Franco's Deluxe Electric Sausage Maker / Mincer Review

[Zuckuss]

Hi,

Well after northen tools no longer make their budget mincer I decided to take the plunge and buy the Franco's Deluxe Electric Sausage Maker / Mincer.

So when you get the package (must admit I had a slight problem but that was due to Paypal mucking them around, normally there is no issue). You receive the main unit, 3 mincing plates, the knife, the auger (think thats the right word), a kebbe maker, a cookie cutter, sauasage stuffer and meat rack. There are instructions included - but as english is the 5 language along and they dont make sense you will probably find better information on this forum!

Apart from the stufer, kebbe maker and cookie cutter the rest of it the bits are full stainless steel and quiote heavy duty as well. The mincer plates were easily 4-5mm thick whereas my previous AWT machine was only 2-3mm.

The machine is rather a strange setup, with what looks like a two speed setting as well as the forward and back motions. But you can only use the forward if its set to one and the backwards if its set to two. A little strange, but you soon get used to it.

The test that I put through it was a vacuum packed 2.5kg shoulder of pork from tescos (yes I know I should use better meat, but its all I can afford and it was on special, half price). I froze the meat for about an hour after chopping it into 1-1 1/2" chunks. I put everything through the biggest plate (I was taking Wal Footrot's advice and putting everything through three times on biggest plate) and I must admit, some of the more frozen parts did make the mincer make the most god awful slowly grinding noises. At one point after three or four larger pieces I thought it would cut out, but the machine kept on going and managed to get through the whole 2.5kg in 12 mins 36 secs.

The second pass through went a lot quicker, the ground mince went through in a very respectable 6min 18 secs. It literally flew through, I did not need to push down on it at all.

Now the tricky part, stuffing. My plan was to use this machine to do the final mince and stuff at the same time. Well this was where it all went wrong. I know from experience using mincers/stuffers to make sure that as little air as possible goes into the element. But as much as I tried I could not get the machine to stuff it, every time I put more mixture into the hopper and tried to press it down it just shot out of the top. There was far too much air inside the machine and I couldnt work out where it came from.

My plan was to make five different sausages of 500g worth of meat each. Stuffing that much meat with the mincer took me 1 hour 6 mins. I then compared this to my manual mincer which I use as a stuffer and that took me 9 mins and the sausages were better with less air bubbles. To make sure it wasnt just first time mistakes I did the same amount of meat again and this time it took me 1 hour 3 mins to stuff 500g of meat. I decided that enough was enough and I had developed a sore shoulder!

Must admit though, the mincing three times on the biggest plate produced a lovely sausage, just the right amount of snap and not dry at all!.

So to round up, Franco's cheapo home mincer is a very reasonable mincer - in fact for mincing, considering price I would give it a 8/10. For stuffing though I would only give it 2/10 (and thats being generous), you are far better off spending a little bit of money and getting a manual stuffer.

Hope this helps anyone who was thinking of buying one of these, obviously this is just one man's verdict but it should give you an idea.

Joe
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