Ground beef

Fun (fresh Chinese rice noodles) come in folded-up sheets sold in one-pound packages. When sliced up that's enough noodles for two or three dishes. I recently decided to use the last portion from the last package I bought to make a Thai dish: wide rice noodles with a curried ground beef topping. For the beef I used a package of 80% lean (fattiest I could find at the supermarket) grass-fed ground beef.

The dish came out OK except for the texture. The beef was in very fine, almost sandy grains. I rarely buy ground beef--the cuisines I mainly cook don't call for it and I'm not a big hamburger fan, so I don't have much experience with ground beef. I'm thinking that maybe this meat was ground too finely for this application? I buy a lot of ground pork and I noticed that while you can see the individual extruded threads in the ground pork, this package of ground beef was one solid mass. Or maybe I overcooked it?

Any ideas?

-Paul W.

I have been cooking for over 70 years and have never seen ground beef like that. In fact, I always have to use a fork to crumble up the ground beef into smaller pieces as it cooks. Perhaps it was a special grind for a particular application? Or a mistake on the part of the person doing the grinding... I hate the ground beef that is in shreads rather than crumbled, and find that kind hard to break up, but in the end, it always works out OK.

Could you post the recipe you used, or if no recipe then a general description of your procedure?

It's my own personal opinion that you overcooked the beef, as that's one of the most common complaints I have about ground beef recipes which have been served to me. In fact, for a long time it was the most common complaint I had about my own dishes that started with a base of ground beef - chili, bolognese, various Chinese wok dishes, etc., for some time.

I eventually settled on ignoring the instruction to brown the beef first, regardless of recipe. That almost inevitably seems to me to over-cook the beef by the end of the dish. Now I generally just stir the beef over moderate heat briefly, but I don't bring it anywhere near browning before adding other ingredients. This even includes my mom's/grandma's/great-grandma's meatball "That Which Shall Not Be Altered" recipe. I form the meatballs and plunk them raw into the sauce. No pre-browning in a pan or oven. (Er...that's not the only thing I altered, but please don't tell them that!)

I guess you could argue that you lose some flavor component that way, but I don't notice the difference, and more important - it doesn't remind me of eating meat flavored BB's.

Piling on... Also sounds to me like over-cooked ground beef. I still like to get a sear on mine but do it in one lump, then proceed carefully.

The recipe indeed did call for browning the ground beef as an initial step. I think overcooking was the problem here. Thanks!

-Paul W.