In article <[email hidden]>, [email hidden]
says...
Quoted message said:yetanotherBob said:One thing you know you'll be getting is WATER, sometimes salted, and
plenty of it, at whatever "meat" price they charged for those frozen
disks.
The recall notice said the products involved were 100% beef,
Which would mean no water or other additives (like TVP).
It's pretty rare to find adulterated hamburger patties. At least
at the stores where I shop.
-sw
The patties can be labelled as 100% beef and still contain more water
than you'd find, for example, in beef chuck that you've fresh-ground
then formed into patties for burgers. The steam that emanates from one
of the frozen burger disks as it grills/fries/broils with high heat is
one quick giveaway.
As an experiment, you could take a "100% USDA choice chuck" Original
Bubba Burger, place it in a skillet along with patty of chuck that
you've ground and formed into a patty of similar size and weight. Put
the skillet on a burner, turn on the heat and watch what happens.
You'll likely see a pool of water forming around the frozen patty, well
before any fat or significant moisture starts rendering from your
homemade patty.
Try the nominally better frozen burgers, from Costco and other suppliers
(including the Costco ground sirloin), and you'll probably see the same
effect of water pooling before anything else.
The only frozen patties I've found that don't have appreciable amounts
of water in them have been from Coleman and a couple of local markets
that use local meat processors, and they're certainly more expensive
than the "Bubba Burger" patties and their ilk.
I suspect that the purveyors of frozen beef patties add water not just
to pad their weight, but possibly also to help cook the patties by
steaming. This would be an easy way to decrease the possibility that
the meat would be dangerously undercooked, lessening the manufacturers'
exposure to food poisoning lawsuits and the like.
Bob
