Let’s Have a Quickie!
Today’s quickie – how to flash freeze ground beef
Photo by Sam Blourland. Licensed under CC0 via Wikimedia Commons
You know I love to flash freeze stuff. Like, I’m obsessed with it.
And I don’t know why I’d not thought of this sooner, but did you know you can flash freeze ground beef? It is awesome! I generally brown 5 pounds of ground beef at a time to have in the freezer for spaghetti sauce, tacos, casseroles, sloppy joes, hot dog chili, etc. I can fit 2 or 3 pounds of cooked ground beef in one gallon size freezer bag but If I freeze it in the traditional way I end up using one bag for every pound, because I don’t want to thaw out 3 pounds when I only need one. When you flash freeze ground beef you don’t have to worry about that. You just pour out what you need!
Quick – how do you flash freeze ground beef?
Just follow the same instructions for flash freezing as described in this post.
You’ll be able to easily crumble it when you’re transferring it to a freezer bag or container and as long as you don’t let it thaw at all it will maintain its crumbly pourable consistency. I like to write the total precooked weight on the container, since most recipes call for amounts based on precooked weight. When you’re ready to use it you can pour out just what you need, and it thaws much more quickly than a solid block does.
Cool, huh?
