Basic Ground Beef

"Not for sale" — required USDA labeling of custom-processed beef. That means I can't sell it to anyone else, not that I can't buy it in the first place!

Here’s my basic recipe and technique for cooking a pound of ground beef.  I’ve honed the spices over time and it’s great either as a quick meal (serve with rice and veggies) or as a springboard for something more extravagant.

Software:

1 lb. grass-fed ground beef, thawed
½ tsp. sea salt (or kosher salt)
¼ tsp. fresh ground black pepper
¼ tsp. ground fennel & coriander
2 tbsp. olive oil
¼ cup onions, shallots, garlic — whatever’s on hand

Hardware:

1 heavy frying pan (I prefer cast-iron, but heavy-bottom steel pans work great as well)
1 wooden spatula

The quantities on everything but the beef are approximate — I never measure these. ½ tsp. sea salt is the amount it takes to fill the crevice of my palm.  ¼ tsp. ground black pepper is 3 or 4 grinds on the pepper mill.  The spices I add directly from our cool little Japanese spice grinder (will talk about in an upcoming post!)  Olive oil is straight from the bottle, until it looks like enough to cover the bottom of the pan.  Get the picture?  Keep it loose and don’t stress; it’s cooking, not hard science.

This smells heavenly; always makes me hungry.

Heat a heavy pan on medium heat, add the oil.  Let it heat for a few minutes, then add a small amount of onion.  If it starts hissing when it hits the pan, then add the rest of the onion and fry it for about 2 minutes, stirring with the spatula.  I like my onions to get a little brown, nicely softened, and a bit translucent.

Add the ground beef, chop it up  with the spatula and distribute it so it covers the pan.  Add the salt, pepper, and spices.

Stir, stir, stir!  Use the spatula to break up any chunks so everything cooks at an even pace.  Stirring frequently, the meat will take take 3–4 minutes to completely brown.

If you want, you can drain the meat, but if you’ve thawed the meat well there’s no need to — that juice is downright tasty!

I had about 20 minutes to cook and eat before I went off to my martial arts class tonight; thankfully my lovely wife had already made a delicious pot of Basic Rice.  I threw a few cups of frozen collard greens (chopped and frozen last month) in the steamer on the other burner; they cooked in about  the same amount of time as the meat, making for one simple, easy meal!

Critical Reaction

Eating as I ran for the door, just one thought was in my mind: “delicious!”  Betsy put chopped radishes on hers, which looked really pretty, (Betsy: “I enjoyed them, thank you very much”) but that didn’t sound good to my palate.

The children:

A: “I think that papa gave me very tasty rice and tasty meat, but I didn’t like the greens.”

V: Picked at the food, fell asleep soon after.  Ah, the joys of being 2…

The finished product. Click to go to the complete photoset on Flickr.