How to cook ground meat perfectly without vision

To 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.

One 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.

I 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.

I 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).

With 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.

I 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

My 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.

I 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.

If 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.

There 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.

Suddenly 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.

The 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.

There'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://www.wayaround.com/blindshell/

WayAround NFC tags are designed for vision impairment use cases, 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... & 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.

It'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.

Two 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.

My 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.

I 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

Is 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?

I 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.

A 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.

I 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.

Pretty 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.

As 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!

Apparently 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.

My cooking robot will have AGI when it can make me Gordon Ramsey’s Beef Wellington.

“Came out great!”

Specs of raw meat scattered throughout kitchen with 2 other burners on full heat and fridge door open.