Should modern sausages be reclassified as bread?
KK SL08 Meat Grinder
12-month warranty on working parts.
$595. FREE NZ SHIPPING
Something is off
The recipe is the problem
In New Zealand and Australia, the food standard says a sausage must contain at least 50% fat-free meat. That is the legal floor.
The problem is when you give an inch they take a mile. With the bar so low, big supermarket brands can legally save money by filling the other half with cheap fillers. Wheat flour, rice flour, rusk, tapioca starch, milk powder, water. These ingredients exist in the recipe because they cost 30% less than meat.
That saving goes to the pocket of the brand because sausages aren’t that cheap these days. The result is a sausage that tastes less like meat and more like ‘sausage product’.
We wonder why no one proudly stamps “now contains 50% filler” on the front of the pack. They bury it in their ingredient list and often still call it a premium range.
Here’s what a good sausage should be:
- Premium artisan/butcher standards are 80% to 95%+ meat
- Incorporate a fat ratio that matches the recipe, not the margin
- Have a coarse ground, chunky texture which is meaty
- Quality ingredients including premium cuts not off cuts
The 40-point gap
In South Africa, boerewors has its own regulation. It must contain at least 90% beef and fat. No fillers. No scraps. No mechanically separated meat. Must be coarsely minced. That is not a marketing claim. It is legislation.
A legal NZ sausage: 50% meat minimum. Other countries are even worse. Like the UK, a product can legally be sold as a “pork sausage” with as little as 42% meat
A legal South African boerewors: 90% meat minimum.
That is a 40%+ gap filled with fillers.
This is why your boerewors from the supermarket do not taste like home.
The only way to close the gap is to grind the meat yourself, from a cut you chose, at a ratio you set.
What changes when you grind your own
That is what this grinder is built for
- Grinds 80 to 120kg per hour, which is a full boerewors batch in minutes instead of a half hour of arm work with a manual grinder
- Comes with three stainless steel grinding plates (fine, medium, coarse) so you match the grind to the recipe
- Includes three stuffing tubes, so you go from whole cuts to filled casings without swapping machines
- Nylon gears keep it quiet enough for a kitchen, not just a shed
- Pulls apart in seconds for cleaning
What it does not do: grind bone, or replace a commercial floor unit. This is a benchtop grinder for home batches, hunters processing a carcass, and side hustle makers doing weekend market runs.
A starting point for your first batch
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This is not for everyone
If you buy a six-pack of sausages twice a year for a birthday barbecue, a grinder does not make sense for you. Ask your butcher to grind a specific cut to order and you will get a better result than the supermarket for not much more money.
But if you miss real boerewors or want to process venison after a hunt, do burger nights every week, or want to sell at the local market, this is the machine that puts you back in charge of what goes in. No more flour where the meat should be.
What are you grinding first, burgers or boerewors?
$595. Free shipping anywhere in New Zealand. 12-month warranty on working parts.
3 fillers hiding in your sausages and how to skip all of them
$595. Free shipping anywhere in New Zealand. 12-month warranty on working parts.
