YSK: You should dry off beef before cooking. Doing so promotes the Maillard Reaction, which will make the meat taste and look better.
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Why YSK: When you cook meat, any water on the surface must first evaporate before much browning can occur. You want to get as much of a Maillard reaction as possible in the limited cooking time you have before the meat reaches the correct internal temperature. Removing the moisture first means that the heat of the cooking surface isn't wasted on evaporation and can instead interact with the meat to form the complex sugars and proteins of the Maillard reaction.
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Does this apply to ground beef? Cuz I'm curious how I would effectively dry that without just making a mess. Is it just the same as a steak and patting it with a paper towel would be enough?
I'd use cloth or you may leave bits.
How often is your ground beef wet? Regardless I feel like most applications of ground beef you typically wouldn’t have to worry about it, you’re always cooking it well done for the most part so it will brown, like ground beef in a pan for tacos or hamburger helper type stuff.
If it’s for burgers and it’s wet for some reason, then yeah a paper towel pat down would be fine, but idk typically when I’m handling ground beef even forming my own patties I wouldn’t really ever describe it as all that ”wet”.
Yeah for burgers. I'm cheap and usually just have frozen premade patties, which is why they would be wet.
If they are thawed and very wet then it wouldn't hurt to dry them. I have also heard that they brown best if you minimize the number of flips, ideally just one flip if you time it correctly.
For ground beef, the best solution is to make sure you have enough fat to get good browning. People usually say 80/20 ratio, but I like to have 25% fat on my burger patties. As an experiment, try making a patty with lean meat and you will see how much the moisture will evaporate rapidly and take the heat away from the meat, giving you a sad grey meat. With enough fat, it will keep conducting heat into the crust without boiling all the water inside; as a bonus, you get juicy burgers this way.