Friday, February 12, 2010

How we do it: hamburger

Let me ask a question: what kind of hamburger do you buy?
  • I examine each package for fat content
  • I buy what's on sale
  • I throw in one of those plastic sleeves of hamburger because I can't stand the look of ground meat.
If I had a meat grinder I'd grind my own meat. I'm not so sure what actually goes into the hamburger coming out of the large processing plants and I'm not so sure I want to know. Your local (add your favorite market) does not grind their own meat for hamburger. Once they did but for some reason they decided butchers were too expensive to have around each store and now it comes from a town far, far away. Well, unless you live near a meat processing plant but I think our meat comes from Pleasanton, CA and anyway, I like to know just what is in my ground meat.

A few months ago I noticed Von's had a boneless chuck roast for sale and asked the man stocking the bins if he could grind this for me. Oh, it was his pleasure and was back in just a few minutes with my ground chuck. And when I cooked this hamburger it actually tasted like something other than cardboard; it tasted like beef. Imagine that. So when I hand the butcher my chuck roast it comes back just that chuck roast and nothing else.

I've been fortunate to find boneless chuck roasts on sale. This one was $2.99 a pound and I don't think that's too much for good tasting chopped meat. I'll leave it up to you but I now look for roasts on sale and when I do we have dinners like meatballs or meatloaf or chili, but the chili, that's another post.

If you try this let us know. Do you taste a difference or if you think this is way too much trouble and just buy one of those plastic sleeve o'meat.

5 comments:

Allie and Pattie said...

I just recently was gifted with the meat grinder for my stand mixer. I'll let you know how it goes-I usually ask our wonderful meat guy to do it
xoxo Pattie

barb said...

Well funny you should mention this, I did try this. The local chain here was having a sale on boneless chuck roasts buy one get one FREEEEEEEEEEEEE. Decided that it spoils you from other ground beef.

Memaw's memories said...

I look for amount of fat content, and prefer ground chuck or round.

I'm going to have to ask to have mine ground. See if I can tell a diff.

Deborah Eley De Bono said...

Free is our family's favorite flavor!

Anonymous said...

Just found your page from PW, read this post about hamburger and thought I would comment. My husband is a Nuclear Engineer, but he grew up working in his family store. His father was a butcher, so they know good meat. When I married him 3 years ago, I had never tasted gresh ground hamburger. We always grind our own, and it is unbelievably good. Who Knew? But there is definitly a big difference. We buy about 10 roasts at a time, whatever is on sale. Rump, Arm. and grind and wrap our own. We always have hamburgers the night we grind.
Also for the noodle recipe, we make our own.,see my blog
http://ewenique.wordpress.com/2009/03/16/dumplings-or-noodles/