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From an article I read recently: “Though it initially made “absolute assurances” that all of its burgers were 100% beef, Burger King has been forced to admit that some of its patties may have contained horse meat, after traces of equine DNA were found at one of their processing plants.“

Now I don’t have a problem with the thought of eating horse meat. I even have a few friends from The U.K. that have eaten quite a bit of horse and said they prefer it to beef. (Oddly enough, one of them is married to a horse trainer…I wonder what happens to THEIR old horses??)

I’ve missed a few meals in my day, (of course not lately, have you seen me?) but it wouldn’t take a lot of coaxing for me to eat Mr. Ed. But my wife and kids are a different story. They stress all the time about what I’m serving them,

“Is this chicken? Are you SURE it’s chicken? It doesn’t look like chicken dad…” (It was)

Or:

“That was some great stir fry dad, the chicken was awesome!” (It wasn’t chicken)

So sadly, my family MUST know what they are eating now…let’s just say I am known for keeping everyone guessing at the dinner table…

So last week, while the wife and I were grocery shopping, we were looking at the meat, and saw some bulk ground beef in a plastic chub. The wise snatched it up until I said it probably had pink slime in it.

She froze. “Slime?”

So I went on to explain about pink slime, and how it is deemed safe, but then so is Coke, Twinkies (rest their souls), and refined sugar. I also told her that it can make up to 15 percent of ground beef without additional labeling, so we wouldn’t even know……

She put it back. “So now what do we do, I wanted to cook some burgers this week for you.”

Always on top of my game when it comes to eating, I dredged up a technique that my old buddy BlueTang uses, grinding his own burger. I explained it to my wife, and she agreed, grabbing up two lean bottom round beef roasts. At $2.99 per pound, it was more expensive than most of the other ground beef in the cooler, but she eyed it all with suspicion now.

BlueTang told me that whenever he gets his meat, he gets it in as large a cut as he can easily handle. If he wants roasts, he has them. Steaks simply require some slicing. And for ground meat, grind it yourself! For a south Florida coastal Cracker, Old BT has some great ideas from time to time…..

Here’s what I did.

• Gather our Kitchenaid Stand Mixer along with the Food Grinder Attachment.
• Get a bowl large enough to hold ten pounds of ground meat.
• Slice the roasts into 1 inch strips, small enough to fit into the grinder. Be sure to keep it cool, it grinds better when chilled. Slightly frozen is even better.
• With the grinder on the lowest setting, feed the strips into the grinder one at a time.
• Fill the bowl with fresh ground beef.

I then divided it into four equal portions, and somehow ended up with just enough to make a test burger 🙂 I then packaged each portion in vacuum sealer bags, sealing them for the freezer.

After this was all done, I fried up the remaining portion a a single burger. Quite tasty! The only issue we had was the size of the grind seemed a bit too coarse. The next time, I’ll use a smaller grinding plate, and probably grind it twice.

While this project does require some higher end hardware, a frugal option is to use a hand grinder, like this one. Keep in mind, it gets old grinding up large amounts of meat by hand….

…but it s well worth the effort when you try a burger you ground yourself.

I’d like to add that I’ve also done this with whole pork loins, slicing them out for nice boneless chops, and taking the trimmings and turning it into ground pork…all for less than the price of ground pork per pound!

Peace,
db

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