Pre-making Hamburgers
Jul. 20th, 2024 11:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerTonight I made myself a hamburger for dinner. And I also pre-made myself hamburgers for several more dinners. Well, I semi-pre-made them. 😅
I bought a 3-pound package of ground beef Friday. Safeway had 90/10 beef at a good price, though the rub was I had to buy a "value pack" for that price.
Usually what I do when I buy these larger packages is portion them out into Zip-lock bags of anywhere from 0.5 pounds to a full pound each and put them in the freezer. The drawback to that is it's still more than I typically make in a serving. Hawk doesn't enjoy red meat much anymore, so it's usually just me eating ground beef. Even a half pound is too much for one dinner for me. Often I make a burger for one meal out of it then brown the leftover meat in a skillet and combine it with marinara sauce to make a meat sauce for pasta. But still, it means when I defrost a small portion of meat I have to be planning two meals out of it— otherwise I risk some of it turning gray and going to waste. I hate wasting food.
This time I decided as long as I was making one hamburger patty for tonight and parceling out the rest of the ground beef to freeze for later, I could make several hamburger patties. I made a total of 7. One went on the grill right away. The other 6 got wrapped individually in wax paper (seen in the photo above) and stacked in a large freezer bag. Now I can thaw just the right amount for one dinner at a time.
"You know you can just buy pre-made hamburger patties," you might observe. Yes, I can. But I don't care for the frozen ones. They're not as good as making my own. And buying the fresh ones is pricey. Yes, I kind of traded off time for cost here by forming patties myself... though even if I bought preformed patties fresh from the grocery store I'd still have to parcel them out into separate wrappers for freezing.
I bought a 3-pound package of ground beef Friday. Safeway had 90/10 beef at a good price, though the rub was I had to buy a "value pack" for that price.
Usually what I do when I buy these larger packages is portion them out into Zip-lock bags of anywhere from 0.5 pounds to a full pound each and put them in the freezer. The drawback to that is it's still more than I typically make in a serving. Hawk doesn't enjoy red meat much anymore, so it's usually just me eating ground beef. Even a half pound is too much for one dinner for me. Often I make a burger for one meal out of it then brown the leftover meat in a skillet and combine it with marinara sauce to make a meat sauce for pasta. But still, it means when I defrost a small portion of meat I have to be planning two meals out of it— otherwise I risk some of it turning gray and going to waste. I hate wasting food.
This time I decided as long as I was making one hamburger patty for tonight and parceling out the rest of the ground beef to freeze for later, I could make several hamburger patties. I made a total of 7. One went on the grill right away. The other 6 got wrapped individually in wax paper (seen in the photo above) and stacked in a large freezer bag. Now I can thaw just the right amount for one dinner at a time.
"You know you can just buy pre-made hamburger patties," you might observe. Yes, I can. But I don't care for the frozen ones. They're not as good as making my own. And buying the fresh ones is pricey. Yes, I kind of traded off time for cost here by forming patties myself... though even if I bought preformed patties fresh from the grocery store I'd still have to parcel them out into separate wrappers for freezing.
