NEVER Bake Your Meatloaf in a Loaf Pan Again — Try This Old FARM Trick

Find All my recipes in one place! Otis Granger Cook Book: https://otisgranger.com/ There's a meatloaf in an oven somewhere right now, in a loaf pan, and it's going to come out the way it always does. Gray on the sides. Swimming in a quarter inch of its own grease. The glaze slid off into the corners. It breaks in half coming out, and everybody eats it with a lot of ketchup and says it's fine. It isn't your recipe. Your recipe is probably your grandmother's and it's probably good. It's the pan. In every house I clear there are two loaf pans in the bottom drawer by the stove. One is stained brown all the way up the inside from forty years of use. The other one is clean, sometimes with the sticker still on the bottom. The dark one was for bread. And in the houses where the food was any good, nobody ever put meat in the other one. I'm Otis. Forty years of barns and estate auctions across the Midwest, and the kitchen is the last room I clear. My mother made meatloaf every other week for eleven people, and I never once saw meat go in her loaf pan. In this one: 1 — the meat: 80/20, and why lean is the wrong fix 2 — the bread: torn bread soaked in milk, not dry crumbs out of a can (and why) 3 — the onion goes in on the grater, juice and all 4 — the mixing: fifteen turns and stop, or you make a hot dog 5 — the shape: three inches tall, by hand, five sides open to the oven 6 — the glaze goes on LATE, in two thin coats 7 — 160°F, then leave it alone ten minutes 8 — what she set it on, which I've never once seen in a modern kitchen A flat sheet pan. Two big onions in thick slices, laid out like tiles. The loaf on top. Nothing over it. The grease runs off, the onions roast in the drippings and make the side dish themselves, and the crust goes all the way around. Honest, said plainly in the video: 160°F for ground beef, no softening it. Line the pan. And if you love the soft loaf-pan meatloaf you grew up on, keep it — just set it on a slice of bread to catch the grease. Did your mother bake the meatloaf in a pan or out on a sheet — and what was in hers that nobody else's had? Oatmeal? Crackers? Tell me, and tell me her name. I read every one.