KitchenAid FGA Food Grinder Attachment for Stand Mixers

Product Details

Product Dimensions: 4 x 7 x 7 inches ; 2.1 pounds
Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
ASIN: B00004SGFH
Item model number: FGA

By : KitchenAid
List Price : ~~$64.99~~
Price : $42.95
You Save : $22.04 (34%)

Product Description

Amazon.com Review
This tool increases the fun factor of your KitchenAid stand mixer several times over. Toss cubes of meat into the food tray, stomp 'em down, and watch the results wriggle out the front. Grind your own beef or chicken for patties or tacos. Blend your own sausage mixtures, from breakfast to boudin blanc. With additional attachments, you can turn it into a pasta maker or a sausage stuffer. It's easy to assemble and use. Most parts are dishwasher-safe; hand wash the grinding blades, food stomper, and cutting knife. --Betsy Danheim
Quickly grind meats, firm fruits, and vegetables, dry bread, and cheese. Includes coarse and fine grinder plates, hardwood stomper, and wrench. Helps make meatloaves, spreads, relishes, bread crumbs, and many other tasty dishes. Fits all KitchenAid stand mixers.

Product Features

Grinder attachment greatly expands a stand mixer's flexiblity
Ideal for grinding meats, grating cheese, making bread crumbs and combining dips, salsas, spreads
Includes fine and coarse grinding plates, tips, and recipes
Most parts dishwasher safe for easy clean-up
Grinder can be used with any KitchenAid stand mixer

Customer Reviews

Given all the concerns about e-coli and mad cow, we decided last year to start grinding our own beef and lamb. This grinder does the job perfectly. We grind right into the short round Ziplock boxes (about a hamburger's worth), which go into the basement freezer, and then we turn out the frozen "hockey pucks" onto a plate to defrost in the microwave, or right into the pot for bolognese sauce or sloppy joes. ("Honey, would you bring me up a couple of hockey pucks for dinner?)
Assembly is easy and cleanup is easy (put a slice of bread through after the meat to make it even easier, or grind up an onion if you're making meatloaf anyway). The knife and both plates store inside the screw cap, so I don't worry about losing them (though KitchenAid sells replacements, as does goodmans-dot-net). The grinder even comes with a handy wrench-thingy to help take it apart if it tightens up.
The knife and plates are not stainless (which wouldn't hold an edge), so you do have to dry them off right after washing, but I put everything, including the wooden stomper, right in the dishwasher, and after more than a year nothing has had a problem.
[...] - this isn't an industrial tool! You can't set the mixer speed above three or four when grinding (less if the meat is gristly), and you've got to cut up the meat small enough to fit in the feed tube (the instructions say one-inch cubes, but long strips work too). Treat this right and it will return the favor.
About the only thing that would make this more perfect is a cylindrical brush to clean out the horizontal and vertical shafts, since the dishwasher spray can't really completely reach both, and the horizontal shaft has a screw thread that tends to catch crud (Right now I'm using a folded sponge, and the abovementioned bread slice).

I work in the food industry, so I'm unfortunately comparing this to its commercial counterparts. If you have small batches of meat to be ground at a time, this grinder is so much better than the crank grinders and gets the job done in a quarter of the time. I still use it, but here's what I don't like about it:
The blade is junk. It doesn't cut the meat at all, and is more prone than ever to getting silver skin and grizzle wrapped around it, forcing you to stop and clean it regularly throughout the proccess. More so than most other grinders.
Stomper: They call this a stomper? Are you serious? I have the new model that does not come with a wooden stomper, but instead has a plastic contraption that acts both as a wrench and a stomper. It's not solid in design, and is quite smaller than the hole so it tends to pull more meat up when you pull it out than it pushes down to begin with.
Since there is no gasket that comes with this and everything is plastic, the seals aren't real tight, and meat tends to squirt out around the plate quite often. This isn't a real big deal unless you're looking for a specific texture, as for sausage.
Horrible grind. Based on all the other faults with this machine, you'll never reach that beautiful solid grind that you see with commercially ground meat. It's more of a squishy mess, even with the large dye plate.
Good luck stuffing sausage. I spent thirty minutes fighting this machine to get ground meat into the casing with very little luck. I managed one link in that amount of time, gave up, and immediately ordered a Grizzly sausage stuffer (which is absolutely amazing, but that's another review).
I am very happy with the ease of clean up. One of those bristle wands that you use for scrubbing cups works great for getting in the grooves of the attachment as well as in the holes of the grinder plate. Just don't forget to hand dry the metal parts immediately or you'll have rust everywhere. I store all my parts in a zip lock back with some rice to keep them together and dry.
So if you just need something small to make a quick batch of burgers or meatloaf with very little effort, this is a great deal. But if you are trying to make large amounts of sausage of the same quality that you would find in a meat market, you may want to keep looking.