Maybe I’ve misunderstood, but is the term “hamburger” in the US used to refer to minced/ground beef, even if it isn’t going to be used to make anything burger-related? That has always confused me, but made me chuckle at the same time.
I use minced meat (beef, lamb, pork, turkey, sausages squeezed out of their tubes) a lot in my cooking. I don’t cook with low-quality, fatty stuff, because it’s less healthy, the flavour is noticably poorer, and it’s still much cheaper to buy decent quality minced meat than it is to buy steaks or whole cuts of meat. I love it because:
1. It’s cheaper. I can get some really nice lean beef steak mince for a few quid that will be plenty for about six portions of food (three meals for me and my boyfriend).
2. It goes further than steaks/whole pieces. Rather than having such a meat-centric meal, it’s less expensive (and in my view, nicer) to balance it out with things, for example, putting some minced meat in a pasta sauce, along with loads of tasty fresh vegetables.
3. It’s extremely versatile. You can use it in so many recipes and do so many different things with it. Last night I made minced pork meatballs, with fresh red chilli and garlic in them. At the weekend I often make lamb kofte, seasoning with garlic, ground corriander seeds, chilli and a pinch of cumin. The flavours are really wonderful.
4. It’s easy to season. Because it’s all ground up, you can add delicious flavours and really mix them into the meat, or just keep it simple with a bit of salt and freshly ground pepper. With it being minced, the flavour penetrates the meat more easily than if it was just seasoned on the outside.
5. It promotes not being wasteful with meat products. Sure, I don’t want to eat lips and arseholes (or any of that “mechanically recovered” stuff), but at the same time, I don’t see why we should just throw out perfectly good, edible parts of animals because we can’t put them in packages and have them look like neat little whole portions of meat.
6. When you look for good quality cuts of meat, the most flavourful ones tend to be those “marbled” with fat, so when they cook, the fat essentially softens, melts and bastes the meat, keeping it wonderful and moist. As @Seek_Kolinahr says, this is basically what you get with nice quality minced meat, but for a fraction of the price.
7. It’s easy to choose healthy forms of minced meat. You could go for a “classic” burger-friendly minced beef (with an 80:20 meat to fat ratio), or you could get the lean steak stuff, which at less than 10% fat is really not an unhealthy choice at all.
So yes, here are just a few reasons why I like to eat minced meat, as well as, or instead of steaks or roast pieces of meat.