How I process large quantities of ground beef…
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
I don’t always brown my beef this way, sometimes I use the traditional method of cooking it in a pan and standing over it chopping, stirring, chopping, stirring…yeah sometimes I do that. One thing I ALWAYS do though, is cook large batches at once. I never just cook enough for one meal.
I prefer to brown at least five to ten pounds at once. I then drain off the grease, cool it, and package it in small freezer bags in whatever amount equals enough for a family meal of spaghetti or whatnot. For my family, this usually means a cup to a cup and a half of ground beef. I freeze it and whenever I need it for a meal, simply thaw in the microwave or with whatever I am cooking and I’ve cut out a major step and a decent amount of mess!
If you end up having a meal such as tacos, which required extra beef, simply grab two bags.
Why get out the skillet, thaw, brown, and drain over and over when you can do it once and save yourself tons of time and repeated messes?
This is one of my favorite ways to cook beef as it doesn’t require the attention that a skillet browning does. Also, you can get those nice little granules of beef without having to chop, chop, chop….Its great for large quantities of beef as well and I find the cooking process is done in half the time, with a lot less fat left on your finished product.
Begin with ground beef. Why do I use ground beef instead of ground chuck or lean ground beef? Simple, its cheaper. Grocery prices have been rising rapidly, gas is through the roof and I still have to feed a family of four with the same amount of money as I had before all of this. Ground beef it is!
Using your hand, take a clump of ground beef and submerge it.
Bring to a boil. You’ll need to stir it just a time or two until its all nice and browned and done.
Until I have a whole bowl like this. At this point, I will get a one cup measuring cup after it has cooled and put one cup servings in individual freezer bags to have on hand whenever I need ground beef for a meal.
And look at all this you left behind!! ewwwww
This beats the FOOL out of the skillet cooking method! And is way faster than freezing the raw meat in 1-lb baggies. Thank you thank you thank you!!
🙂 I am glad to hear that you found it useful. And it really does beat the other ways in my book.
This is a great idea. I have been processing 20 pound or more of ground beef for many years. I used the large skillet method and had several skillets to make it happen and a lot of chopping. I never thought of using the water method. I will try it the very next time that I have to process ground beef.
my recipe for making pork pie uses this method, you put the ground pork in the pot, add the water and smoosh it up, I use a potato masher and then drain it. I drain all the cooking water into empty tin cans and put them in the garbage. You don’t have to add soo much water either, just enough to lightly boil the meat. I then brown the pork to get it a bit drier, and make my pork pies.
Otherwise I get my DH to stand at the stove cooking the large packages of ground beef in my big wok, they are always nice and separated when he does it. I pack it into the quart ziplock freezer containers, and just pop it out into whatever I am using to cook the meal.
Christy – I’m new to your site and found you because of this posting on Pinterest. I tried this method for the first time today. I’ll freeze the beef and try it within the next two weeks. My question is how do you dispose of all the water/grease from the pot? Today is Thursday, which is trash day for us, so I had an empty 25 pound bag of cat food. I put that bag inside a large trash bag and emptied the water/grease into the cat food bag. Then I just rolled the cat food bag down, closed the trash bag and took it all outside. But if I didn’t have the cat food bag…options? Thanks for your help with this question. Marie Everett
Marie, we are coffee drinkers at our house, so I always have some type of empty coffee can. When I drain my ground beef, I let the liquid cool and then pour into the coffee can, put the lid on it and in the garbage it goes.
My mother in law used to do that and make what she called scrambled hamburgers. She would put it on a bun with ketchup and pickles.
I don’t know where you live, but in the South we call that Chili Burgers. Yummy.
How many 1 cup bags do you use for l lb of meat?
I use one bag if it is just the four of us. If we have company I use two. I roughly estimate that a pound cooked is 1 to 1+1/2 cups 🙂
HI Christy,
Thanks for posting this. A friend of mine, who was on the weight watcher diet, did this years ago. I thought it was wierd at the time but now it does sound like a good way to cut down on the bad fats!
im going to buy 10lb or so and try this sounds quick to me. And all your recipes i have tried have been great. Thanks for this one