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How to cook ground meat perfectly without vision
- CarVac 3y agoI have never once considered the ordeal that cooking while blind would be. The closest would be cooking while camping in the dark, but even then I have a headlamp.
- Simulacra 3y agoThis is where I think meal delivery services would be really great. Especially if they are packaged for people with limited site.
- bozhark 3y agoSight*
- makeitdouble 3y agoBut then...I can't imagine life eating prepared meal until death. The whole topic is blowing my mind, just realized there's knife resistant gloves that could help even for teaching full sighted kids to cook.
- stacktrust 3y agoPlastic knives (originally for lettuce) can also be used, https://lssproducts.com/original-lettuce-knife/ https://lssproducts.com/original-lettuce-knife/
- jfim 3y agoThey'd have to improve the quality of the deliveries for that to be useful. Door dash seems to deliver at a random location each time, and about 30% of the time delivers to the neighbor instead of the correct address. Even with sight, it sometimes takes me a few minutes to find the delivery, I have no idea how that would be useable by someone that has partial or no vision.
- smegger001 3y agoOr they take beverages and appetizer and drop it and leave without knocking
- refurb 3y agoWhat's the premium for meal delivery services over home prep? 300%? How many people can afford to pay $20 for a meal they could make themselves for $5?
- resolutebat 3y agoThe video in the linked article for the Talking Thermometer illustrates nicely how hard "simple" things like operating an oven and finding the place to test the temperature are: https://theblindkitchen.com/product/talking-thermometer/ https://theblindkitchen.com/product/talking-thermometer/ (note that the presenter is blind herself)
- ethbr1 3y agoAlso https://theblindkitchen.com/product/auto-measure-spout/ https://theblindkitchen.com/product/auto-measure-spout/ I found it interesting to listen to the videos with my eyes closed, then rewatch them.
- pests 3y agoThat was very interesting. I can see the huge value these videos provide. Listening to her spend so much time describing how it looks really sold the point home. To me - its shape and how it unfolds is obvious. Really shows how much better we can make content for the disabled. How many ecom store descriptions would have even taken the time to describe the shape of the devive so TTS/screenreader would even have a chance to read it?
- murrain 3y agoThere was a blind chef on Master Chef: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkicUwoqayg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkicUwoqayg
- ckwalsh 3y agoI really enjoy watching the judging of her apple pie: https://youtu.be/i0zRSANWj1I https://youtu.be/i0zRSANWj1I
- bigstrat2003 3y agoNot just on, but did very well! It was something to watch her work, she is a better cook without sight than I am with sight.
- blharr 3y agoTo further top it off, she didn't just do well, she fully won the competition that season. She also makes some great youtube videos about cooking and other things https://youtube.com/@theblindcook https://youtube.com/@theblindcook
- murrain 3y agoI was trying to not spoil the results of the season she was on :)
- jayknight 3y agoTommy Edison recently made waffles. I don't think he's ready for master chef. https://youtu.be/se-NnydBolE https://youtu.be/se-NnydBolE
- YoumuChan 3y agoHere is a blind person making a meal including rice, seasoned wings and veggie using microwave: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1m94y1Y7Qj https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1m94y1Y7Qj (video is in Chinese)
- sdwr 3y agoIt's remarkable how many opportunities for error there are in this process. Even sighted cooking isn't easy the first time. Has to be a good analogy for something.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- DoreenMichele 3y agoTwo of the best cooks I have ever known have significant visual impairment, though neither is blind. One is blind in one eye and I've heard the other described by someone knowledgeable as one of "the sighted blind." They both rely heavily on smell to determine doneness, which gets vastly superior results to my reliance on time as an indicator of doneness.
- jfengel 3y agoIs it really necessary to "brown" ground meat if you're not going to make it crusty? If you're making tacos or chili, what happens if you just add the spices and liquid and braise the whole thing? Obviously it would change the timing somewhat, but it should be safe (everything comes to well over minimum temperature). If you didn't mean to make a fond, is there any difference in flavor?
- stickfigure 3y ago> is there any difference in flavor? Yes, the browning makes quite a difference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maillard_reaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maillard_reaction
- jfengel 3y agoIs there a Maillard reaction going on? The meat is quite wet and it's hard to get it up to the required temperature without concentrated heat.
- stickfigure 3y agoAlmost any stovetop heat setting will do the job, it's just a question of how long you want to wait. The post said to use medium heat and listen for the sizzle; the sizzle starts when the water is gone. Then the browning/Maillard begins. For anyone making tacos at home: If you don't get to the point where you hear the sizzle, you're making tacos out of steamed meat, not browned meat. This is an easy fix that will seriously up your taco game (unless for some reason you like grey tacos).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- brianpan 3y agoYour ground meat is wet- are you defrosting it before cooking? Hard to get up to temp- are you using vegetable oil? Heat the pan. Heat the oil. Put the meat in. It's basically starting to brown immediately. Like the blind kitchen says- use your ears and nose. It should sizzle immediately when you put the meat in (just a gentle sizzle, NOT a violent sizzle). And it should start smelling good pretty quickly. Defrost first. Don't try to brown too much at once (the meat needs to touch the oil and the pan). EDIT: Oh, I think you're trying to make chili "all at once" by skipping the browning. Yes, it's safe. No, it won't taste as good. Browning is about flavor, not safety. When you cook a steak, you sear it for the crust, then continue cooking to get it up to temp. If you cook a steak in a low-temp sous vide bath, you do the reverse. You get the meat up to temp in the bath. Then when you're ready to eat, you finish it by searing it in a pan.
- ctoth 3y agoTo someone with functioning eyes, this must seem rather difficult. I've noticed that sight is what I like to call a greedy sense, in that if you have this high bandwidth data input it sort of blocks you from being able to pay attention to input from your other senses. As a blind person who fancies myself as a bit of a cook though, being able to smell, feel, and interact with the food as I'm cooking really does make up for a lot. Also, you just kind of have to get over the initial fear of heat :) The article mentions this and it's absolutely true: a high-sided pan makes all the difference. I use my 6 qt cast iron Dutch oven for browning meet and this completely avoids spillage. Also if you ever wondered who buys those weird "smart" kitchen devices, anything with an app is about 15,000 times more useable than the touch surfaces for most modern appliances. It's way easier to set the air fryer or instant pot from the phone, which reminds me I've been meaning to try and reverse engineer the protocol that my Bluetooth instant pot uses before the unmaintained app is removed from the store.
- vjerancrnjak 3y agoI guess that explains why Leonhard Euler got better at math after he went blind.
- stacktrust 3y agoThe Instant Pot ecosystem would benefit from open-source firmware, so it can be integrated with Home Assistant and voice controlled systems like Alexa, Siri, Google. The company is under PE management and in bankruptcy, but for the sake of the millions of repairable devices out there, will hopefully find a second wind. If not, perhaps the internal controller can be replaced with a RPi. Teardown photos: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Instant+Pot+Smart-60+Disassembly/103983 https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Instant+Pot+Smart-60+Disassembl... Disassembly video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=l4D8sLPZ3G0 https://youtube.com/watch?v=l4D8sLPZ3G0 & https://youtube.com/watch?v=bPrezDskchs https://youtube.com/watch?v=bPrezDskchs Instant Pot also made a $100 cooking blender clone of the $1500 Thermomix, https://www.wired.com/review/instant-pot-ace-multi-use-cooking-and-beverage-blender/ https://www.wired.com/review/instant-pot-ace-multi-use-cooki.... Surprisingly, there are no affordable cooking robots? Bosch Cookit is above $1000, https://foodcook.net/kitchen/thermomix-tm6-vs-bosch-cookit/ https://foodcook.net/kitchen/thermomix-tm6-vs-bosch-cookit/
- quickthrower2 3y agoA device I thought would be cool as a careless cook (not a blind one) which would help here is some kind of rotating tumbler. A bit like a composter but small and made of steel, and rotates itself (could use energy from heat source to assist). This would allow you to chuck mince, chicken, rice etc. in and have it so no burning occurs. Use a low heat and wait a bit longer.
- frogulis 3y agoSomething like a drum roaster for conventional cooking?
- throw_away2 3y agoIf I understand what you're asking for here, I believe devices like this exist: https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/drum-wok.html https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/drum-wok.html
- stacktrust 3y agoRobot woks!
- ricardobeat 3y agoThese machines exist! https://www.amazon.nl/-/en/Kenwood-CCL401WH-multifunctional-capacity-cooking/dp/B01B1OXKU0/ref=sr_1_11?crid=2RWLH3Y36RAHB&keywords=multi-cooker+mixer+risotto&qid=1697250654&sprefix=multi-cooker+mixer+risotto%2Caps%2C76&sr=8-11 https://www.amazon.nl/-/en/Kenwood-CCL401WH-multifunctional-...
- stacktrust 3y agoCool device, doesn't seem to be available in the US. After 50 years, the $1500 Thermomix cooking blender arrived in USA in 2022, https://www.foodandwine.com/lifestyle/kitchen/what-is-thermomix https://www.foodandwine.com/lifestyle/kitchen/what-is-thermo... & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermomix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermomix > There have been numerous accounts of a Thermomix machine "exploding" and scalding people with hot liquids ... Choice told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that it was aware of 87 cases where Thermomix consumers had been burned. The ABC understood that 18 of those required several weeks of treatment in hospital burns units ... In April 2018 Thermomix in Australia was handed a $4.6 million fine because they had violated consumer law by failing to report dangerous defects.
- stacktrust 3y agoThere's an Android cellphone (with replaceable battery!) for the blind market, which includes NFC and the WayAround app for reading their NFC tags, which are designed for attaching to food items in fridge/freezer/cupboard, clothes (laundry ready buttons) and more. https://blindshellusa.com/blindshell-classic-2-collection https://blindshellusa.com/blindshell-classic-2-collection & https://www.wayaround.com/blindshell/ https://www.wayaround.com/blindshell/ WayAround NFC tags are designed for vision impairment use cases, https://www.wayaround.com/shop/?swoof=1&orderby=popularity&paged=1 https://www.wayaround.com/shop/?swoof=1&orderby=popularity&p... Generic NFC tags can be rewritten to work with WayAround, https://store.gototags.com/nfc-tags/nfc-tokens/?product_list_order=top_seller&product_list_dir=desc https://store.gototags.com/nfc-tags/nfc-tokens/?product_list... & https://old.reddit.com/r/Blind/comments/txc1du/whats_the_advantage_of_wayaround_waytags_as/?rdt=63368 https://old.reddit.com/r/Blind/comments/txc1du/whats_the_adv... > You can copy a Wayaround tag onto a generic tag and it will operate on the Wayaround app same way. HOWEVER, you cannot just use generic tags freely. The tag does not really hold the information you "write" to it. It just has a serial number that it looks up on your account when you read it. I copied a blank Wayaround tag to a generic one, then had the app set that tag as Artwork, Statue of Cthulhu. Both tags now respond with that same result. On iOS, NFC tags can be used to trigger user-scripted Shortcuts that speak audio or take other scripted actions when the iPhone is tapped on a tag. Requires Lockdown mode and Airplane mode to be disabled. No app necessary. For a quick demo, some public transit passes are NFC and readable by iPhone. Even if the pass is expired, the NFC identity function can be used indefinitely.
- sargun 3y agoI use a lot of “modernist” or “precision” cooking techniques, and I feel like these would be perfect for the blind. 1. Take meat out of packet and break into single layer on quarter pan 2. Put into Anova precision oven at 160F, sous vide mode. Idk, wait an hour 3. Take your control freak and turn the temp to 350F. 4. Dump quarter pan into control freak, brown slightly for 3 minutes
- shepherdjerred 3y agoIf that blind person has $2,200 to spend on two appliances, sure. The Anova Precision Oven [0] is $700 The Control Freak [1] is $1,500 It's a ton of money to spend on what are essentially gadgets. But, then again, if you find cooking difficult it could be worthwhile. Aside: I own the Anova oven and it is quite nice! Much more convenient than traditional sous-vide. [0]: https://anovaculinary.com/products/anova-precision-oven https://anovaculinary.com/products/anova-precision-oven [1]: https://www.breville.com/us/en/products/commercial/cmc850.html https://www.breville.com/us/en/products/commercial/cmc850.ht...
- stacktrust 3y agoAnova has Alexa integration, which is invaluable for vision impaired users, https://anovaculinary.com/blogs/blog/anova-voice-integration https://anovaculinary.com/blogs/blog/anova-voice-integration Anova Precision Cooker (WiFi model) is under $200,
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ricardobeat 3y agoThere is a method that might make this even easier / safer for visually impaired persons. I don't remember where I got it from, and mind you, it sounds a bit off-putting, but it actually works. I don't use it often as it's not worth the hassle for me, but has it's advantages. The trick is to add a cup of water to your ground beef, and mix it in thoroughly. Put that on the stove on high heat. Oil is optional as the fat from the meat will have melted by the time water evaporates. The ground beef will separate perfectly with very little effort. Cook it until it starts sizzling, then let it brown as needed. No hot oil, no clumps, no raw meat. For any dish with a thick sauce (chilli, bolognese, etc) it tastes the same, would just avoid it when going for drier results like taco meat as the texture is different.
- dclowd9901 3y agoYou would use oil with watery meat? The technique sounds interesting, but a bit on the spattery side that I like to avoid.
- shepherdjerred 3y agoAs long as you add the water in to a cold pan there won't be any more spattering than there normally is. It's a common trick to regulate temperature.
- MandieD 3y agoThat might also be a good way to deal with frozen ground meat you want to use at the spur of the moment - thanks!
- pipeline_peak 3y ago“Came out great!” Specs of raw meat scattered throughout kitchen with 2 other burners on full heat and fridge door open.
- dclowd9901 3y agoI actually adopted the practice of rubbing the tip of my spatula against the surface of a piece of meat to get a sense of doneness. Think taking the tip edge of your spatula, planting it into the top surface of the meat and rocking it back and forth a bit to feel how spongy it is still. The less give, the more done. This works really well for finicky cooks like chicken and fish.
- PeterStuer 3y agoWith meat especially, but also with fish and some vegetables, one of the prime indicators as to how far along someting is cooked, for everyone not just the visually impaired. is not sight but resistance. This is because usually the outside the things when prepared well should look the same irespective of how coocked trough it is. For meat the easiest way to learn the different ways meat feels at different points throughout the coocking scale from 'bleu chaud" to 'well done' is steak. Pushing down with a spatula a raw slab of beef feels like solid pudding. You can push it sideways with preessure on the top and without moving it, and also it will compress and bounce back. As it gets more coocked through, the elastic feel will gradually become more contrained until you end up with a rock solid charred brick. For ground meat this is similar but more subtile. For vegetables you do not use the push down method, but you feel the resistance by sticking a fork in and feel it change from pretty hard to prick in to slicing through like butter. Easiest there yo practice id with boiled potato. Smell is also usefull, but inly to an extend as there can be many strong smells in a kitchen and the differences for degrees of coocking can be very subtle and vary with each batch, and also smeling can be impeded when you have a cold.
- yosito 3y ago*cook, not coock
- PeterStuer 3y agoI shouldn't post from the phone.
- lifeisstillgood 3y agoSuddenly I realise what everyone is going on about when they say one should be aware of one's own "privilege" - simply cooking is something that is massively privileged with sight, and honestly till today it never even crossed my mind.
- zen_1 3y agoI realised this once when I was helping a female friend move and I was proud of how I packed all her pots and pans into a single box. She called me over a bit later because she wasn't able to lift it on her own, so we had to split the contents across two boxes, I didn't even consider weight to be an issue while packing as long as the box wasn't in danger of breaking.
- throwaway892238 3y agoThe texture, weight, and resistance of ground meat is really key to understanding how "done" it is. If it is no longer "springy" at all, it's overdone. But what cut of meat you have, and how it was ground, is also essential to the result. The best teacher in the kitchen is repetition. Take a ball of whatever meat you have, try to cook it. However it comes out, make a tiny adjustment, try it again. Do that a dozen times. You won't have spent very much money, but you will have learned a lot about how it reacts in a pan. Do that for all kinds of foods and you will very quickly become experienced.
- bob1029 3y agoMy process for ground beef in particular involves a potato masher and a really deep skillet. Don't forget the onions. I don't need to see a damn thing. There are 2 completion triggers for the sauté phase: smell and sound. You can smell the sugars being created and burned off, but for me the much bigger one is sound. I can hear the pan and the "sizzle rate" with such precision that I could tell you how many seconds until I need to stir it at every moment. I can get 2 lbs of taco meat prepped in ~20 minutes completely blindfolded with my mise en place. Absolutely no doubts about that. Practice makes perfect. You do something once a week for a decade and it becomes 2nd nature.
- az226 3y agoMy controversial take: cook ground meat as you would a steak. Toss the whole block in there and get a nice crust on both sides and then once you have gotten that Maillard reaction, then break it into the ground crumbles like usual. Flavor will be so much better. Most “browning” of ground beef is more akin to steaming than searing.
- mongol 3y agoI will try this!
- Hikikomori 3y agoBrowning can also happen after the water has steamed off and you're left with some fat in the bottom.
- az226 3y agoBut I'd rather have nice crusty bits with good flavor and some textural difference and some really juicy meat that didn't get fully dried out vs. having all meat dried out and none really well browned, just slightly browned.
- jon-wood 3y agoThis is entirely counter to my usual method of chopping up a block of mince meat before putting it in the pan. I’m going to give it a try next time and see how it goes, I suspect it’ll result in the outer layer being delicious and the rest less so, but we’ll see.
- LegitShady 3y agodepending on how deep the heat gets in, it might also result in large chunks of meat with lots of interior meat that was cooked but never touched the pan. Personally I've tried this and I don't like it. I have better experience in success by brreaking it up, adding things like onions and garlic as well as spices.
- paddim8 3y ago
- adammarples 3y agoI just got a good tip on ground meat from Joshua Weissmann, use a potato masher to break it up while it's cooking into perfectly sized little bits
- mnw21cam 3y agoApparently this is about minced meat, not meat that has an association with the ground in any way. Not sure why the article doesn't just say that.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- morelisp 3y agoWe'll start calling it minced meat when you rename mincemeat.
- barbs 3y agoI imagine the author is American. "Ground meat, called mince or minced meat outside North America..." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_meat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_meat
- noduerme 3y agoIf you do something often, it pays to find out how to do it without vision. I can't function in the morning without/before I have coffee, and this often means I can't pull my shit together enough to make said coffee by which to function. So I have a moca pot and two timers, one 9 minutes and one 13 minutes. Moca pot goes on full heat and it takes exactly 9 minutes for the first coffee to come through; alarm goes off; turn the flame down to very low so as not to burn coffee. By this point I should have switched from making bed to cleaning dishes or folding laundry, (or vacuuming or cleaning the stove or bathroom or another area I noticed needed cleaning - I attend to each on longer and shorter rotations). At the 13 minute alarm, the coffee is exactly full, and ideally the morning chores are done.
- dr_dshiv 3y agoMy cooking robot will have AGI when it can make me Gordon Ramsey’s Beef Wellington.
- Shenglong 3y agoI haven't posted in years, but felt the need to weigh in on a food topic that's dear to my heart: With ground meat, the two things you're looking to develop with heat are flavor and texture (and safety). The problem is though, that while texture can be developed as a function of time, flavor can be harder to develop since it's mostly a product of the Maillard reaction (browning). Unfortunately, as you develop texture (heat up the meat), the muscle fibers contract and squeeze out water, which lowers the temperature of your cooking surface and mitigates Maillard development. This is exacerbated by using ground meat, which isn't as insulted as say, a steak would be, which means water comes out faster. This leaves two major ways to develop flavor: 1. Sear your meat before you grind it -- easy said, but a pain in general because it involves cutting and semi-freezing the meat chunks after searing, slowing down your cooking, or 2. Working in batches and trying to get your ground meat to brown before the heat causes the water to come out, which is slow. Both of these options suck. For any aspiring home cook, I'd say the best thing you can do for your food is to buy a high heat source. Use a powerful induction stove on the highest setting, and you can brown your meat without batching it as the water evaporates faster than it can collect (up to a point).
- goodbyesf 3y agoOr you can bake it. That way you can save the tasty juices. It's especially effective for hamburger patties. When you are done cooking, you can dump the juices on the bread and then put your hamburger patty on it. Absolutely delicious. After years of overcooked dry meat, setting off the smoke alarm, dealing with splatter all over the stove and a lingering smell in the apartment for the entire day, I discovered the magic of baking meat and will never go back to searing and frying meat. This works just as well for steak. Instead of buying individual cuts of steak, buy a rib roast. Roast it in the oven and cut it into individual steaks afterwards. Cooked steak keeps amazingly well so you can put it in the fridge or freeze it and eat it later. Pan searing or grilling will never get you the tasty crust that roasting can. Try it and never go back to a smoke filled apartment with a screaming smoke alarm.
- menssen 3y agoJust take the whole compressed, square, package-shaped "patty" of ground meat from the plastic and drop it into a ripping hot pan intact, and don't touch it until it browns pretty darkly on the bottom, then proceed to break it up and cook as normal. This gets you quite a lot of Maillard flavor without having to cook crumbled meat within an inch of its life. (As with most good ideas, this one came from Kenji.) This relates to my biggest objection to this article, which is that the best cooking tip for ground meat (blind or not) is that it's really easy to hear the difference between the "hiss" of water evaporating as steam and the "sizzle" of it frying/browning, and the two things do not happen at the same time. Alternative title: "how to slowly steam ground meat flavorlessly without vision."
- saalweachter 3y agoOne of the principal challenges listed in the article is that you cannot stick a thermometer into the ground beef. Apropos of that, I would like to encourage bakers to start using thermometers on their baked goods. You'll see lots of recipes give all sorts of instructions on how to tell when something is fully baked like "until golden brown" or "until it pulls away from the sides" or "knock on it until it sounds right". But it turns out you can just stick a thermometer in it. Most things I bake need to hit around 190F internally before they're ready. This especially works well for things like cinnamon rolls that have a gooey filling that sometimes slows the bake so it looks done from the outside but is still gooey inside; you stick the thermometer in when it looks done and lo, it is only 160F inside, totally under baked. It was a bit revelatory to learn this trick, for me; previously I only thought of thermometers as a tool for cooking meat and syrup.
- el_oni 3y agoI do this with bread baking, if it looks ready, temp it. If it's below ~90C i'll tent it with foil to stop the top from burning but let it get up to temp.
- denton-scratch 3y agoI just make a pancake of mince, about 1/2" thick. I cook that until it's browned (I can see, but you could time it), then I chop it into four quarters, and flip them. Yeah, I end up with four triangular slabs of what amounts to a giant burger; I then smash it up with a fork or the back of a spoon. Add the result to some fried onions; viola - cottage-pie filling.
- yreg 3y agoI feel like it would be super interesting to try to learn cooking blind even as a person without impaired vision. I can even imagine it as a hobby and it would make it easier to recognize and remember the need of accessibility in our worlds - both the digital and the physical one. But I'm anxious about hurting myself attempting this.
- stacktrust 3y agoSunglasses with different tints can simulate levels of vision impairment.
- bipendulum 3y agoAs a color-blind person, I have the phobia of either undercooking or overcooking food, as I can’t use “color” to assess it. Cook poultry until it’s not pink inside? I have no idea if this color classifies as “pink”. Therefore this website might actually be useful not for only blind people!
- NeonWind 3y agoPretty soon the answer will be: use smartglasses to snap a picture of the pan, use visual mode of chatgpt app to answer whether it looks done or not, have it respond back to you with voice on how done it looks.