Last spring, my family had a brief but intense love affair with making our own hamburgers. A neighbor lent us his meat grinder, a hefty, semicommercial machine that could handle anything I fed into its 3-inch-wide maw.

Evenings were spent cranking out juicy burgers and sausages like we were shortorder cooks at a diner. But just as we started to get the hang of it, our neighbor moved away, taking the grinder with him.

Recently, however, we began thinking about grinding meat again. Store-bought burgers are fine, but they lack the texture and flavor that only freshly ground meat can provide. And with the right tools, grinding your own meat is surprisingly easy.

We tried making burgers using a KitchenAid grinder attachment, a food processor and a small tabletop grinder, but none produced the texture and consistency we were looking for. So, of course, we turned to TikTok for guidance.

That’s how we discovered our new favorite meat grinder: a stainless steel, heavy-duty machine from Meat!, a company unflinchingly devoted to carnivores.

Built like a tank, it has a monstrous 1.5- hp motor that can churn out 18 pounds of ground meat in under a minute.

The basics are simple: Feed cubes of meat into a hopper.

A screw advances the meat along a horizontal chute and past a rotating blade that minces the meat. Then it pushes the meat through a flat piece of metal with holes cut in it. The size of the holes determines the final grind.

The Meat! grinder comes equipped with both coarse and fine stainless steel grinding plates and three stuffing tubes for making sausage. It’s sturdy enough to outlast all of us. It’s also quite large — at 70 pounds, this thing isn’t going to sit happily on top of your refrigerator between uses. But it also isn’t going to creep off the counter when you’re using it.

The best part? Grinding your own meat gives you control over the quality and cuts of meat, and lets you dial in the texture and meat-to-fat ratio of the grind. Meat!’s grinder is foolproof to operate and easy to clean. When I had questions, the staff at Meat! were quick to answer the phone and help.

Now that we own a Meat! grinder, we’re back to making sausages, meatballs and, of course, burgers that are just as delicious as the ones we made last spring.

If you’re a hunter, the Meat! grinder might make even more sense. But even if you’re not, wouldn’t it be nice to know you could process a deer or a side of beef if you had to?