I’ve talked before about how you’re probably cooking meat wrong, because you’ve probably listened to a bullshit article that was regurgitated second-hand information that swam the backwaters of the internet cesspool until the original source was lost to digital entropy.
I get it. Spending 5 minutes instead of 5 seconds to verify information and perhaps seek out alternate opinions is hard. You just want to get back to wasting time on ADHD social media feeds. And if you’re bothering to still be reading this post at all, you’re probably angrily scrolling past my intro to get to the information.
But the real tragedy is SEO – search engine optimization. They won the algorithm battle, and search engines no longer prioritize delivering meaningful content. I usually ignore page 1 search results by default now.
Okay okay, so on to the real article.
Store-bought ground beef sucks. Here’s what you can get:
- Pre-packaged tubes. This is throwaway meat from the worst livestock, and an amalgam of pink slime and pure fat – often from different suppliers, mixed to the USDA-certified proportions and squirted into an opaque tube so you can’t see the contents. It will be greasy, dry, adulterated with lots of water, and if you get sick you’re out of luck because no single slaughterhouse of origin can be pinpointed since their contracts prohibit the manufacturer from listing them on the package and the FDA will never be able to track it down as a result and so other people will get sick too.
- Low-cost bulk case meat at your local grocery meat counter. They would like you to think this is a bargain because they’re grinding up all their scrap meat, so you might be getting ground prime ribeye after all! And indeed you might be getting some of that. But the bulk of these grinds isn’t trimming, it’s frozen blocks of bull meat. How do I know? Because I used to do this myself as a college job. Of interest to me is I don’t know how to find a source for the giant meat blocks. It’s very well hidden from internet sleuthing, so it must be a USDA supplier arrangement with ConAgra or something, with commercial license required. But here’s what the machines look like: https://berkelmiami.com/collections/frozen-block-chippers/products/biro-fbc-4800ss-frozen-block-chipper. Basically, junk meat is frozen and molded into blocks designed for these machines which slice them into chips that will fit into a grinder. Mix the chips with the day’s trimmings, and there’s some ground beef. It’s actually not too bad, but there’s still the issue with questionable multiple suppliers and the subterfuge that annoys me. Plus, we can do better.
- Local grocery packaged ground beef, labeled. The labeling is no joke – you can’t lie about this, but the USDA still allows a degree of fudging the words. If it’s expensive, it’s probably what it says it is on the package, but it’s still a gamble and could just be what the bulk meat is in the case, albeit with a hefty markup.
- You pick out meat and and ask the butcher to grind it for you. Probably your best option, if you trust what’s going on back by the grinder. And how clean that machine is.
What’s the point of this post? No reason, other than this information doesn’t appear to be available anywhere else, and certainly not in once concise location. And it’s all part of my perfect burger journey. Don’t trust beef you didn’t grind yourself. Grind your own.
–Simon