Local fitness enthusiast Jason Murphy remakes favorite meals of his youth into healthy dishes. See the full list of his recipes at www.mysaline.com/shirtless.
If you are familiar with this feature, you know my main point is to avoid processed foods as much as possible in your daily life. Anything you can do yourself instead of trusting to a large corporation is always going to be beneficial both in taste and nutrition.
It just makes sense, because why you might have your best interests in mind, major food processors absolutely do not consider you in their bottom line, or any other line for that matter. They will push the legal limits on anything they can if it puts another dime in their pocket, which for you can mean as little as not tasting as good, up to being dangerous to consume on a regular basis.
Most processed foods are obvious and easy to spot in the mega-marts. If it’s pre-packaged and has an expiration date that won’t be hit until your unborn great, great grand-children are driving age, then it’s something to be avoided. However, there is one very popular food substance that is processed that no one even thinks about…ground hamburger meat. That’s right, the item that makes up a large percentage of everyone’s cook from home meals is most definitely an ultra processed food that can and should be done at home.
Store bought ground hamburger is not from one single animal. It is actually a plethora of animals. It’s made up of leftover cuts trimmed off of steaks and other subprimal cuts and combined for later grinding. There could be hundreds of cows in one single burger.
What does this mean for taste and quality? To start, it’s the scrap cuts. Have you ever trimmed off a fatty, non-appetizing looking piece off your steak and sneaked it to the dog? That’s what you are sneaking to yourself and your family every time you eat ground hamburger. The next time you eat some cheap ground and get all those hard bits that hurt your teeth? That’s hard connective tissue and bone that the meat processors didn’t take the time to trim and just left to the grinding teeth of the hopper.
Also, if one of those cows were sick, or if one of those pieces came from mishandled and now E-Coli infected meat, now the whole batch is a biohazard. We’ve all seen the multi-state recalls for beef contaminated with E-coli or worse. That comes from the mish mash of hundreds of animals thrown together for ground beef. The meat processors make money off of speed and efficiency, not taste, quality, or safety. Do not trust them to have your best interests at heart.
Here’s the rub, almost every kitchen in America is more than capable of making their own ground beef from one single, grass fed, pasture raised cow. The humble food processor makes short work of taking one Sirloin steak and transforming it into the best burger patty you ever served up. It’s so quick and easy, and the taste so unbelievably better, you will kick yourself for not trying it sooner.
Not only are you now not feeding yourself the scrap meat that should be reserved for the family dog, now you are eating a burger significantly higher in Vitamins A, B, E, antioxidants, much lower levels of saturated fats, and up to five times more healthy omega-3 fats than grain lot beef. The chance of consuming E-Coli or some other nasty bug plummets as well from eating from one pasture raised cow vs hundreds of animals with no way of tracking how that meat was handled.
You can make normal patties for the grill, or go super thin for sliders as I do here with this example. You can’t go wrong either way. So be a one cow man or woman in your one horse town, and your taste buds and GI tract will ride off triumphantly in the sunset together.
One Cow Grass Fed Sliders:
Ingredients:
1 grass fed sirloin steak, at least 1 lb
1/2 tsp sea salt, pepper, onion powder, garlic powder
Instructions:
Trim your steak of any excess fat from the edges:
Cut the steak into 1 inch chunks:
Chill the steak in the freezer for 10 minutes. Place the chunks in the food processor and sprinkle in the spices. Cover the top of the food processor with plastic wrap to keep ground meat from getting up into the nooks and crannies of the lid for easy clean up.
Pulse 10 times in short bursts until the meat has the consistency of ground beef:
To make sliders, line 1/4 sheet pan with parchment sprayed with non-stick:
Cover with another sheet of parchment and roll out thin until the meat covers the pan. A can of vegetables is a good tool to roll out the meat:
Cook 2-3 minutes on each side on a griddle or cast iron skillet. Melt a slice of grass fed cheese on top if desired:
I served this batch as a Big Mac Wrap from last week’s article:
See the list of all the Shirtless Chef recipes at www.mysaline.com/shirtless.