Meat in your Mince

Mince or ground beef, can be a really versatile ingredient. However, it can be very variable in quality too. As mince can contain a lot of fat and connective tissue often the budget mince ends up being far less value than it first appears.

While I personally do not have much time for the “cant cook, wont cook brigade”, I genuinely feel for folks that do not have the money to buy, cook and eat the best food available. Thus, I have been experimenting with the mince that the majority of people actually buy. While I wish it were different, the majority of people buy their mince from a supermarket. It took me a while to find a decent local butcher after moving to the village, but I did locate one. There I can buy good mince at a price that is equivalent to the supermarkets, but it is in terms of quality that it genuinely wins out.

While the quality is very good, it is not as good as well hung beef. Hanging beef enables the meat to dry out and the natural enzymes in the meat tenderise and add flavour to the meat as it hangs. While traditionally all beef was handled in this way, most retailers do not do this as it adds costs. It is this change that has enabled the major retailers to reduce the price of beef.

While there is an argument that cheaper food helps the poor afford foods they could not otherwise afford. However, this has had other costs particularly in the context of food and cooking, the flavour of the meat. Further, the constant downward pressure on price for meat means that farmers are forced to reduce the welfare standards to reduce costs. Equally, the downward pressure on the price means that the supermarkets will source the meat they sell from wherever it is cheapest. That can lead to meat that would not pass as fit within Britain (or your nation), can enter the food chain. While I am not going into the details here, there have been examples of this happening. This is why knowing where your food comes from can be so important.

While the supermarkets have abused the labelling regulations to hide the fact that people have been buying imported meat, for the most part you can tell where the meat has come from. The real difficulty arises with processed food and ready meals. Last year when the BBC were asking the largest retailer in the UK where the chicken in just one ready meal came from, they were originally told it was British. Then they said it was European but they could not say exactly what country. Finally they acknowledged it was from Thailand. While the label on the ready meal said it was British.

Now in this example there were no health implications, but if there had been a disease outbreak that effected chickens, consumers would never know that they are eating a suspect food. This is why I personally favour cooking from scratch.

With the cheap mince from the supermarket, I have a special way of cooking the mince. I will chop a couple of onions and over a low heat cover the chopped onions with the mince and cook without adding any extra fat. As the ground beef and the onions cook in the fat that is already in the meat, no extra fat or oil is needed. Further as you are slow cooking the meat, any bits of connective tissue that is in the meat is tenderised too.

Once cooked the meat is drained, this removes the excess fat, and this means you end up with less fat than even the lean mince that you will often be charged extra for. Also, as the mince will have been made from meat that has not been hung, this removes the excess moisture from the meat as well. This can be separated and the liquid added back to a dish if needed.

This system of cooking mince can also be used for very lean mince and especially if you are cooking in bulk. My local butcher has a discount for buying five pounds (weight) of mince, and I will cook this all at once and freeze portions ready to add latter. Alternatively I will prepare many dishes and freeze them.

This is why I can not understand why even busy people will waste money on ready meals and processed food. Cooking from scratch is obviously cheaper and more economical. However by cooking in batches like this, it is possible to genuinely save time. As most pre-prepared meals made at home can be cooked straight from the fridge or freezer. Further it allows parents in particular to ensure that there children are getting a balanced diet. Equally it is possible to cook a Chilli con Carne for the adults and one that the children can and will eat.

While this way of cooking mince is a guide to enable folks to cook the budget type ground beef, it is only one of many ways to cook mince. However it is a great starting point and when I have previously shown people how much fat can come off a packet of mince, they have been shocked. I first developed this method when trying to help some friends who wanted to loose weight. It amused them that I as a vegetarian, as I was then, knew more about cooking meat than they did. While you do need some fat to add flavour to meat, any meat, I would suggest trying this and see for yourself just how much fat and how little meat is in your mince.

Cooking Real Food

Yesterday I posted regarding the meat content, or should that be lack of it, in hot dogs. This is illustrative of reason why I started writing here about cooking, food and farming issues. While these issues were always important to me, and I would hope to others too, there were situations and activities that were occurring just beyond my perception.

For me the real revelation came when I spotted a “Convenience” Pancake mix in the village shop. As pancakes are so easy to make I was really confused as to how any company could even dream of selling a product like this. Even if it was made for catering market, making a pancake batter is really simple.

At the time I was willing to lay the blame upon the education system, as all young people should be taught basic cooking skills. While I personally think this should start in the home, and with most families it does, schools also have a role to play as well. As no matter what else we may think that education is for, it is used to develop workers and economic skills. Thus allowing all young people learn some basic cooking skills will help them become independent latter when the leave school and leave home, but it may even inspire some to go further and have a career in the catering industry.

Equally, when the banking system collapsed and people needed to save money, one of the easiest ways I thought I could help was by showing how folks could cook and eat well via some videos and by writing. Again it seemed that lack of knowledge and skills were at the heart of the matter. The more people I talked to about food and cooking the more this seemed to be confirmed.

I had always known that there are a significant part of the population that will stick to the same foods and meals all the time, but was it that some folks were just to lazy to cook as others and stereotyping would have us believe or was it that people were just clueless. As I wanted to watch a TV programme on what manufacturers put in children's food, I watched that yesterday. And in that programme there was a dietitian working out of a hospital with young mothers who related a incident where she gave a woman a potato and a peeler and the woman asked what she did next?

Now I was aware of the joke that some people do not even know how to boil an egg. I had always assumed that was a myth as I learnt that as a child by osmosis rather than ever really being taught it. Latter I learnt tricks to do it better, but I genuinely am shocked that some people can not deal with the basics of cooking and food preparation.

I even started looking at what people were buying in the supermarket. I even tried to talk to people that I knew about this and offered suggestions of cheaper and better alternatives that they could cook from scratch. But this did not always go down well. While I know that people do live busy lives, and time can be at a premium sometimes, often with a bit of planning though it is possible to have pasta sauce for example ready in the fridge or freezer ready.

Yet the part that I least understand about peoples attitude towards food, is that often it is the unemployed and those not working that cook the least. When I have been unemployed it was only by cooking from scratch that I was I able to make ends meet.

Therefore near the start of the credit crunch I started filming some of the things I was cooking with the aim of helping people to learn some simple ways of cooking great meals. I also sought out some advice so that I could make them as best I could and provide some good quality information. However, each organisation that I spoke to had there own agenda and it made me very confused and the information that each body wanted included would have made the videos boring.

While I posted the original preview a while ago, and I tried to make the video entertaining, I realised that I needed to do more work before I was ready to post these films. So I continued to film so that when I was ready and had the time, I could try and help the folks that want the help.

This delay helped me realise that there are some people out there who just don't want help, no matter that they need it. Therefore I will offer help and advice to those who want it. I genuinely hope that the videos will entertain as well as inform.

The reasons why I became a vegetarian and why I stopped have already been related here, but this happened when it was near impossible to find vegetarian recipes so I had to learn to adapt recipes to be vegetarian. Thus I learnt more about cooking and what worked and what did not than most people ever do. Therefore this skill has given me the skills to cook and cook well, that I want to pass on in these videos.

While I was a vegetarian for more than twenty years, there was a real cultural change to food in Britain. Even when I was a child, even the poor demanded good food, and food was far more than just fuel. As even the poor took pride in producing good meals especially on a limited budget. So while I was expanding my diet via discovering new ingredients and flavours, other people were limiting their diets. Equally at the same time there was a cultural adjustment where instead of sitting down to meals together, people started eating alone. Families would have several sittings, one for each member of the family. This actually makes cooking more difficult for the cook in the family, as she, and unfortunately it will normally be a woman, then has far more work to do. It is this aspect of the cultural change that has enabled the food industry to sell more of the expensive processed food to people.

But this is the aspect that really surprises me, particularly when children are involved. Even as a vegetarian I noticed this as there appeared many vegetarian forms of processed food too. While I looked at and tried some of these, reading the chemical list, sorry ingredients list told me that I really did not want to eat them. While convenience foods do have a place in the kitchen and the diet occasionally, to have the whole of my diet based upon this would make me very depressed.

I have a real love of good food, and I love sharing food too. My better half has become my number one taste tester. It is this love of food that I want to share, here is the original video

What are you really Eating?

One of the exciting aspects of the Internet and with interacting with people from other parts of the world, is that it can enable me to learn via the investigation of tangents prompted by a comment. Personally I can not even remember when I last had a hot dog. To the best of my recollection it was when I was a child. Therefore, I had no idea what was in one.

I have to emphasise that this applies to Britain and Europe, and while via systems like the GATT agreement (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), the rules are very similar across the globe, specifically I can only talk about European regulations here. I place this note here as while I am sure of the information regarding Europe, different rules and regulations apply in other parts of the world.

Anyway a question was raised about what is in a hot dog? In Britain they come under the rules that govern sausages and a sausage has to contain a minimum of 46% forty six percent of meat to be legally called a sausage. As items like hot dogs contain less than this, Hot Dog sausage manufacturers stay within the law by calling the things like Hot dogs or Frankfurters.

I did some digging to try and discover what was permitted and it was not easy. As it seems that manufacturers don't like to admit what garbage they are really feeding us. But looking at the labels and knowing that meat can be twenty five percent connective tissue and twenty five percent fat, fifty percent of the stated meat content may not even be meat then I found two brands that had less than nine percent meat in them.

Well, the question has to be asked what are you really eating?

Bread Making

The staff of life, better known as bread is one of the essentials of life. Over the years there have been many occasions when I have made my own bread. So when the snow meant that there was no bread in my village co-op, I was able to return home and make my own. I was already prepared as when the commodity prices rocketed just before the banking collapse, I restarted making my own bread.

Not least because at that time the price of a loaf of decent wholemeal went up to £1.80 in the village stores and even in the supermarkets the price went up by nearly a third to over £1.50. So when I spotted that I could buy a bag of strong wholemeal flour for 58 pence as the bag was slightly damaged, I could see that from that I could make two loves for much less than a single bought loaf. While there is a cost in time and Energy, even with both these costs it still made it financially viable.

The only additional major cost at the time was another decent bread tin. While I already had a good one from a cheaper end of the types available, the better quality ones have a wider base and you end up with a better shaped loaf. Also if you just want to make bloomers or cottage loaf style bread then you don't even need a loaf tin, you just need a baking sheet. Again the best quality you can afford. Often one of three or four pounds cost will out last by many years one of one or two pounds cost. I know this from the experience of having wasted money on cheap ones in the past, and I would rather say now that good quality equipment that you will use regularly is far better than cheap rubbish that you loath to use.

Equally, I have had my disasters with making bread, and I am happy to enable you to benefit from my mistakes. The worst one was when I put two table spoons full of salt in to a recipe instead of the two tea spoons full. The only real other aspect that you need to be aware of is not having had the bread rise sufficiently I have made this mistake myself, and found the solution unexpectedly. Following mixing a batch of dough, there was a gas leak near by. Thus the gas had to be shut off, so I could not place the dough in the warm place near the boiler to prove (allow the yeast to rise the bread dough). So I placed it in the fridge and waited until the gas reconnected. This happened the following day. Much to my amazement even in the fridge the dough had risen. And via experimentation it takes 24 hours, so even if you have not got an ideal location to prove the dough, if you allow sufficient time, you should never have a loaf that has not risen sufficiently

Just like any other type of cooking, bread making is actually very easy. When I first said to friends that I was going to try making bread for the first time, I was told that it was very difficult and that I should not even try. Having already bought the bread tin and the ingredients, I was left wondering if I had wasted my money, but the only way to really discover if this was to difficult was to give it a try. Using the recipe given below, I made the attempt and I discovered it was one of the easiest tasks I had undertaken. While it does take time for the dough to rise, the preparation and time for needing the dough was less than ten minutes. Even clearing up and washing up took no longer than it would from washing up after any other cooking. So those myths were dispelled quickly. But the real revelation was just how good freshly baked bread tasted.

Bread Basic Recipe

Notes:

For making bread you need what is described as “Strong” plain flour. This describes a flour that has a high protein level and this is better for making bread. It is perfectly possible to make a reasonably good bread using the plain flour that is used for cakes and pastries, but you get a superior taste and better nutriment value from bread by using a bread flour. For this recipe you can use a wholemeal, that is a flour where all the bran is included, a wheat-meal where the bran is removed and is 81 to 95% of the wholemeal, or a strong white flour. Also you can use a stone-ground flour. As the use of stones while milling the flour generates heat, this toasts the flour and adds to the flavour. However, the choice of flour is really dependant upon your personal tastes.

Salt is essential for making any ground grain taste better. Without salt grains would be unpalatable. However, by making your own bread you will be able to control the level of salt in your diet far more. Often salt and sugars are added to commercial breads to improve the taste of poorer quality flours.

Fat is essential to make the bread moist. Again making your own you will have greater control over the amount of fat in your diet. Not just the amount but the type. Even the good quality breads from supermarkets are often made using cheap fats and the cheapest fats are also the saturated fats. These are the ones that are less than healthy. Also to help make commercial bread last longer they will have more fats than you would use when making your own.

Making bread from fresh yeast was the norm half a century ago. This was when every village and town had its own baker and you could buy fresh yeast from them. But with the loss of the local baker where the bread is prepared and baked on the premisses, it is almost impossible to buy fresh yeast. The only source that I have locally is twenty miles away. So I personally have no problem with using a dried yeast. In fact the first time I tried to use fresh yeast it was not as fresh as I had been led to believe, a friend had obtained it for me, and it was a week old when I finally got it, thus it was already moribund. Where with dried yeast I have never had any problem. Further it is best to use just the quantity stated in any recipe, if you use more than stated the bread will have an overwhelming yeast flavour.

While sugar is added to so many foods to improve the taste of lower quality ingredients, here the use of sugar is to provide food for the yeast. Even dried yeast is living and to multiply and work as the rising agent in bread you need to feed the yeast. While the recipe says use fine caster sugar, you can use granulated sugar, but it may take longer for the bread to rise properly.

When I first started making bread the use of the term “tepid” was a real mystery for me. What temperature was meant by that term. I knew that if the water was to hot it would kill the yeast. Equally if the water was to cold it would take longer for the yeast to become active, so that you need the water to be warm enough to provide the ideal conditions for the yeast. An easy way to get the water to the right temperature is to cold water from the tap you pour in water just off the boil from the kettle and the water will be the right temperature for the yeast to become active.

Thus the myths of bread making are dispelled.

One last tip, always use either metric or imperial measurements as if you try and mix the two, you will find the results a disappointment as the balance can be lost.

Ingredients

700g 1.5lb Strong plain Flour
10ml 2 teaspoons salt
Knob of fat (I prefer to use butter but this can be lard)
7.5ml one & half level teaspoons of dried yeast (15g ½oz of fresh yeast can be used but is not easily available)
5ml one teaspoon of caster sugar
400ml (¾pint of tepid water) about 43 degrees C or 110F

Method

Depending upon if you are making Rolls or two small loves or one large loaf, grease a two pound tin or two one pound tin or two baking sheets.

Sift the flour and the salt into a large bowl and rub in the fat.

If using fresh yeast blend with the water.
If using dried yeast add the sugar to the water then sprinkle the yeast over the water and leave to start frothy.

Mix the dry ingredients with the yeast water with a wooden spoon and work to form a firm dough. You can add extra flour to the mixture if needed to get this firm dough and this is where the dough leaves the sides of the bowl easily. If you add to much extra flour the dough will be to stiff and the bread will be heavy and dense.

Turn the dough on to a lightly floured surface and kneed the dough thoroughly so that you stretch and develop the dough. The kneading process can be best described as pulling it towards you with your fingers while heeling it away with the palm of your hand. Continue this until the bread dough feels elastic and is no longer sticky. The better you kneed the dough the more evenly the yeast will be distributed through the dough but it is possible to over work, over kneed, the dough too.

Shape the dough into a ball and return to the mixing bowl. The dough needs to be covered and lightly oiled (greased) greaseproof paper I find works best. In old recipe books they would say cover with a damp cloth, but this can leave fluff on the bread and no matter how clean a tea towel is I feel it is not that hygienic In modern books they will say use a plastic bag, but as most people will have previously used the bag for other uses, again I have hygiene issues with this. By using greaseproof paper, you can stop the dough getting a dry crust on it as well as keeping the dough clean while still allowing it to rise. It needs to double in size, and this will normally take ¾ to 1 hour in ideal conditions, but allow two hours if rising the dough at room temperature Also as stated in the bread posting allow 24 hours if proving the dough in the fridge, but you also need to let the dough rest for a hour at room temperature.

Turn the risen dough onto a floured surface and knock it back with your knuckles. Forget other forms of stress relief making bread can be a great way of getting rid of stress. Kneed the dough and make it firm for shaping. If making two small loves divide the bread into two or if making rolls you can get up to 18 rolls. Or just make one single loaf. The bread needs to rise again inside the tin or if rolls on the baking sheets. If making rolls space them about 2.5cm (1 inch) apart so that as they rise and expand.

When the dough has had its second rising in a tin it will be level or over the top of the tin. Cut a score down along the length of the loaf as while cooking it will expand further and this cut will allow the bread to expand.

In the base of the oven place a bowl of boiling water, bake the bread in a hot oven 230 C that's 450 F or gas mark 8 for 30 to 40 minutes for loves or 15 to 20 minutes for rolls, until well risen and golden brown. When cooked the rolls will be double in size. The loaves will shrink away from the sides of the tin and will sound hollow on the base when tapped.

Cool on a wire rack

Welcome to Ye Olde Cookbook

Hello and welcome to this new Web Log. While I have been keeping a Blog for a number of years, inadvertently food and food issues has often slipped into those postings. Therefore I decided I really needed to create a dedicated web log for these issues and topics.

I know that here on the Inter-web thingy, there are lots of resources about food and food issues, this contrasts with the food desert of the former mining village in North East England, that I live in. While there are food shops in the village, they cater for the “Cant cook and Wont Cook” brigade. Therefore even when I first moved to the village I struggled to even find some decent tea. While I mainly drink a standard blend, just like the majority of people, I also enjoy specialist tea such as Darjeeling and Assam and while I was prepared to order these and support local businesses, they were not prepared to get these in even when they had at least one customer wanting the item.

To my mind it was rather bizarre to have a business refusing trade. The one gem appeared to be a greengrocer in the village. However, the quality was often dubious. While I persisted buying what I could from them, it became clear that their buying policy was to buy what was cheapest in the market no matter how poor the quality. While I do understand that the village is in an area of outstanding poverty and has a high number of unemployed people, rubbish is still rubbish no matter how cheap it is. Further, as I got to know other people in the village, I realised that I was not alone in this view. There were many people who would rather pay to travel to the nearest town to get better quality Fruit and Vegetables than pay for the low quality that was being offered.

While it took a little time, I started to discover where I could buy good quality produce. By that I do not mean expensive, I mean just good fresh fruit, vegetables, meat and finally fish too. In some cases I still have to travel into Newcastle to get these items, ingredients, but with good planing I avoid paying over the odds to remain well fed.

As I have reached the reached the esteemed age of “Old Git”, and I started teaching myself to cook when I was in my early teens, in the last century, I was genuinely shocked to discover just how poor some peoples cooking and food skills are. This was brought home to me three years ago when I discovered in the local village store, an instant pancake batter mix. Now pancakes are so easy to make that I no longer need to follow a recipe. Further as its just a mixture of Flour, Milk and Egg, I genuinely thought that these would be items that everyone would have in the store cupboard already.

While I wrote about this in my Blog three years ago, then as now, I see no point in ranting about peoples lack of cooking skills, nor is it helpful to accuse people of being lazy as in reality if someone does not know how to cook these supposedly convenience items, I will not call them food, seem like a good alternative. I know that I had to follow a recipe when I first cooked pancakes. But I had developed the skills to try something new. Often people lack the knowledge about food to even know that they can quickly and easily make these meals for themselves.

I started cooking for myself when I became vegetarian back in the late 1970s. This I did as I read a book that was predicting BSE. While it never talked of BSE, they used the example of scrapie in sheep and this fallen stock ending up in the feed for cattle. Now even then I knew that this was unnatural and it made me start to question what I was eating. And this is the real point that I am trying to make, when I was a vegetarian I would constantly be asked what I ate? I often answered by cooking for them and showing that vegetarian food was often far more interesting than they ever imagined.

Therefore, while I suspect that most readers of this will already be confirmed foodies, I also hope that over time I can show that good cooking is not difficult and that good food really matters.