Oh great!!;-(
Yet another reason to cook from scratch....read further and you will read that lots of the tainted meat made it's way into meat balls, meat loaf and pre made stuffed peppers.
Thanks for the link Alexa!

I know this is the n-th time I've mentioned it, but I don't buy ground beef. I buy cuts of beef and zap them in the food processor or a hand-cranked grinder.

You get better meat, from recognizable parts of the cow.

There is less opportunity for contamination, because the cuts have less surface area per mass, have received less processing at the meatpacker, and are from one cow not from bits and scraps of many cows.

When many batches of meat are combined (either mixed together, or processed in the same equipment), the odds of contamination go up because you only need one batch to be contaminated.

Just illustrative - suppose each batch of meat has a 1% probability of being contaminated, meaning a 99% probability of being ''clean''. Then suppose you combine 100 batches. The probability of the combined meat being ''clean'' drops to 37% = 0.99 ^ 100.

If you really want to be fussy, you can cut off, or sear, the outside of the cut before grinding.

Well, if you cook it to 160F, it supposedly kills all the bacteria, so don't eat any medium/rare burgers.

John, I also chop meat in the food processor, it works best if it's still really cold, bordering on still a bit frozen.
Since I raise my own beef, some of it comes to me ground, but some I grind myself. I also grind pork for sausage.

And, since you've all heard it before, I won't have my usual fit about stock yards and commercial beef and agribusiness and the fact that animals are required to live their lives up to their bellies in their own filth, without even room to move around. Gee, I wonder how there could be any e coli there?

Annie

"If you really want to be fussy, you can cut off, or sear, the outside of the cut before grinding."

I have just started grinding my own meat, but I have long wondered if searing the surfaces of a cut of meat, before grinding, means that you could consume a medium rare burger safely. I would like to read more about precautions experianced home grinders take.

Looking forward to any responces.

tojohnso - There is a two (or three?) part series of "Good Eats" where Alton Brown goes through a handful of things you can do with a whole beef tenderloin. One of which is carpaccio, where he says that if you're paranoid you can make is safer by searing the beef before slicing it. Makes sense to me.

While I can recall a handful of ground beef recalls over recent years, I'm not sure that I recall a general beef recall. Maybe I'm forgetting, but even so they're clearly less prevalent. I'd feel a lot safer eating a rare burger if I ground the meat myself.

I just made Ann T's tourtiere for my FIL yesterday and ground the pork myself, but that's because there was no ground pork at the grocery store and the butcher shop is mobbed with tourists. That said...

I don't raise my own cattle or pigs but I do not/will not/never have bought hamburger from anyone but 2 butchers in my community who grind Angus beef fresh everyday. If I could, I'd go further and buy locally raised beef but hey, I live on a sandbar. Our local harvest is seafood. What can I say?

And I'm certainly staying away from ground turkey.

Geesh. Then there's sprouts. Packaged spinach.

It's a jungle out there.

seagrass

If it is beef I've bought as a cut, seared or trimmed, and ground myself, I will even eat it raw. As in, boeuf hachee. You can get that in bistros in France. Good-quality beef, chopped, served raw in a mound, sometimes with a raw egg on top and surrounded by little piles of condiments - onions, capers, cornichons, etc. Delicious and I've never had any ill effects. I would never have that in a US restaurant and they'd never dare serve it.

In Japan there are places that serve chicken raw, kind of a chicken sashimi. They are not US supermarket chickens, that's for certain.

That may sound scary, but consider that a good steakhouse in the US will have no problem serving its beef rare. A rare steak is pretty much uncooked on the inside. It is safe because the outside is cooked.

Anyway, I think a rare hamburger is fine if you grind/chop the beef at home.

Creepy but there's an ad for a hip implant recall on the right screen when I view this thread.

What's up with that?

seagrass

Seagrass - Maybe the cow got a bad replacement hip, couldn't stand, and is therefore now ground beef? Who knows, but I often get a feeling that there's some misguided artificial intelligence driving which ads pop up. I suppose it's a good reminder that we're being watched at all times.

Makes me glad we butcher our own beef, well we don't
butcher it, but have it done, no worries!

John what you describe is what I call steak tartare.
I am seeing an add for "The Mommylogs" at Stamford hospital...hmmm??

I see a Weight Watchers ad . . .

No ads. Firefox.. adblocker plus.

I think we're pretty lucky. The next little town has an IGA [Independent Grocers Alliance], . They have good meat cutters. They grind ground beef and ground pork all day every day. It's always quite fresh and no, it's not Angus but they do have Choice beef. The pork is quite lean and I've been using it a lot lately. I've ground my own in the past, but I just don't feel the need at this time.

What cuts of beef or pork do you use to grind your own? Does it matter other than fat content?
Trying to watch fat content in my diet and the brand Laura's Lean Beef which is 4% fat (I think) is almost $8.00 a pound. I don't eat beef very often but still can't see paying that much for ground beef! Just don't trust the ground meat sold in stores today. Would prefer to grind my own but not sure how to go about it.
Murphy

If you are going for a particularly lean ground beef, then maybe look for a lean cut, top sirloin or flank etc, with little marbling, and trim it well. Sear, if you want to. Cut into chunks about 1'' big. If you're using the food processor, do small batches, like a layer 1 cube deep (rather than filling the processor bowl). Process in 1 second pulses, start with 10 pulses, adjust to get the consistency you want. I like my ground beef fairly chunky like hand-chopped meat, not mushy like a meat hummus. If using a grinder, then just send it through. I prefer the food processor.

Maybe annie1992 has more information. E.g., her method of half-freezing the pieces is cool.

Same process for making ground pork, turkey, chicken, by the way. Though I won't eat those raw even if I do grind them at home.

If you make a really low fat ground beef, it may make for a dry chewy burger. Fat adds flavor and juiciness. You can replace that by mixing flavor and liquid into the meat. I usually add at least salt, pepper, and olive oil (melted butter when I'm being baaad). SWMBO likes her meat mixed with something like teriyaki sauce. If you're not a purist, you could get all experimental, mix in huckleberries or wasabi or weird stuff.

Don't mash the meat when mixing, or making the patties, or cooking the patties. I don't like ground beef that's been compressed to cardboard or burgers squeezed dry. I like almost a loose, slightly crumbly burger , admittedly I use a skillet not a grill. Medium rare inside, brown and crusty outside. Yum.

Grinding your own meat is great, but unless you are making a lot of ground meat, it is not worth the trouble to do it.

There is a technique to chop meat very quickly using two Chinese cleavers. You can make just one or two hamburgers, meat balls, or one ot two servngs of meat sauce.

Not need to set up your machine or messy clean up afterwards.

dcarch

For the tourtiere I needed 1 1/2 lbs. of ground pork. I bought 2 packages of boneless country ribs - allowing a little extra weight for the packaging. I have a small electric meat grinder. Mine doesn't grind as fine as I can get from the butcher, and I prefer the finer grind but my FIL didn't care!

We actually got the meat grinder for grinding quahog meats (large, hardshell clams). We make stuffed quahogs and red clam sauce with the meats from that endeavor. My husband dug a basket of clams Sunday morning. So the grinder got a good workout lol.

seagrass

"Good-quality beef, chopped, served raw in a mound, sometimes with a raw egg on top and surrounded by little piles of condiments - onions, capers, cornichons, etc. Delicious and I've never had any ill effects. I would never have that in a US restaurant and they'd never dare serve it. "

John, there are a number of fine restaruants that serve this, and have never had any issues with it. Now, if they forget my anchovy on top, they will have issues!

I've had steak tartare. If it weren't for the onions, capers, cornichons and anchovy it would have no flavor at all. I'd much rather have that luscious beef seared to a crust, juicy and warm inside topped with homemade mayonnaise using that very egg and chopped capers, cornichons and even the anchovy on top.

We ate once in a restaurant in Paris and a whole family at the next table ordered raw chopped beef with the raw eggs, etc...even the grade-schoolers were scarfing it down. None of them were screaming for chicken fingers lol!

Then there was the "hamburger" I ordered somewhere in the south of France that was barely cooked and came with a fried sunny-side egg on top of it.

What was that? Steak tartare medium rare??

Ugh.

seagrass

John, I l3arned that half frozen trick by accident. Just as it's easier to slice raw beef thinly when slightly frozen, it makes more of a minced or chopped beef than a paste when you start with meat that's a bit firmer.

I personally love steak tartare and I've even ordered it once from a restaurant in Grand Rapids, which is solidly midwestern, so it's not so exotic, I guess. Peppi, being in Chicago, has access to pretty much any food that anyone would want to eat, I think.

I much prefer my own tartare, I'm comfortable with that, knowing exactly where that beef was, what it ate and who has handled it. I save the sirloin for steak, though, and grind chuck or brisket.

Yeah, yeah, I know, but I don't much care for long cooked/braised/stewed beef, I like it rare, so pot roast is few and far between in my kitchen, I'd rather have it minced up and made into a rare burger or a really rare one, LOL.

Seagrass, I don't think I'd like the barely cooked burger either, althoughI like them rare, I don't want them pale, I want them cooked fast and hot, crusty on the outside and just warm in the middle. I still can't get into the custom of adding an egg, though, sunny side up or otherwise, and none in my tartare either.

Annie