On the subject of raw hamburger I feel the need to edgumakate y'all on hamburger meat. I expect many of you already know but this for the one(s) that don't. I feel qualified to post this because for the past year of high school (class of 1962) I worked i the meat market of a large chain grocery store. to this day this is how things were done. (Pretty much)
My official job title (description) was clean-up boy. Every night I would clean all the knives, pans, and, the meat grinder, and the band saw. Then sweep all the old blood soaked sawdust out of the cooler and put down fresh. sweep and mop the market, turn out the market lights, clock out, and go home.
But after few months I got unofficially promoted to what amounted to assistant butcher. Cutting up/splitting chickens, pork loins, beef ribs, and most things using the band saw.
But most often and my favorite task was making hamburger meat. First I would cut up 25# block of frozen bull meat on the band saw. This made up about half of the meat. Then I wold pull all the steaks, roasts, stew meat, etc that had not sold and was turning dark from the meat case. next I would de-bone all this. This was the rest of the meat that went in to it.
Here's where it gets really interesting. To all that I mentioned above I would add all the fat that the butchers trimmed from all the steaks, roasts, briskets, etc.
Then I would add all the suet trimmed from the beef kidneys. There was a surprisingly large amount of this.
The butchers would sort out all these ingredients and fill tubs with the correct proportion for lean, fat, or more fat accordingly and label them accordingly and set them on a rack next to the meat grinder. I did all the grinding and filling Styrofoam trays for the ladies to wrap.
From the first tub of meat and fat I ground I made SURE my hamburger was the leanest available and cooked to well done.
Raw hamburger? Ughh! FUGGEDABOUDI.
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