Tips for Juicy Beef Patties For Hamburgers

With spring and grilling season coming up, this is as good a time as any to mention that if you want to know what is in your beef patties for hamburgers, ou should grind your own meat at home.  In stores, anything goes.  This doesn't even go into proper sanitation.

Never used a food processor myself but I'd probably give it a go if I had to.  Maybe if you just used the pulse function and played with it?  Arrrrgh, I don't know what I'm talking about.

With the small amount of meat grinding I do, I just use my mixer's meat grinder attachment.  It does a pretty good job.  I probably wouldn't recommend that to anybody grinding more than a few pounds at a time or grinding several times per week but I suppose it would do okay until it didn't.  Inexpensive dedicated meat grinders would be a step up but they make an awful racket and have to be stored and cleaned. 

These days meat isn't even ground on site.  The "butcher" is some kid stocking the shelves.  Ground meat is delivered to grocery stores prepackaged from a processing and distribution warehouse that has schedules, quotas and profit margins to think of.  The heck with everything else.  "What's that yer throwin' in the hopper Monroe?"  "Dunno Oswaldo, its mostly meat ain"t it? Nobody's gonna know".

Contrary to popular lab grown meat mythology, the only reason lab grown meat, clean meat if you will, will be able to get away with selling this product (for now anyway) is because it's ground muscle with fat added.  Only the muscle fibers can be grown.  No fat, connective tissue, or bone.  But I digress.

I know folks who cook wagyu burgers but that seems like a waste to me.  Great burgers are more expensive burgers but let's try and keep this under control. 

A mixture of ground brisket point and chuck make great burgers.  I know a guy who's favorite burger is a mix of ground brisket, chuck, and oxtail.  It's a lot of effort to separate the meat from the bones in the oxtail but he does it.

Just about any burger can be improved with the addition of a little fish sauce.  You won't notice the fish sauce but the burgers will taste beefier.

I imagine a dedicated grinder in 1999 for around $100 is a much better machine than the el cheapos available now.  I've seen them with everyday low low prices hovering around $50 and everyone seems to mention these machines work great.  Just noisy.  I've been tempted, more than once, to buy one of these. A quick look just now finds this model for $33.00.  It even has an on/off switch.  That's $22 less than I paid for my mostly plastic stand mixer grinder accessory. I could handle the noise more than the expense.

One day.

I've heard that a mix of chuck and sirloin is also a good combination, but have never tried it; that is to say, I've never consciously tried mixing them, but they may have been combined that way in burger that I've bought. I want to say it is a 50/50 mix, but it may have been a more elaborate ratio.

All of this talk has me wanting to bring the grill out, but with all of the fresh snow we've gotten, and temperatures in the teens, it just doesn't seem like a good time, quite yet. The cold doesn't bother me, but there are other related hassles.

I think that mix would produce a beefier flavor, Mike, primarily from the oxtails. They'd be required, anyway, to provide the fat missing from the sirloin.

I used to work a short-order grill where the owner insisted on straight sirloin, cuz he wanted a reputation for providing top cuts. Trouble is, he never had to work the flattop when there were a dozen burgers going at once. With sirloin, if you turn your back for a second, the burger is overcooked. Alas.

He would buy provisions by sight, rather than asking the supplier, and insisted that we use "white American cheese," cuz it was more flavorful. Yeah, it was. But that's because it was Provolone. But we never set his straight. Evil of us, I reckon.