ottawa foodies

How do you clean lean ground beef?
I have heard some people use vinegar or just water.

What method do you use?

Thanks.

no cleaning - i buy it from a reputable butcher so i know it's fresh and i know what's going into it.

cleaning it?
i have never even heard of that
what are you afraid of and what are you hoping to accomplish?

At the risk of sounding contrarian, if you are going to bother cleaning ground beef I`d simply buy a hand crank grinder and grind your own. I have a cheap (cast aluminum?) type and it was less than 20$ at Winners. As long as you make sure to remove sinew from the whole cut beforehand, it works really well. Otherwise, if you are concerned about contamination, make sure to cook to medium.

I use fire and salt to clean mine. Sometimes a little pepper. When it's clean, I tend to drap some cheese on it to dry it.

My question remains - what exactly are you cleaning?

James that is hilarious :-)
Zymurgist I agree, What on earth are you asking Dita? love the picture.
I was a GM at that big Ottawa Burger chain for years and there is no Cleaning of Ground Beef... Just buy Good Beef FRESH from a butcher. Go see Jon at Sasloves, before things changed that's were the beef came from... or Marc at the Butchery, Dan at Brian's butchery, James in Manotick or Pete and Gus if you are in that neck of the woods...

Unless you are asking what to do if your ground beef smells bad?... Chuck it, no pun intended.

I'm guessing this has to do with the habit some people have of washing all the meat they buy before cooking it. The need for this is apparently a myth.

Washing meat isn't going to kill any pathogens. You have to cook it to do that. And if you want to eat it raw, it should have been handled carefully enough that you don't need to wash it.

I've heard of people pouring boiling water over cooked ground beef to remove the fat.

I cook it.

To follow up what Fresh Foodie said, I don't rinse my meat. All that does is transfer any bacteria from the meat to the inside of the sink and possibly the kitchen counter and wherever else any water happens to splash... resulting in more cleaning for me to do.

In a nutshell: Buy the freshest meat possible from a reputable butcher or vendor, keep it cold, consume it asap, cook it properly and use clean hands/dishes/utensils.

It is just raw ground beef from Metro - I heard some people use vinegar to kill the bacteria and some wash it prior to cooking. Just looking for input - Fresh Foodie hit the nail on the head.

I know that some people wash meat before cooking it, but I've never heard anyone talk about washing ground meat... it doesn't really have a defined surface to clean, so the water (or other liquid) would just mix with the meat.

Washing meat in general is a bad idea, as the water is more likely to carry surface bacteria deeper into the meat. If the bacteria are on the surface, they will get killed quickly when you cook the meat, as the surface will get exposed to the most cooking heat.

Pretty much any liquid that would actually desinfect meat, you wouldn't want to eat (both for taste and safety reasons). So heat is the best way to desinfect the meat. If you are really worried about bacteria for no particular reason, just cook it a lot. But if you think the meat may be bad (smells wrong or something), just bring it back to Metro...