Cooking Tips
Ground meat is better when done yourself. But you don't need a meat grinder to do it.
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Published Oct. 5, 2021.
Buying ground meat at the supermarket is kind of a crapshoot; unless your butcher grinds to order, there's no way to know what you're actually getting. The cut, fat content, and texture of store-ground meat can vary widely.
But when you grind it yourself in afood processor, you control all the variables. That means you can achieve the perfect grind forbeef,pork,poultry, and evenfish and seafood. Your food processor can also help with thinly slicing meat, which can be a tricky task without a commercial meat slicer or a supersharpchef’s knifeand an extremely steady hand. This opens up possibilities for all kinds of dishes in the home kitchen that are otherwise better left to the professionals.
Here are a few tricks we've discovered for grinding proteins in your food processor.
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1. Partially Freeze the Meat
Partially freezing the meat before processing it ensures results that are chopped but not pulverized.
2. Make a Paste
In dishes like turkey burgers and shrimp burgers(below), we grind a portion of the main ingredient to a paste and use it to bind the rest of the dish, which is ground to a chunkier texture.
3. Mix Meats
You can combine more than one cut of meat to engineer just the right mix of flavor and fat for each recipe.
4. Use Pressure
To ensure clean, even cuts when slicing meat in the food processor, use a good amount of pressure to push the meat into the feed tube; don't be afraid to get a little heavy-handed!
5. Add Baking Soda
Adding baking soda to our home-ground meatkeeps it especially tender and moist during the cooking process(like with these Homemade Italian-Style Sausages).The soda raises the pH of the meat, which makes it more difficult for the proteins to bond.
6. You Can Use Less Panade
You can use less panade (a bread and milk mixture used to add tenderness to ground meat dishes) when you grind your own meat because it will already be more tender than store-ground options.
Food Processor Perfection
Let America’s Test Kitchen help you unleash the power of the all-in-one multitasker gathering dust in your cabinet. Your food processor can do the work of a whole set of knives, a meat grinder, a food mill, a box grater, a mandolin, a stand mixer, a blender—and do it all faster—with just the touch of a button.
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Getting the Perfect Grind
Store-ground beef is often over-processed to a pulp, so it cooks up heavy and dense no matter how much care you take. Processing home-ground meat just enough to get the perfect grind means it cooks up more tender. The exact size of the grind will depend on the type of meat and the type of dish. The visual cues below will help you know when you’ve gotten your grind just right.
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