Add Baking Soda to Minced Meat
From an aesthetic point of view, minced meat is not the most pleasant of animal proteins. It is soft and blotchy when raw, and more often than not, when cooked, it simply turns the pink pulp into a gray lumpy mass.
This can be mitigated by leaving it alone and letting the meat roast well before breaking it into small pieces, but even that doesn’t help reduce the moisture loss typically seen when cooking ground beef. (If you’ve ever cooked a meat mass for gravy or chili peppers, you know which liquid I mean.)
Fortunately, there is a handy little chemical that solves both of these problems. It’s called “sodium bicarbonate,” but most people call it “baking soda,” and adding it to ground beef helps keep it soft and also speeds up the browning process.
It’s not a “new” trick or a recent discovery, so I’m not sure how much I’ve missed it all these years, but I’m glad it finally got into my brain. I came across this on America’s Test Kitchen Instagram account (which has an image taken from a five-year-old chili recipe ).
I finally tried it last night with just over a pound of minced meat that I needed to use up. I sprinkled the meat with about a third teaspoon of baking soda, shaken, left alone for 15 minutes, and then cooked in a skillet over medium to high heat.
I’m not used to being crushed on ground beef, but I was just amazed. Even after some excessive fiddling and stirring, the beef chunks developed a deep brown crust, and the usual puddle of liquid turned into a simple puddle. Moreover, he was much softer. There was no bouncy rebound, no unpleasant chewing – just beautifully browned meat pieces with a meaty flavor.
Why does adding baking soda to minced meat make it cook faster?
Why does it work? Baking soda (very alkaline) raises the pH of the meat, preventing over-binding of proteins (and thus squeezing out water); it keeps everything nice and delicate and prevents liquid puddles from forming. The drier your pan, the faster your food will brown, butaccording to ATK , an alkaline environment is also much more conducive to the Maillard reaction — the “chemical between amino acids and reducing sugars” that gives browned food its appearance and flavor.
You can also add baking soda to your cuts of meat. Accordingly, ATK recommends 1/4 teaspoon for every 12 ounces of minced meat and a whole teaspoon for every 12 ounces of chopped meat. Mixing baking soda with one or two tablespoons of water can help distribute it evenly (especially if you’re dealing with sliced slices), but I’ve found the sprinkle-and-go method to be effective enough for shredded foods. Toss the raw meat with the bicarbonate (I just smashed it with a wooden spoon and pushed it), wait 15 minutes (no more time will enhance the effect of the baking soda), then cook as usual.
Updated 4:15 pm EST on Jan 23, 2021 to clarify how to “mix” baking soda with minced meat. Updated on June 21, 2021 to align content with the evolving Lifehacker style guidelines.