The Ultimate Ground Beef Buying Guide

When you go to buy ground beef, there's so many options.

Here are my pro tips for buying the best.

I'm Jake Dickson, owner and operator

of Dickson's Farmstand Meats in New York City.

Here's my ultimate ground beef buying guide.

[meat sizzling]

First things first, what is ground beef?

When we're doing ground beef,

we're taking either a whole muscle or trim from the animal

and we're sending it through a die

with a set amount of holes and a blade that cuts it.

So essentially we're breaking up the muscle fiber

to create a uniform product that we know as ground beef.

In your package of ground beef,

you could have meat coming from all different places,

different cuts, different animals, even different countries.

So it's really important to know

what is going into the package when you buy it.

How the animal was raised and what it was fed

makes a real difference in your burger.

We got a lot of packages here,

and they're all making different claims,

or no claims, depending on which one.

You can see here from the Key Foods package,

so this is the freshly ground beef.

This was ground at the supermarket,

so you don't see a USDA label on it,

and they're making no claims.

It means that it was fed antibiotics and hormones

and growth promoters.

That's just the fact of how beef in our country is raised.

So if they make no claims,

you should believe there are things

that are not great going on with that beef.

This next one here, which is the all natural,

that's the only claim they're making.

You'll always see all natural with an asterisk.

When it comes to meat,

when it says all natural and nothing else,

it just means minimally processed.

There's some things on here that matter

and some things that don't for me.

You'll see they're saying it's USDA prime beef.

Prime is mostly about marbling.

With ground beef,

we can add or take away as much fat as we want,

so marbling is irrelevant.

So I don't really care about this USDA prime.

The things that matter to me though

are the no antibiotics ever and no hormones ever.

This one's certified animal welfare,

which I think is a good thing.

It means a third party has certified

that these animals were raised to a specific standard.

And there's all different standards for animal welfare,

but it's better than nothing.

So this one is making a claim of pasture-raised.

Pasture-raised could mean a lot of things

depending on how each farm defines it

or each company defines it.

It could mean happy animal out in a field on a small farm,

which is what we would hope it would be,

but it could also be in a pen with access to outdoors.

Do they mean, you know, it's a one cow for every acre?

Is it a smaller pen with access to outdoors?

Double check what the claim means

if it's something that matters to you.

Generally, I would say the more claims that they're making

and registering with the USDA, the better.

You can see the USDA organic label,

and that's gonna implicitly cover

a number of different claims.

So that will mean no hormones,

no antibiotics or growth promoters.

It also means that the animal ate non-GMO feed

through its entire lifecycle.

Regenerative agriculture is a big buzzword right now.

They're essentially saying that raising these animals

instead of taking away from the land,

they're bringing back to the land.

So through the way they manage the cattle,

they're improving the soil health and the grassland.

So it's trying to mitigate the environmental impact

of cattle on the land.

So bringing large herbivores back to the land

and their hooves can aerate it

and their manure can fertilize it.

Some people believe this is realistic.

Some people believe it's a load of BS.

But if you're someone who eats beef,

but you also care about beef's environmental impact,

looking for a regenerative tag or label claim

could be important to you.

Over the last 10 years,

you've seen a lot of grass-fed beef hitting the shelves.

It does not mean that the animal

is out on pasture all the time.

It means that they are eating grass,

no grains for their entire life cycle.

But it could be eating baleage,

which is like a fermented hay,

or it could be hay that's brought to it.

It doesn't mean that it's a happy cow living in a field.

A huge amount of the grass-fed beef coming into our country

is from Australia, raised on massive farms, huge farms

because they have a big land mass.

I would always rather buy from a small farmer,

whether it be grass-fed or grain-finished

that raises, you know, a few cattle or a hundred cattle

as opposed to a large operation

that might raise 10,000 cattle

even though they're raised on grass.

Grass-fed and grain-finished beef does taste different.

Let's have a little taste test.

[upbeat music]

Feels like a burger.

I took a big bite.

It's pretty juicy. It's not dry.

Texture is pretty good.

Sometimes I find with like grass-fed beef

that's a little bit too dry

or you'll get like a granular texture in your mouth,

and I didn't get that.

It doesn't have like a big beefy or irony flavor

I would expect from the grass-fed beef.

My guess on this one is grain-finished beef.

[upbeat music]

All right, going for burger number two.

Is this burger number two?

Not entirely dissimilar to the first one.

Maybe like a little bit more juicy.

It's like running down my hand.

I'm not sure that means anything.

I think a little bit less flavorful this one.

I'm gonna wait.

I'm gonna hold off till the final burger

to make my call of which one I think.

All right, I'm going in for burger number three.

I think I know my verdict.

My belief is it is one and three are grain-finished

and two is the grass-fed burger.

I think number two, slightly more flavorful.

I think sometimes not always with grass-fed beef,

the animal takes longer to grow.

It works a little bit harder in its life

so you can get like a bigger beefiness to it.

Whereas one and three are a little bit more generic

like burger flavor.

Hope I don't look like a fool and I'm completely wrong.

I nailed it. I feel pretty good about that.

But this one has a little bit bigger beefiness to it.

I thought it was like a little bit more appealing.

And these weren't bad,

just like a little bit more generic flavor-wise.

Like if someone handed me at a barbecue,

I'd be equally excited about them.

You know, if I'm nitpicking here,

I think the flavor was a little bit better

on this grass-fed one.

Now, I'm not saying that universally

grass-fed beef has a better flavor.

Grass-fed beef doesn't mean better. It just means different.

Next up is fat content.

The ratio of lean to fat in the package

is gonna change everything

about how your beef looks, tastes, and cooks up.

This is a high-fat blend here, so it's 73:27.

Really fatty ground beef

you'll probably have a hard time finding these days.

It's much less popular.

I don't use anything this fatty.

You often hear people say fat is flavor,

but the problem with this is most of that fat

is gonna render out

and you're just gonna get a lot of shrinkage

and you'll be paying for meat that you're not eating.

Next up, we've got kind of my favorite all-purpose ratio,

which is an 80:20.

It's good for meatballs and burgers. It's not overly fatty.

You're gonna have good flavor to it,

so it'll stay nice and juicy.

I use this for pretty much everything,

and it's what we sell in our store in Chelsea Market.

With this one here, we've got a 93 to 7 ratio,

so it's very, very lean.

I don't use this for many things.

I find that you're just not getting enough fat for flavor.

We experience juiciness as a ratio of water to fat,

and so if there's no fat,

it's gonna eat dry even if there's a lot of water.

This last one here, we're getting to the really ultra lean,

so it's 95:5, kind of almost no fat at all in this product.

I wouldn't really use it for anything

unless you have somebody

who has an issue with fat in their diet.

It's gonna not taste like a lot without the fat

to deliver those flavors to our palate.

Fat ratio is really gonna affect how these cook.

Let's take a look.

[upbeat music]

[meat sizzling]

Okay, so we sauteed up two pounds

of each of those three fat ratios,

and really you're seeing

pretty much exactly as you'd expect.

Right here, we've got the 73:27,

and it rendered out a tremendous amount of fat.

Unless you're a homesteader who's gonna capture that fat

and fry up your eggs in the morning,

you've paid for something

that you're probably not gonna eat.

That being said, you can see as it rendered out,

then kind of fried up bits of the ground beef in it.

So you do get some nice browning on it

that you might not see with the other one.

Next up is our 80:20.

You'll see there's some nice fat in there,

but it's not even close

to how much you'd see in the other one.

It looks pretty good. It's what I would expect.

I would say it's probably gonna eat pretty juicy

if I was using this for chili,

but I'm not gonna be pouring off tons of fat

to keep it from being an unpleasant eating experience

for my guests.

And then last up here, we've got our super lean.

The pan is almost completely dry.

Got a little bit of oil on the bottom,

but it's rendered out almost nothing.

So I guess from a protein-to-purchased ratio,

you're very high,

but from an eating experience,

it does not look very appealing at all.

Let's do a pour-off test.

All right, I'm gonna pour off this 73:27

and try not to make a giant mess.

All right. Wow, look at all that.

That is all the fat that rendered off that 73:27 blend.

It's quite a bit.

Now we're gonna get into the 80:20 blend.

It's a decent amount of fat, but not a ton.

Last but not least, our lean, the 93:7.

I don't think anything's coming out of this pan.

There's definitely no fat to render here.

I think it's a fail on the render test.

Nothing's coming out of this one. It's dry as a bone.

There's just not enough excess fat for it to be poured off.

You're looking at these here, you'll see the lean,

there just wasn't enough fat to really get nice browning.

And then on the fatty stuff,

you're just losing a tremendous amount.

So there's a lot of extra meat that you've paid for

that you're just pouring off and putting in the trash.

You've kind of got a nice amount of extra here that came off

as you've exceeded what amount of fat

that this meat on the 80:20 could hold,

but not so much that it's excessive.

So I would just go with the 80:20 every time.

Your fat ratio is really gonna affect

how your burger cooks up.

So we're gonna add them from fattiest to leanest to the pan

and see what happens.

[meat sizzling]

You can see that the fatty one

is, like, already rendering like crazy.

So there's good and bad things that we're seeing, right?

The meat's gonna get an awesome caramelization.

It's basically frying itself, which I like.

The downside is that it's probably gonna shrink a lot.

My prediction is that this one

is gonna shrink almost not at all.

This one's gonna be like a little hockey puck

when we're at the end,

and then this one here is gonna be

a nice burger in the middle.

And the my Maillard reaction

is we're seeing the process of browning

as the meat comes into contact with fat and heat.

Took a little bit longer,

but we got a little bit of caramelization on the 80:20.

You got some nice browning on that one.

I'm gonna flip this one.

I don't think we're gonna get much color on it.

I was wrong. It actually has some of the best color of all.

We're cooking these on a griddle right now.

If this was on a grill,

I'm pretty sure the left side of my grill would be on fire,

but all of this fat would have rendered,

hit the flames and caught on fire.

Just like with the saute test,

they're basically doing exactly as you'd expect them to do.

We're getting a lot of shrinkage

and a ton of fat coming out of this guy.

80:20 is getting a little bit of rendering,

but not excessively.

And then we're just seeing like nothing on that 93:7.

There's some sort of like weird pink ooze

coming out of the 93% lean

that we're not seeing on the others,

and there's just like no fat really at all

that has rendered out of that.

It has like a totally different texture than the other one,

but I'm gonna pull these guys and let them rest.

We've got maximum shrinkage, medium shrinkage,

zero shrinkage over here, from fatty to lean.

Really nice color on this one that dried in its own fat.

Surprisingly good color on the lean.

It does surprise me a little bit

that we didn't get as much caramelization on the 80:20,

but let's see how they all taste.

So this right here is our 73:27.

It's got some nice fat in there.

Like, it looks pretty juicy,

even though I did overcook it a little bit.

It needs salt, but aside from that, texture's all right.

It is a little greasy.

There's a residual rendered fat that stayed in there.

It's coating my mouth a little bit

in a way that I'm not really loving.

Let's try the 80:20.

It's got good texture to it.

I don't get that same coating in my mouth

that I did with the other one.

It's pretty juicy. It's a tasty burger.

Now we're going into the 93:7.

The texture's not awful, but it has almost no flavor.

The difference in flavor

between bun and meat is very minimal,

almost like an empty protein from a flavor perspective.

A lot of people are buying this 93% over the 80:20

because they're trying to maximize protein,

but the truth is,

the difference in protein levels between these two products

is extremely minimal,

and the eating experience of the 80:20

is gonna be far superior.

So I recommend you get the 80:20, enjoy that burger,

and still get almost the same nutritional value.

When buying ground beef, even the packaging matters.

We've got a number of different ways

that ground beef is being packaged

and stored for the supermarket.

This package from Empire is known as MAP,

or modified atmospheric packaging.

There's a little bubble, high pressure in there

because they've removed the oxygen

and inserted an inert gas like argon gas or nitrogen gas

that will prevent spoilage,

but they're still going for the look

of a freshly packed product.

One thing I don't really like

about all the MAP gas products you see

is that you won't usually see a pack by date,

only a sell by or use by date.

If this has been in here for, let's say two weeks,

which is totally possible,

yes, it might not be spoiled

in the sense that it will make you sick,

but it might not be delicious either.

Meat will change

and not necessarily be good quality over time.

This under vacuum seal,

you'll see it kind of can squeeze the meat a little bit

and change the texture,

but at the same time, it will maintain the freshness

really well for a long period of time.

It's also really good if you're gonna freeze it

because you won't get freezer burn.

One way to tell if vacuum sealed meat is freshly packaged

is you can see how much purge is there.

The pressure of the package

will actually squeeze some of the liquid out of the meat

and just over time it'll generally come out.

I like to have as little purge as possible

because you can tell that the time

between when you're buying it

and when this was actually packaged has to be pretty short.

So over here we've got

the freshly ground in the supermarket.

So typically a supermarket, they would grind every morning.

In this case,

they are putting it in their classic styrofoam tray,

covering it in saran wrap.

This will have a very short shelf life on it.

They're not doing anything to preserve it,

which is not a bad thing.

That just means you have to know when you bring it home,

you got to use it right away.

My recommendation would be if you're gonna use it

in the next 24 hours,

buy the freshly ground and packaged.

If it's gonna be in the next five days or so,

buy something vacuum sealed.

And my preference

is to skip the gas-packed product altogether.

When shopping for ground beef, color really matters,

but sometimes it can be a bit misleading.

So for instance,

this was ground this morning and vacuum sealed,

but it looks really dark.

That's because redness you see from meat

is exposure to oxygen.

This meat was so freshly packaged,

it never had a chance to bloom or become red.

It's been about 10 minutes here

and you'll see it's getting a nice rosy red color to it.

Basically, if meat goes from dark to redder, it's fresh.

If it doesn't, it's past its prime.

You may be tempted to buy pre-made patties to save time,

but this is what I recommend.

All commercial pre-made patties are done in a patty machine,

which works by essentially putting meat in a large drum

and an auger smears it into a mold that then pops it out.

The problem with this is that it can overwork the meat

and draw out proteins that then bind together

to make a tough burger.

So when you look at this patty,

you can see that it's almost like the meat is homogeneous

because it's been smeared into a mold

and that's how it's formed.

You can pull out a protein called myosin that can bind it up

and give it a tough texture.

Now, the BUBBA's patties here or all your frozen patties

are made in the same way,

but I actually think it's a little bit better almost

if you're gonna get a pre-made patty to have it frozen

because they make the patty

and then they immediately freeze it,

kind of stopping the process of binding.

But what happens when you have meat

that's kind of mixed up too much,

those proteins come out and they form bonds.

And so as it sits in the refrigerator,

it's gonna be tougher.

So on day one when this is made,

it might be kind of a tender patty,

but on day three, four, five,

it actually could be tough when you go to buy it.

I would stay away from a fresh pre-made patty

unless you're in the supermarket

and you know that it was made there that day.

These are the BUBBA Burger.

They're a really popular frozen patty.

You'll find them in supermarkets all over the place.

I think they're all right.

I don't like the sourcing that much

that you'll find in the freezer aisle,

but from a quality standpoint, they're pretty good burgers.

They cook up well.

The thing I don't like about them

is that they're trying to look more natural

by being irregular.

I would rather a symmetrical product

that's not trying to be looking handmade

when it came out of a machine

than like this weird shape that was stamped from a mold,

but that's my personal preference.

It won't really affect the cooking in any different way.

When you go to the supermarket and you buy a pre-made patty,

you're gonna pay a premium for it.

You're much better off buying freshly ground meat

and making it yourself.

This is about a pound of meat.

Most people like about of a third pound burger.

I don't want to overwork it because if I work it too much,

then I'm gonna pull out too much myosin and proteins

and create too much bind and it'll eat tough.

So I kind of like form a ball

and toss it a little back and forth,

squeezing it with each hand

just to get a little bit of bind so it doesn't fall apart.

And then I like to use my hand as my mold

instead of using like a pre-made mold.

So I basically form a C with my fingers

and I just rotate with my thumb,

pressing it in to form a mold.

You get it nice and symmetrical so it cooks evenly.

So this is kind of like my favorite style of burger

because I like it to be more on the medium rare

or rare side in the middle.

If you look at these two different products,

they're completely different.

I think it's pretty obvious which one you'd rather eat.

This one you can actually see the pieces of meat.

You can tell that it's a freshly ground product,

whereas on this side, it's got like a weird smear.

You can actually see

where it's been kind of like dragged over,

pulling at the fibers of the meat

as it's been smeared into the mold.

I would always eat something like this

before I eat something like this.

Here we cooked a pre-made, the frozen BUBBA patty,

and a handmade one,

and they're pretty obvious which one's which,

but also which one's kind of more appealing-looking.

Some strange things happened with this pre-made patty.

It cupped a little bit,

had some strange things going on texturally.

So here's the frozen BUBBA Burger. It's a bit gray inside.

Sometimes you see that with frozen meat.

It loses that color, but it doesn't necessarily mean

it's gonna affect the flavor so much.

This is the hand-formed burger

that we made from freshly ground beef.

It's got a little bit more of a crumbly texture,

looser packed, maybe a little bit juicier.

Sometimes with preformed patties,

you get something called persistent pinking.

So this was that fresh pre-made patty.

Even though this one was cooked

to the same temperature the others,

because it was preformed and sat, it stays pinker.

It's important that you use a thermometer

when testing for temperature and doneness

because you can't go by color alone.

When it comes to patties, always better to buy fresh meat,

make your own.

You'll get a better result and you'll save a bit of money.

When it comes to ground beef, breed doesn't really matter.

Breed mostly affects the quality of the overall animal,

how fast it grows, and how it marbles,

but that's only really relevant

when we're talking about steaks.

With ground beef, we can create a fat-to-lean ratio

just the way we want.

We're crafting it.

So in these packages,

you'll see things like Certified Angus,

which is a breed of cattle.

You see Wagyu, which is a Japanese breed of cattle.

Wagyu is a breed of cattle that originates in Japan,

prized for its extreme marbling capabilities.

Now here in the United States,

we have a cross-breed of Angus with that Wagyu cattle,

but it's not the same thing.

Sometimes it's amazing, really, really great beef,

and other times it doesn't mean much of anything.

For ground beef, I just don't care that much, truthfully.

Marbling is irrelevant for ground beef.

This package that says American Kobe Beef

is really confusing and I'm not sure what it means.

Kobe beef would be Wagyu beef raised in Kobe, Japan.

This doesn't even say that it's Wagyu beef,

and Kobe is on another continent,

so I'm not really sure what this package means.

My guess is it's just marketing.

When it comes to ground beef, breed really doesn't matter.

I look for other claims on the package.

If you see dry-aged listed along with ground beef,

I would definitely buy it.

You'd really only see it in small butcher shops like ours.

Essentially dry aging, we are hanging the meat

and expose it to the elements

in a temperature, humidity,

and air velocity controlled environment.

A lot of things happen during this process,

but the main thing as it pertains to ground beef

is a concentration of flavors by evaporation.

It's gonna make it seem like a juicier,

more concentrated flavor

by having a lower percentage of water-to-fat ratio.

So if you see dry-aged ground beef,

I would definitely buy it,

will be a superior eating experience.

One thing you'll see denoting quality

in a lot of supermarkets

is something saying ground sirloin for high quality

and ground chuck as low quality,

but I would argue in some ways it's reversed.

Chuck is seen as low quality because it's tough,

but by grinding it, we are rendering it tender

and it has really a lot of flavor and good fat,

so I think ground chuck makes some of the best ground beef.

Whereas sirloin, which is a tender cut for a steak,

is kind of irrelevant for a ground beef or burger.

Because we're gonna grind it up,

we don't care about the tenderness of the whole muscle.

All we care about is the end product.

You're better off getting that chuck at a cheaper price

that's gonna end up with a better burger

than the sirloin that's gonna cost you a premium.

Here are my thoughts on food safety

as it pertains to ground beef.

Almost all recalls for fresh meat in our country

are from ground beef.

This is because mass-produced ground beef

is pulling from lots and lots of sources.

In one package, you could have 50 different animals

represented from different farms all over the world.

Mostly when we look at recalls, we're talking about E. Coli.

That's essentially a bacteria that's in the stomach

that during the slaughter process

ends up on the hide of the animal and then on the meat.

When you cook a steak,

it's killed because it's on the outside of the steak.

But with ground meat, what we're doing is we are folding

that exterior surface into the middle.

That's why they're recommending you cook ground meat

to 160 degrees

because they want to cook it all the way through.

So your ideal circumstance is you buy from a single farmer

or a small butcher shop like mine

where you know it came from one, two, maybe three animals,

and then you can trust that meat

and you could cook it to medium rare.

But the less confidence you have in the sourcing,

from a food safety perspective,

I would recommend cooking it all the way through to be safe.

All right, let's talk about grinds and how they're made.

Ground beef is not made

in a food processor type environment.

It's made with a specific meat grinder

that works in a different way.

So essentially you have this auger here

that's gonna force meat, pushing into the holes

and then a blade spins behind it and cuts it.

Typically, we'll do multiple passes

when we make ground beef,

through a large one to break up the bigger muscle fibers

and you'll do a second pass through

or even a third in successfully smaller holes.

Most of what you find in the supermarket

is gonna be a really fine grind.

So this is the fine grind that you'd find

pretty much in every supermarket in America,

and this is kind of a more artisanal product

that you'd find in our shop in Chelsea Market,

which is a coarser grind that has a bigger particle size,

so the pieces of meat are larger.

It's less smeared into each other,

so it's more distinct pieces.

If you go to a butcher shop or even ask the person

behind the meat counter at your supermarket,

you can request a coarser grind,

and I recommend you give it a try.

You might find it's a little bit more of an elevated

kind of steakhouse experience that you'll really like.

All right, we're gonna make my steakhouse burger.

We're gonna make a big one using our coarsely ground beef,

about a half pound.

I am gonna eyeball it, so I'm gonna work it a little bit

just to pull out some of those proteins,

get a good bind on it.

I like to heavily salt

because you're gonna leave quite a bit in the pan.

[meat sizzling]

This burger, which I brought from my store

and I know all about where this was sourced from,

I'll cook to rare or medium rare,

but if I was buying beef from a place

that I didn't know anything about,

for food safety, I would cook

a totally different style burger

and I would cook it well done.

[upbeat music]

All right, so this is a perfectly cooked steakhouse burger

from our store in Chelsea Market.

It's nice and juicy, I like that.

It's pretty damn good.

With this big burger and the coarser texture,

it's gonna eat a little bit juicier.

It's really tender,

but it's got like a little bit of texture to the meat

that I really like.

It's kind of like an elevated steakhouse experience.

I definitely recommend you seek out a coarser grind,

ask your butcher,

ask the guys at the meat counter at your supermarket,

definitely worth giving a try.

Well, there you have it, everything you need to know

to buy the best ground beef you can find.

Know how it was raised, pick your fat ratio,

check your packaging, hand-form those patties,

don't worry about the breed,

and if you can find it, try a coarser grind.

And when you're shopping, take a pic of this chart

and bring it along so you can help decide what to buy

and go make yourself a good burger.

Cheers.