[Shenglong]

I haven't posted in years, but felt the need to weigh in on a food topic that's dear to my heart:

With ground meat, the two things you're looking to develop with heat are flavor and texture (and safety). The problem is though, that while texture can be developed as a function of time, flavor can be harder to develop since it's mostly a product of the Maillard reaction (browning). Unfortunately, as you develop texture (heat up the meat), the muscle fibers contract and squeeze out water, which lowers the temperature of your cooking surface and mitigates Maillard development. This is exacerbated by using ground meat, which isn't as insulted as say, a steak would be, which means water comes out faster. This leaves two major ways to develop flavor: 1. Sear your meat before you grind it -- easy said, but a pain in general because it involves cutting and semi-freezing the meat chunks after searing, slowing down your cooking, or 2. Working in batches and trying to get your ground meat to brown before the heat causes the water to come out, which is slow.

Both of these options suck. For any aspiring home cook, I'd say the best thing you can do for your food is to buy a high heat source. Use a powerful induction stove on the highest setting, and you can brown your meat without batching it as the water evaporates faster than it can collect (up to a point).

[menssen]

Just take the whole compressed, square, package-shaped "patty" of ground meat from the plastic and drop it into a ripping hot pan intact, and don't touch it until it browns pretty darkly on the bottom, then proceed to break it up and cook as normal. This gets you quite a lot of Maillard flavor without having to cook crumbled meat within an inch of its life. (As with most good ideas, this one came from Kenji.)

This relates to my biggest objection to this article, which is that the best cooking tip for ground meat (blind or not) is that it's really easy to hear the difference between the "hiss" of water evaporating as steam and the "sizzle" of it frying/browning, and the two things do not happen at the same time. Alternative title: "how to slowly steam ground meat flavorlessly without vision."

[goodbyesf]

Or you can bake it. That way you can save the tasty juices. It's especially effective for hamburger patties. When you are done cooking, you can dump the juices on the bread and then put your hamburger patty on it. Absolutely delicious.

After years of overcooked dry meat, setting off the smoke alarm, dealing with splatter all over the stove and a lingering smell in the apartment for the entire day, I discovered the magic of baking meat and will never go back to searing and frying meat.

This works just as well for steak. Instead of buying individual cuts of steak, buy a rib roast. Roast it in the oven and cut it into individual steaks afterwards. Cooked steak keeps amazingly well so you can put it in the fridge or freeze it and eat it later. Pan searing or grilling will never get you the tasty crust that roasting can. Try it and never go back to a smoke filled apartment with a screaming smoke alarm.