The Unexpected Kitchen Tool You Need To Break Up Ground Beef

There are so many recipes that call for a pound of ground beef, and many of them are one-pot meals, which makes getting dinner on the table easy and convenient. However, ground beef is sold in blocks or tubes called chubs, which means in order to achieve the "ground" part of the equation, you have to stand there and manually break up the meat into crumbles, which can be tedious, to say the least. That's why you need a super-common but quite unexpected kitchen tool to make mince-meat of that ground beef.

By taking a potato masher to the beef in your skillet, you can ground up so much more meat at once, while using less effort than stabbing at it with a turner. Your typical "wavy" potato masher works just fine, but if you have one with perforations, that might work even better if what you're looking for are very small, uniform crumbles (skip the ricer, though). When using the potato masher to break up ground beef the meat might get stuck between the coils of the mashing head; just tap the handle against your pan and they should release with ease (and if you need to strain your ground beef, we've got a hack for that).

Did you know they actually make a tool specifically for mincing meat in your skillet? These choppers look like three-, four-, or even five-sided spatulas and feature a long handle; you bring down the mashing end into your ground beef and the blades separate the cooking beef. They're also great for breaking up other types of meat, including sausage cut out of its casing, plus any other ground proteins, like pork, chicken, or turkey. While it does mince meat a lot quicker than a single turner can, these tools still don't cover as much ground in one stab as a potato masher.

If you want very fine minced meat, you can also use your handy-dandy immersion blender. Cook your meat and chop it up as much as you can in the skillet, but then you'll transfer it to a tall container. Stick the blender in and pulse it a few times, or until you reach your desired consistency. Just be careful not to blend it too much, as you could end up with a meat milkshake.