NEVER Cook Ground Beef This Way Again — Try This Old Italian Trick
📖 A hundred recipes my mother never wrote down, finally measured for your kitchen: Link In Comments!
You put the ground beef in the pan, broke it up right away, and it never browned. It turned grey, sat boiling in cloudy water, and came out as little pebbles that tasted like nothing. You did not buy the wrong beef, and your stove is fine. You did one thing at the very beginning that ruins it, and it is the thing every recipe tells you to do.
In my mother Filomena's kitchen in Bensonhurst, a pound of ground beef was the start of three different dinners, and it never once went in the pan grey. In this one I count down her ten rules, and every one starts with plain instructions before I explain anything.
Eighty-twenty chuck, taking the chill off and patting it dry, the right pan and one pound at a time, salting after instead of before, how much fat to keep, onions after the beef, frying the tomato paste, wine for the brown bits, the old Bologna milk trick, and at number one, my mother's way of putting the beef in the pan. I also settle draining the fat and rinsing the beef.
One pound of ordinary ground beef, one heavy pan, ten minutes. Brown, juicy and full of flavor.
So tell me where you are cooking from, and settle it: drain the fat, or keep it?
00:00 Grey pebbles in a puddle
00:50 Who I am
02:11 What you need
02:46 Why ground beef goes grey
03:26 10. The right beef
04:03 9. Dry and not ice cold
04:34 8. The right pan, one pound at a time
05:18 7. Salt after, not before
05:55 6. Keep two spoonfuls of fat
06:38 Halfway
07:03 5. Onions after the beef
07:37 4. Fry the tomato paste
08:09 3. Wine for the brown bits
08:42 2. The Bologna milk trick
09:22 1. My mother's slab
10:44 Drain it? Rinse it?
11:34 Why every recipe says break it up
12:02 One idea underneath all ten
12:45 One pound, three dinners
13:21 Your job this week
13:45 Next time
You put the ground beef in the pan, broke it up right away, and it never browned. It turned grey, sat boiling in cloudy water, and came out as little pebbles that tasted like nothing. You did not buy the wrong beef, and your stove is fine. You did one thing at the very beginning that ruins it, and it is the thing every recipe tells you to do.
In my mother Filomena's kitchen in Bensonhurst, a pound of ground beef was the start of three different dinners, and it never once went in the pan grey. In this one I count down her ten rules, and every one starts with plain instructions before I explain anything.
Eighty-twenty chuck, taking the chill off and patting it dry, the right pan and one pound at a time, salting after instead of before, how much fat to keep, onions after the beef, frying the tomato paste, wine for the brown bits, the old Bologna milk trick, and at number one, my mother's way of putting the beef in the pan. I also settle draining the fat and rinsing the beef.
One pound of ordinary ground beef, one heavy pan, ten minutes. Brown, juicy and full of flavor.
So tell me where you are cooking from, and settle it: drain the fat, or keep it?
00:00 Grey pebbles in a puddle
00:50 Who I am
02:11 What you need
02:46 Why ground beef goes grey
03:26 10. The right beef
04:03 9. Dry and not ice cold
04:34 8. The right pan, one pound at a time
05:18 7. Salt after, not before
05:55 6. Keep two spoonfuls of fat
06:38 Halfway
07:03 5. Onions after the beef
07:37 4. Fry the tomato paste
08:09 3. Wine for the brown bits
08:42 2. The Bologna milk trick
09:22 1. My mother's slab
10:44 Drain it? Rinse it?
11:34 Why every recipe says break it up
12:02 One idea underneath all ten
12:45 One pound, three dinners
13:21 Your job this week
13:45 Next time