Ground beef is an easy and affordable way to add filling protein to a recipe, but it doesn’t always deliver as much as you want in the flavor department. It’s not that ground beef can’t be tasty, but just that it tends to be a little one-note. This can be fine in recipes that rely on other spices or a sauce for flavor, but if you were relying on your meat to be the backbone of your meals’ taste, it can fall a little flat. Luckily, there are plenty of ways to add some extra depth and complexity to the flavor of your ground beef while still emphasizing the meatiness instead of spices, and like so many things in cooking, it’s a lesson you can learn from Italian-American grandmas. Whenever your ground beef needs a little boost, add some pork.
The mixture of ground beef and pork isn’t exclusive to Italian-American cooking by any means, but it’s the backbone of many classic dishes like Bolognese and Italian meatballs, which hold within them great lessons in how pork and beef can pair. While ground beef in a meatball provides a robust, meaty flavor, ground sausage adds a richness from pork fat, extra depth from a second meat, and additional flavors from the spices and seasoning in the sausage. What’s great about rendering out a little pork fat is that it can come from so many delicious places, depending on which flavors you want.
Pork fat makes a great flavor booster for ground beef
Ground sausage or pork are great additions, but you can also render fat from other pork products to cook ground beef in for extra flavor. The best of these is going to be preserved pork ingredients with a lot of fat in them, like bacon or pancetta. Beyond the fat, these can add extra salt, smokiness, or even a little funk from the curing process. And you don’t need a lot of either for a flavor boost. Just chop up a few tablespoons and render out the fat in a hot pan before adding the ground beef to cook.
You don’t even need to spring for extra bacon either, as rendered pork fat can be a great way to use scraps and odd ends that you’ve trimmed off larger cuts. If you have, say, a pork chop with an extra large fat cap, just slice it off and save it in the fridge. Then, when your ground beef needs a little help, cook the leftover fat in the pan to render it out just like you would bacon. It won’t be as flavorful as smoked and salted pork, but it will still add extra richness and a mild porky flavor. Or you could go the extra easy route and cook your beef in store-bought lard. No matter which option you choose, your next ground beef recipe will be that much more flavorful for it.
