When you’re looking through money-saving recipes, you’ll discover that many of them start with similar instructions:

Brown a pound of ground beef or turkey.

After that, the recipe can go in many different directions, but browning the meat is essential. Have you ever thought about it, though?

The recipes assume that you know how to do this, but if you mess up this part, the rest of the dish is guaranteed to suffer.

Here are some common mistakes to avoid:

• Don’t add cold  meat to a hot pan. This just cools off the pan and may cause your meat to release all those tasty juices. Adding cold  meat to a cold pan does the same thing, because in both cases, the pan takes a while to reach proper browning temperature once the meat is added. Instead. Let your meat come to room temperature before cooking. This takes about 30 minutes.

 

• Don’t overcrowd the pan. If you are cooking more than 1 pound of meat, or using a small skillet, divide the meat and cook in smaller batches. Crowding doesn’t allow enough surface area to reach the heat and the meat steams instead of browning.

 

• Don’t walk away. Browning meat doesn’t take long. You want to sear the surface and then stir as it finishes cooking; this will rarely take more than 10 minutes. Since most of the time, the browned meat will require additional cooking to finish the recipe, you don’t want to over-cook in the first stage.

 

• Don’t use the wrong pan. A skillet with tall sides works best and the material that conducts heat most evenly is cast iron. Get a good cast iron skillet, season it, and use it for the best ground meat ever!

Published 07/22/09