End of summer? Really!
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Joe Hell I hope you had a good podcast or audiobook to listen to! 10 hours is an insane amount of time to be processing onions. Hopefully, that’s the last time you will have to do that for a while?
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Joe Hell I hope you had a good podcast or audiobook to listen to! 10 hours is an insane amount of time to be processing onions. Hopefully, that’s the last time you will have to do that for a while?
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Jonathon I listened to the new Tool album, lots of Janes Addiction, Raconteurs, Mother Love Bone and Soundgarden!
If my guesstimates are correct I should have enough onion for about 2000 lbs of sausage…give or take
Joe Hell
That’s a lot of onions. Are those some type of musical groups??? Hmmm. -
PapaSop I spent 10 hours yesterday hand processing 300 lbs of onions before taking a break…then there was 2 hours of clean up. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to wash the stank off of me. Lol

Joe Hell I did not see a complementary box of tissues in that pic.for doing all of those onions lol
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Joe Hell Any tips to not cry when cutting onions? I love onions but man do I HATE cutting them up!
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Parksider I’ve been considering going the fry cutter method. I used our Thunderbird meat grinder on all of the white onions! It made a terrible mess. Overall I’d give the machine a grade of an F and the customer support isn’t far behind. They don’t seem to have a working knowledge of the machine. I don’t know how it ever left the factory. Check out the video to see the mayhem
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Joe Hell YIKES! I saw your post with the meat spilling out the bottom and thought it was something you set up wrong (no offense I just couldn’t imagine that was what it was doing) but…YIKES!
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Joe Hell YIKES! I saw your post with the meat spilling out the bottom and thought it was something you set up wrong (no offense I just couldn’t imagine that was what it was doing) but…YIKES!
Jonathon That’s the thing. There is really only one way to set this thing up. The company said we were feeding too fast. Well…it’s only has one speed! lol. The only timing adjustment is for the length of time the mixer goes forward or reverse and how often it changes direction. The half inch gap between the mixer and the grinder is ridiculous. Also…it only grinds about 10 lbs a minute! ARRRGGHHH
Also…they sent it to us in a non-operational state in that the safety switches cannot engage. One of them I could easily access and adjust but the other would require removing the motor which I’m assuming is a pain in the ass. I ‘fixed’ the switch issue by wrapping a nickel with masking tape and wedging it between the switch and door. The company claims it would have never left the factory without testing. I call BS.
Tonight I have about 100 lbs of pork to grind and I’m not too enthused about it. For smaller jobs (10-12 lbs) we have been using my trusty Weston #8. It says something about the $100 Weston when it’s more reliable than the $10K Thunderbird AMG-50.
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Joe Hell That’s disappointing, you might want to show them that video? You probably already have but if not it would be worth a shot.
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Joe Hell That’s disappointing, you might want to show them that video? You probably already have but if not it would be worth a shot.
Jonathon I sent it to them and the guy was still denying that it was an issue. He also seemed to think it was weird that we used it on vegetables. I told him that the manual clearly calls the machine a meat/vegetable grinder. He wasn’t aware of this. I have more onions to grind and I’m really not looking forward to it.
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Joe Hell I don’t blame you, that looks like a mess! Maybe a fry cutter is the way to go?
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Jonathon I might have to go that route. It would be a larger dice but that might add another texture dimension. Despite the mess I will give the grinder a big thumbs up with the way it cut the onion. I’d really like to load it up with tomatoes, onions, peppers and cilantro to make instant pico de gallo but I’m frightened by the thought of cleanup.
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Jonathon I might have to go that route. It would be a larger dice but that might add another texture dimension. Despite the mess I will give the grinder a big thumbs up with the way it cut the onion. I’d really like to load it up with tomatoes, onions, peppers and cilantro to make instant pico de gallo but I’m frightened by the thought of cleanup.
Joe Hell We bolted the french fry cutter plate to the wall, just high enough to fit a 1 gallon cambro box under it. We diced tomatoes, onions, peppers, if it fit it went through cutter. We even did squash and zuchinni sticks, perfect 1/4" or 3/8" depending on the plate. We used Vollrath everything. We had the tomato slicer, onion slicer, lettuce chopper. Those things were bullet proof too! Just search onion witch or lettuce witch.
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Joe Hell We bolted the french fry cutter plate to the wall, just high enough to fit a 1 gallon cambro box under it. We diced tomatoes, onions, peppers, if it fit it went through cutter. We even did squash and zuchinni sticks, perfect 1/4" or 3/8" depending on the plate. We used Vollrath everything. We had the tomato slicer, onion slicer, lettuce chopper. Those things were bullet proof too! Just search onion witch or lettuce witch.
Parksider Our Vollrath slicer went down hard recently. It’s in the shop for repair. I brought my Berkel for backup and we’ve got a trusty vintage Hobart that serves as the shop workhorse. I’ll probably have to suck it up and make a big mess with the Thunderbird this weekend to finish off the rest of the onions. As a side note, I’ve been draining and saving all of the onion juice. It’s astonishingly mellow. It would make a great mixer with a number of drinks…bloody mary in particular. I will use some of it for the liquid addition for new sausages. I’m also toying around with the idea of fermenting the juice into something boozy. Agave and Onions are closely related, so…onion tequila?
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Joe Hell If you make onion tequilla I will rip up my back lawn and grow onions!
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Jonathon To make it a bit authentic I think you would want to char some onions…perhaps direct fire on coals briefly. Remove, grind, convert starch to sugar by caramelizing. It may need a little sugar to up the proof. You would not want to ferment in a place adjacent to living quarters. It would no doubt be odoriferous.
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Joe Hell we aren’t but humble sauasage makers, odiferous is a little outside our vocabulary!
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Joe Hell we aren’t but humble sauasage makers, odiferous is a little outside our vocabulary!
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