Chuck roll with pork belly for ground beef

[Mike981]

I finally fixed my Kitchenaid mixer and I can use my meat grinder for the first time.

After my first attempt at cutting up a chuck roll I have 9.5lbs of meat to grind up. There wasn't much usable fat from the chuck roll so I am planning to use pork belly to mix in. I would like to go 70-30 or 60-40. Do you have a suggestion on how much pork belly to 9.5lbs of beef? I was thinking 3-4lbs of pork belly??

I'm a bit confused with the pork belly since there is pork mixed in with the fat in the pork belly.

Thank you~

[realdocBBQ]

You have to estimate the fat/meat percentage of your pork belly - at MOST, the meat ratio is going to be 50/50 in most pork bellies. So 4 lbs of a mostly 50/50 would be 2 lbs of meat, 2 pound of fat.

In order to get to a 70/30 with your chuck, you'd need probably 8lbs of that 50/50 pork belly. If your pork belly were more of an 80/20, you'd only need to add maybe 3-4 lbs.

I'm sure I could figure out the actual math, but I'm lazy right now, and honestly none of us pay THAT close attention to it - every place you watch a video or whatever, they're always 'eyeballing it'. It's a general thing more than a specific thing.

[Duanessmokedmeats]

And I was told that you would never use algebra in real life.

[Ace]

Mike981
This can have a wide range of intermuscular fat depending on the grade of the beef you have. I grind choice Chuck Roast for ground chuck and without much trimming, I would guess that the mix is somewhere around 90/10 to 85/15. With that percentage in mind, your 9.5 lbs could have aprox 1 lb of intermuscular fat already. So, to get to a 70/30 mix you would need to add aprox
2 lbs of extra fat. Please keep in mind that this is purely a guess on my part. Not sure how much pork belly you would use because that would increase the overall meat weight plus depending on the fat content of the belly would also increase the fat needed to get to the 70/30 that you're looking for. Sorry that I couldn't give you a better answer.

[realdocBBQ]

Exactly. You're chasing an enlarging number - unless you're using pork backfat, or just 90+% fat-content pork belly. Sure, you can do it, but it becomes an increasingly-large amount the more meat is in your pork belly.

[realdocBBQ]

ChatGPT tells me if you add pork belly that is 70% fat (a 30/70 ratio of meat/fat), you'd add 2.5ish lbs to get your 9.5 to a 75/25 ratio. This would be around 12lbs total weight.

[Mike981]

Thank you all. I didn't realize we had so many smart folks here.

[bbqLuv]

I, being lazy, why not trim off pork belly fat amount you need? 80/20 ratio. 2lbs of fat.

To reach an 80/20 ratio of lean meat to fat, you'll want 80% of your mixture to be lean meat and 20% to be fat. If you start with 8 pounds of lean meat, then you need to add 2 pounds of fat to get that 20% portion. That will give you a total of 10 pounds of mixture, with 8 pounds lean and 2 pounds fat, making the ratio just right.

Thank you Microsoft Copilot