It's Time To Start Adding Baking Soda To Your Ground Beef

Ground beef is an ingredient in many classic dishes; whether you're having a Mexican night, homemade smash burgers, or a hearty casserole, chances are this meat is playing a starring role. The best thing about this ingredient is that cooking with ground beef is so effortless. In fact, properly breaking ground beef up is often the trickiest step. That being said, there is one downside to ground beef: It can sometimes turn out chewy or dry and nobody wants to eat a dry beef taco. Fortunately, adding some baking soda to your beef is a quick and easy solution that keeps the meat juicy and tender.

Adding baking soda raises the pH of the beef (thus making it more alkaline). This makes it harder for the proteins in the meat to stick together which is what causes the beef to become tough and dry. By reducing the amount of bonding that takes place, the beef retains more moisture, ensuring it is tender and juicy even when fully cooked. 

You only need to add around ½ teaspoon of baking soda for every pound of beef. Simply sprinkle the baking soda over the beef before mixing it in. The beef should be left to rest for 15 minutes. Then, it is ready to cook.

While adding baking soda is a great way to ensure your ground beef stays tender, there are a few mistakes people make when cooking with ground beef that can lead to the ground meat becoming dry and chewy. One mistake you need to avoid is stirring the ground beef immediately after you've added it to the pan. It's actually best not to touch it until you see the meat developing some color. If you start stirring it too early, a lot of the moisture the meat contains will be squeezed out.

It's also important to break the meat up into similarly sized pieces. If you fail to do this, you'll be cooking a mixture of different-sized chunks with the result that the smaller chunks will be overcooked (and dry) by the time the larger chunks are perfectly cooked. 

Lastly, if draining out the grease, keep a little bit of it (about a tablespoon) to one side so you can incorporate it into your cooked beef later. Grease adds a lot of moisture to the meat, and getting rid of all of it can leave it tasting overly dry. If you follow all this advice, and use the baking soda trick, creating deliciously moist cooked ground beef is totally achievable.