Never Cook Your Ground Beef This Way Again. Try This Old Mexican Trick Instead

#groundbeef #mexicanfood #picadillo 📖 Get La Cocina de Bertha, every recipe in this kitchen written down (372 pages): https://berthascookbook.com Mija, look at the pan. Gray pebbles in a puddle of cloudy water, poured down the sink, then a packet shaken over what was left. It was never you. It was the spoon. In my mother's house a pound of ground beef came out of the pan dark and crusty, smelling like a steak, and that beef became the picadillo, the tacos, the tortas. At number one I show you the first five minutes, and the thing I have to correct in my own book. ⭐ THE PAN (then picadillo, page 151) • 1 lb ground beef, 80/20, chuck if the label says it. The cheaper grind with more fat is better here (page 151) • A heavy 12 inch pan, cast iron if you own it. ONE pound per pan. • Then for picadillo: 1/2 white onion and 2 garlic cloves, 2 potatoes and 2 carrots in small dice, 4 Roma tomatoes blended with 1/2 cup water, 1 tsp cumin, 1/2 tsp Mexican oregano, 1 bay leaf, salt and pepper LAST ⭐ THE 7, COUNTING DOWN 7. THE BEEF: skip the 93% lean. No fat, nothing to fry in, nothing to carry the taste. 80/20, chuck. 6. DRY, NOT ICE COLD: out of the refrigerator 15 minutes before. Press the top dry with a paper towel. Never from frozen. 5. THE PAN: heavy, HOT before the meat, until a drop of water dances. One pound in a 12 inch pan. Two pounds = two batches. 4. THE SALT WAITS: salt on raw ground meat pulls the juice into the pan and tightens the meat like chorizo. Beef goes in plain. Salt after it is brown. (The beans get salted at the start. The beans are not the beef.) 3. THE FAT STAYS: spoon the extra into a cup, keep 2 spoons in the pan. Never the sink, never the tap. Onion and garlic go into those 2 spoons AFTER the beef, never before. 2. THE TOMATO GOES ON THE BEEF: raw beef into the caldillo = gray beef in red soup. Brown first, then the blended tomato lifts the brown bits off the pan and fries 2 minutes, red to brick. 1. NEVER LIKE THIS: do not break it up. The whole pound goes into the hot pan in one piece, pressed flat once, a tortilla of meat. Walk away 4 to 5 minutes. Listen: sizzle, never bubbling. Dark crust underneath, then cut it in a cross like a tortilla for tacos, flip the quarters, 2 more minutes, then break into chunks, not dust. (Page 151 says "breaking it up, let it sit still between stirs." That works. This is better. I am correcting my own book.) WHY: a pound of ground beef is nearly half water. A hundred crumbles weep at once, the pan floods, and boiling water never gets hotter than boiling water. Brown only happens above that, on hot dry iron, left alone. SAFETY (page 205): ground meat is all outside. It cooks through every time, no pink anywhere, 160°F. A crust does not excuse a pink middle. THREE DINNERS FROM ONE POUND: tonight picadillo (the full recipe is in my "Just Add Ground Beef to Your Potatoes" video). Tomorrow tacos dorados. The Tuesday with no time: browned beef, onion, a spoon of salsa, in a warm tortilla with queso fresco. THE HONEST WORDS: • Gray anyway → pan not hot enough, two pounds in it, or salted first. • Crust stuck and tore → not ready, one more minute. Meat lets go when it is browned. • Dry and sandy → the lean package, or broken into dust. • Black, not brown → that one time it burned. Lower the fire. WHO PROFITS: the taco seasoning packet is about $1.50 for an ounce of salt, cornstarch and paprika, and the back of it says DRAIN THE BEEF, THEN ADD WATER. Pour out the flavor, pour in what made it gray, buy a packet to put the flavor back. The frozen bag of pre-cooked crumbles is twice the price of the package it came from. There is no money in a woman who owns a heavy pan and knows how to leave it alone. THE HABIT (page 243): Sunday, brown 2 pounds in two batches. One is tonight. The other, with onion, garlic and the fried tomato, goes in the freezer BEFORE the potatoes (potato goes grainy frozen). Thursday: potatoes in, dinner in 20 minutes. And the pan afterward, with the crust baked onto the iron, and the little cup of fat? That is the other half of my life: 🧼 Clean The Mexican Way → [link to cleaning channel] If your ground beef always came out gray and tasting like nothing, it was never because you were careless. Nobody ever showed you. Tell me in the comments: potato house or rice house, where does your picadillo go? I read every one. #cookingtips #kitchenhacks #mexicancooking