How to make ground meat chubs using poly tubing
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I’m looking to make chubs of ground meat (like you’d buy the 3/5/10 lb chubs of ground beef or turkey at the grocery store). I’ve made sausage before but I’m not sure if the same concept would apply. Would I load the poly tubing onto a stuffing tube the same way I’d load sausage casing? How do I know how much to load on? Since I’ll be stapling the ends of the chub (as opposed to tying/twisting like with sausage) how do I start the beginning end?
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Jonathon Team Blue Admin Walton's Employee Power User Kansas Dry Cured Sausagereplied to AlchemyBullies on last edited by
AlchemyBullies Good questions, first I would say instead of using the poly tubing you can use Ground Beef Bags, these might look flat in the picture but when they are stuffed they look more like the chubs you see at the store and they are already closed at one end. If you want to see what these look like when they are stuffed check out this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY4rINa_Gmk at the 2:50 mark we are stuffing a bag from a grinder and then at the end you can see the filled bag and I will include a photo of what they look like at the bottom of this post.
If however you are set on using the poly tubing (which is totally fine by the way, lots of commercial processors do this for patties and then freeze and slice them) then you will load it onto the stuffing tube just like you would anything else (use the largest stuffing tube possible) and staple the end that will the bottom first and then after you have stuffed as much as you want into it cut and staple that end.
It will take some guess work on how many inches it takes to get get to your 3/5/10 lb goal and give yourself enough room to staple it at the end. Luckily each one of those rolls is 2,000 feet so you have a lot of material to do the testing on!
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I’m intending to do exactly what you said: grind into the poly tubing, freeze, then slice. The tubing seems to come out rounder, and I figured it would be easier to slice into uniform portions that way. But seeing how round the bags came out in the video, maybe I’m wrong…? The bags certainly would be easier!
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Jonathon Team Blue Admin Walton's Employee Power User Kansas Dry Cured Sausagereplied to AlchemyBullies on last edited by
AlchemyBullies If you are intending to do patties then I would say that you are better off using the poly tubing as the bags have a gusset at the bottom that would make that a little oblong. We do sell the meat bags by the 100 if you wanted to buy some and check them out and see if they would work for you?
Another option would be the 4.8 in x 22 in Fibrous Boneless Ham Casings and stuffing, freezing and slicing them. You would get a lot more round portion out of this than I would think you would get with the meatbags? This would be fairly cost effective as well as you would get 25 of these casings with an order and each casing is 22" long so they would do a fair amount.
So, if you are going to use the full 2,000 feet then go with the poly tubing, if you don’t want to buy all of this at once then either the meat bags or the fibrous casings would be a decent option!
