www.sausagemaking.org

Does anyone have experience with patty forming equipment?

We've been making "seasoned pork patties" for a customer by hand for about a month, using an Italian sausage recipe.

The volume has increased to the point where it's time to automate.

I need to be able to control the size. These patties are for "slider" sized burgers, and need to be a uniform thickness as well. Current patties are 9cm x 2cm before cooking, with about 20% shrinkage.

We only need to do about 1000 a day, so manually operated equipment is fine, though I would expect to be able to make 1 patty every 5 seconds.

Suggestions?

I originally started off with a 4 inch ID pbc pipe two foot long -- split/clamped and the meat inside -- freeze overnight then slice on power saw the next day

Went to a Hobart patty maker due to volume but sales dropped off -- customer complained about the change in texture

Back to a manual patty maker and an ice cream scoop

photos to follow

Robert, its funny seeing that as we have always shunned burger 'presses' as a good burger should be cut imo.

We still either form a long roll in clingfilm par freeze and slice or use a split pipe too!

John I would/will agree with you .. but saying that what I am using now is equivalent to the split pipe method

The split pipe approach sounds interesting. I have to do 1000 patties a day, at 2cm thick each, so linear space of 20m in the walk in. My shelves are 30cm deep x 1m wide, by 60cm tall, so about a shelf and a half overnight for freezing. That's manageable.

That Hobart looks interesting. Are different patty diameters available?

What do you do for end caps on the split pipe?

Thewitt wrote:What do you do for end caps on the split pipe?

Cap them ....

2 foot long pipe split down center (length wise) .. to join them back up use three hose clamps ... one center, one at the end which you cover with a plastic bag first and the clamp holds the bag in place while keeping the end tight ... fill tube with meat .. place plastic bag over top and secure bag to top end with the third hose clamp ... easy peasy ... the best $5000 pattie maker out there

Thewitt wrote:That Hobart looks interesting. Are different patty diameters available?

Its not the Hobart .. its an Italian job ... comes in two sizes .. this being the larger of the two (diameter) .. the smaller one is much better (on loan to a friend so no photos ) ... the nice thing is if you use the ice cream scoop like I have show (they come in all sizes) your sizing comes out every time .. saves waste when cutting with power saw .. yep I'm thrifty

No food grade PVC pipe in Malaysia from what I can find. I'll have to do more digging.

What we are doing today is scooping with an ice cream scoop and forming in stainless rings on top of paper separators. Patties are blast frozen on single layer sheets and then stacked in 2x3 boxes 4 patties high, so 24 in a box. It's working, but it takes two people nearly 3 hours today to mince, mix then form and pack 1000 patties.

I'd like to cut this down to an hour. We can mince and mix the meat in 2 batches of 50kg each no problem, but the patty forming and packing seems to be a real bottleneck.

It shouldn't take longer to form and pack patties than it does to fill sausages...

I found a product called Easy Slider from Patty-o-Matic that I can get shipped here fairly quickly that looks like it will work. They can make a custom plate for my patty size and ship by next week. It would mean 4 patties at a time in the press, at a production rate of more than 40 patties a minute. Should easily allow me to compress the entire cycle to under an hour.

Once minced, mixed and rested - which all happens in daily batches for the sausage runs of the day - forming and packing should take 2 people about 30 minutes. I can live with this.

That looks like a nice unit. Let us know how it works for you.

PP pipe is food grade, I'm sure available in Malaysia it will be white.

Also there is a burger press by I think its a Spanish company called Monca it is a hand operated rotary type that has self portioning for thickness so you only press down and the rotary table self levels the patty. It's not that pricy, but could not find a reference with a quick google search...too busy right now. Try to find something that is going to do portioning as that is a time consuming part of doing patties. Depends on how accurate you need to be on your portion.

I may be accused of being an LEM sales rep, which im not!, I just really love LEM products. And this thread hasn't been updated in a while so ill just leave this here for those looking for more options.

https://www.lemproducts.com/product/big ... ry-cutters