NEVER Pack Your Meatloaf in a Pan Again — Try This Old TEXAS FARM Trick

Everything I know in one place. The Cookshack Book: https://earlhargrove.shop/ Open the cupboard under your oven and look at that loaf pan. Somewhere along the line, a meatloaf packed into that tin got to be what meatloaf looks like in this country. It isn't baking. It's an hour of the sides simmering in their own grease, and the recipe on the box even tells you to drain the juices off before you slice. Those juices were supposed to stay in your supper. My daddy Roy fed a branding crew of fourteen men for three days in the spring of 1963. The second night was meatloaf, four pounds of it, in his fourteen-inch iron skillet. He never owned a loaf pan. There wasn't enough left over to make one sandwich. I was standing right there. I'm Earl Hargrove. Eighty-four, cattle and a little field in Gonzales County, Texas. Forty years cooking for fifteen men at a time. In this one: - why LEAN beef dries out no matter what you do - why DRY crumbs drink the juice right out of the meat, and what to SOAK instead - the walnut-sized TEST PATTY that tells you the salt before it's too late - why SQUEEZING the mix turns it into bologna - why you never PACK it, and never into a pan - why the GLAZE goes on at the end, not the start - why you can't trust the COLOR in the middle, and the number you can (160) - the eighth piece, Roy's: what goes UNDER the loaf, and the gravy it leaves behind A loaf pan doesn't bake the sides of your meatloaf. It boils them. Did your daddy make his in a pan or free on a skillet? Oats or crackers? Tell me his name and what county he cooked in. I read every one.