This is a great way to cook up 5 to 10 (or more) pounds of ground beef at a time, with no spatters to clean up. Later you can use it to make soup, hamburger stroganoff, chili, tacos, burritos, goulash, shepherd’s pie—whatever you normally make with ground beef.
Put the ground beef in a big stockpot. Cover with water. You can add seasonings if you’d like, using whatever you’d normally brown the beef with, such as green peppers, onion, salt, and pepper. Bring to a boil, stirring now and then to break up the clumps. When it has lost its pink color, it’s done.You don’t need to watch it as carefully as you do when you’re browning so I’ve never really timed it.
Put a large bowl in your sink with a colander over it and pour the beef into it, saving the “broth” for soup if you’d like. (Be wary of just dumping it down your sink as it is full of fat.)
Refrigerate the broth overnight and then skim off the fat. Freeze the beef in 2-3 cup portions (equivalent of about one pound of raw beef).
The texture of this meat is different from ground beef you brown on the stove. It is more crumbly and in smaller pieces rather than the larger clumps you get when you brown it on the stove. Some people don’t like the texture, so try boiling a pound first and make sure you like it before you cook up 10 pounds and discover you don’t!
[…] If you like boiling ground beef, I’d think you could reduce the water a bit and skip the blending because the ground beef […]