The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science

As a home cook, you have five different options for getting
ground beef for your burgers: buying preground beef from
the store, having your butcher grind meat for you fresh,
grinding at home with a dedicated meat grinder or stand
mixer attachment, grinding at home in the food processor,
or hand-chopping with a knife. There are advantages and
drawbacks to each method. Store-bought beef, for example,
is easy, but, as I noted above, you have little control over
flavor or texture. The food processor provides excellent
results if you don’t have a meat grinder, but it can take a
little bit of planning.
To find the best method for grinding beef, I gathered a
couple of pounds of beef, ground using five methods: store-
bought 80% lean ground chuck, chuck ground fresh by the
butcher; chuck ground in the meat grinder, chuck chopped
in a food processor, and chuck finely chopped by hand. I
tasted the results of each method cooked into two types of