I'm a convert now

As I was grinding skirt steak for nachos last week, I finally understood better why you're supposed to run your meat through the grinder twice. It occurred to me in an epiphany—there had to be a better way of dealing with the remaining meat that gets caught in the grindworm (the corkscrew thingie in the grinder that pushes the meat forward to the chopper blades and the extruder) than the usual suggestions of feeding ice or bread into the grinder. When you feed the meat you've just ground back into the grinder, the remaining unground meat gets caught up and pushed out, and when it's time to pick out the meat still stuck in the grindworm, that meat turns out to be ground beef! Problem solved.

Of course, this is not the reason usually given for grinding your meat twice. No: the reason normally given is that twice-ground meat has a better texture for things like burgers. And that's definitely something I've noticed when grinding twice: the second grind produces better, more solid "meat spaghetti" than a single grind does. When the meat passes through the extruder a second time, what comes out looks almost as solid as Play-Doh being pushed through a plastic spaghetti-making die. The twice-ground meat also looks more like the meat you see in the grocery, where the grinders are industrial-sized and powerful. I only ever use the medium extruder plate when grinding meat; maybe I ought to try the small-holed extruder to produce some angel-hair ground beef. Might be interesting.