Secrets to cooking the best tasting minced / ground meats:

My Salisbury Steaks sizzling away.

     If its ground meat you've gotten from a large grocery chain, it probably looks straight from the grinder and is in little wiggly strings, you are tempted to just pull the plastic and throw it in the pan...but wait!


STOP!!
   Wash your hands and mush the meat. Squeeze it back together, break it apart - don't overwork it but get rid of all trace of the meat noodles before you toss it in that pan, its no bueno!  Now...get the meat into one spread out layer ( if you have too much meat to do it all, you will just have to make two batches, get a dish for the first batch to take a nap in while you make the second, ) across the bottom of the VERY VERY HOT,  oiled pan and...


BROWN YOUR MEAT!!
   Now this isn't about "graying" your meat, (which means moving it around in the pan thats not hot enough, so cramped that it produces steam, releases its juices and then boils) but actually searing the meat until you see dark brown crunchy bits, and please don't get rid of any of those bits, its called fond, and its packed full of flavor. Now, to do this... 


LEAVE IT ALONE!
   Once you've moved the meat, you've lost that opportunity, the pan has not returned to temperature, or else it would be ready to turn (because its at the right done-ness), so you have to learn to step off the food for a minute (but not too long!) and let its do its thing. 

First example: this is from Lilibeth in the Kitchen

In my humble opinion she has crowded the meat and its a big pot of wet oily gray stuff. Opportunity lost. Its not meat-thulu though!

Second example is from Holly at Naptime

Here, she did not smush her meat back together before she threw it into the pan, thus creating the inevitable "meat strings" Her meat is leaner and therefore a bit drier, but i still don' t see much in the way of caramelization on the meat bits. Too much movement in the pan from the get go I think.

Third example is from a post by Carly over at College Candy.com

Looks good, really..not too much in the pan, nice color on the meat, doesn't appear to be any meat twigs. Great job! - I'm coming to her house for lunch.

  Now, if you are making two or more batches, I transfer the meat into a dish, then deglaze the pan with wine or broth, scrape up all the fond,  add it to my cooked stuff, thus cleaning the pan and making it ready for the next batch. Heat the pan and start all over again.

Easy-peasy, right?  Somehow, most of the videos Ive watched on YouTube that brown meat, get it wrong..not to say that its not edible, I'm sure the food is very delicious, and no one would think its even all that important, but once you taste the difference in a tomato meat sauce or chili when the meat tastes like someone has diced a perfectly grilled steak in it, you will never go back to the gray mess of boiled mice. 


--Unless that is precisely what you are going for... 


My mother and grandmother cooked a dish that they called Mincemeat. Not like the pies though, so i have no idea how it gained its name... but its basically meat put into broth and boiled with onion, peas and carrots, and ladled -with minimal juice-  over mashed potatoes.  Cooking it in this method, makes the meat a different consistency, its typically done like this for hotdog chilis - its a consistent small ground, from stirring in liquid when its warm but not yet cooked though.


OH YEAH - back to that pan of meat.


What to do with this brothy, winey stuff?  This is now what will replace the word  "water" in your recipe, and if "oh no, you have too much', just let the stuff cook on a higher temperature for a minute or two and it will evaporate...which condenses flavor and never hurts a thing.  Tacos, sloppy joes, traditional meat sauce, beef stroganoff, salisbury steaks, beef stew, soup, chili, burritos....ect. 


Take the extra time, its worth it. :)
~Jen