Burger meisters: Crafting your own ground round
Posted
Oct 22 2007, 12:31 PM
by
Donna Freedman
When life hands you flank steak, make hamburgers. At least that was the tip offered recently by Mary Hunt of Debt-Proof Living: Pick up loss-leader cuts of beef and ask the store butcher to grind them.
Hunt found, and ground, London broil for $1.47. When was the last time you saw ground beef for $1.47 a pound?
But I wondered whether she just had a particularly friendly butcher. So I went shopping.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that all four supermarkets I visited were willing to do special meat orders. Chop meat as a special order -- yep, it made me laugh, too.
You find it, they grind it
An employee at Albertsons, part of the Supervalu chain, suggested customers find out what times different meats are ground. That’s because each time the butcher changes meats, the grinder must be completely cleaned out and sanitized. In other words, please don’t ask them to grind flank steak when they’re in the middle of pulverizing turkey.
A cheerful meat-department guy at Top Food & Drug said the store is “glad to do” grinds. He said shoppers in a hurry could call ahead and ask the butcher to pick out and grind “a couple of good-looking Londons” so they'd be ready and waiting. (Personally, I’d ask the butcher to pick out a couple of the cheapest Londons.)
Employees at Fred Meyer, which is part of the Kroger chain, and at Safeway both pointed out that some of the meat will cling to the inside of the grinder. So if you need, say, exactly one pound of meat, you’ll have to throw in a bigger cut. Neither employee could say how much of the meat gets “lost” in the process.
DIY chuck
A couple readers of the Smart Spending message board noted that anyone with a food processor can make ground beef at home. Posting as “Savoir Faire,” a reader said to cut the meat in small pieces and pulse the motor: “Don’t put it on high and let it rip.” (Eeewww, meat margaritas.)
A reader named “old Karen” reminded everyone to sanitize the processor afterward. (I suggest a 1:10 mix of bleach and water.) Also in the spirit of food safety, I’d urge you to cook or freeze the meat promptly.
Those of us without food processors will have to rely on the kindness of butchers. It could be that not every meat department is willing to do this. Heck, some supermarkets don’t even cut meat on-site. But you won’t know until you ask.
I had a thrifty encounter with a Safeway butcher earlier this year. Pork chops were 99 cents a pound (limit two packages), and not surprisingly, they were sold out two days in a row. The third day I stopped in, the butcher said he’d just gotten a pork delivery, and asked me to wait.
A few minutes later he handed me 17 pounds of thick-cut chops. He must have thought I deserved a break because he’d seen me three days in a row. Or maybe I looked really hungry.
Being an inveterate wise guy, I nearly said, "Hey, it says limit two packages." But then I remembered that they have a lot of knives back there -- and that maybe he'd seen that "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" episode about the leg of lamb.
