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I tend to find it easier just to buy premade fresh beef patties for making burgers. I often find it messy to buy plain ground beef then add other stuff to form patties.
I read years ago that when you buy ground beef it can be any part of the beef. So I buy ground chuck, ground round, ground sirloin or whatever, but never ground beef. And never buy premade patties.
I'd rather buy the ground beef and make my own patties, but, even though I'm the one cooking them on the grill, I have to do what "the boss" says and use the premade patties when we have family over.
I buy ground beef and make my own patties. If wife is cooking these days she sometimes grabs preformed patties. It's a waste of $ and just plain laziness. But, if you're loaded, in a rush, or just lazy go ahead.
Having said that...recently I've discovered a really good breakfast sausage in preformed patties in about a 2lb pkg frozen. Now this is far handier than having to break open a 1lb chub and squeeze patties together each time you need a couple for breakfast. So it's different in this case.
know if it is made/ground fresh at the store you are buying it at.. you can ask
and here's what to ask
is this burger ground fresh at the store, and is it made from real steak trimmings?? ( as opposed to being shipped in from thousands of miles away like walmart, or made from pre-determined lean/fat tubes....this is preprocessed burger from huge batches out west..
go to a butcher shop, or smaller iga store that still has a butcher and ask
id go for the ground chuck before id buy a fat/lean %
more of a chance the fat/lean % was shipped in and not ground fresh onsite..
i was a meat manager in a supermarket for many years....now a supervisor with independent stores, i deal with this everyday
if you do buy chubs, and other shipped in burgers,,,be sure to cook to 160f it kills all bacteria
this preprocessed burger shipped to stores and not hand cut at stores is where the pink slime came from years ago
It depends on the situation. If I am just going to be cooking a couple of burgers on the grill I buy hamburger; if cooking for a larger group it makes sense to buy the patties.
I don't east beef but I buy ground turkey rather than the pre-made turkey burgers. As other posters have said I'm concerned about fillers. But apart from that the burger s I make myself are just better. We can add what we want in the proportion we want. For example, one of our favorite burgers has minced chipotle peppers in adobo sauce - can't find that in a pre-made patty.
I buy whole beef shoulders and grind my own. Then weight it out and package in 6 ounce patties and one pound blocks. So if I want a hamburger or am grilling, I am using a pre-formed hamburger, of a sort.
As far as I can tell, the burger patties and the bulk burger in Costco are exactly the same meat, and I've never bought bad burger from Costco.
I buy some really good USDA choice certified Angus from the restaurant supply house and grind that. I once bought their burger in a tube and it was pretty awful, so I won't do that again. I bought the tube to make dog food, but it wasn't good enough to feed to my dogs, so I am back to grinding the meat for the dogs as well as for my family.
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