Break Up Your Ground Beef Better With An Easy Kitchen Tool Hack

Ground beef is a famously versatile ingredient, and not just for burgers: From tacos to chili, loaded ground beef gyros to bulgogi and crispy Thai basil beef, it adds delicious texture and protein to a litany of dishes. The element these non-burger recipes share is that the ground beef is crumbled during the cooking process into delectable mini-nuggets of beefy goodness. While spatulas and spoons do the job just fine, they can create inconsistent pieces of varying sizes, and it requires multiple passes through smaller and smaller hunks of ground beef as it cooks down.

But there's one kitchen tool you may be overlooking. In fact, this simple yet super-effective hack may be hiding in plain sight with other rarely-used gadgets and tools: the lowly potato masher. We're not talking about fancy electric ricers or graters: Just that hand-held swirly or perforated metal thing you may or may not have actually used to mash potatoes (but have already used when mixing raw ingredients for meatballs). Try it one time and you'll be sold.

This innovative hack comes in a blink-and-miss-it moment at the beginning of a video from TikToker Notorious Foodie, and it's so simple you'll wish you'd thought of it. The process is straightforward. Throw a little oil in a frying pan and toss in your slab of ground beef. Break it up the traditional way, with a spatula, into smaller portions. Let it cook up a bit, then either flip everything over to brown the other side, or start right in with the masher.

Depending on your technique, the masher will smash down the still raw beef across the pan, or effortlessly crumble beef that's beginning to crisp. Either way is fine, though the former may require a couple of passes as you cook. The result is the same: Small, consistent bits of crumbled ground beef frying up perfectly. At this point, you can decide whether to fully cook and season the beef and set it aside (say, for taco filling), or to add other ingredients.

A few things to keep in mind with this hack. An old-school metal potato masher is more effective than plastic or silicone. When working with raw meat, be sure and wash the masher well before using it for other ingredients (potatoes, for instance, where you shouldn't take shortcuts). Finally, remember to return the masher to the drawer or cupboard where you keep the kitchen tools you actually use!