Degrease spaghetti meat -- or no?

[struggle4progress]

From time to time, I do beef spaghetti for one-fifty or two hundred people

To prepare, I've typically been browning about 50 lb of ground chuck, with some spices, then draining the meat, chilling the drainage, skimming and tossing the tallow, and adding the aspic back into the final tomato sauce

How much tallow comes off depends on the meat of course. The drainage can be anywhere from 20% - 80% tallow by volume, and there might be a gallon or so of it from 50 lb ground. The tallow has a slightly bitter flavor overall, picking up aspects of the italian seasoning and garlic

Today, I decided to try retaining a few tablespoons of the tallow for the sauce

Do the real chefs here have any advice on how much, if any, of the tallow to put back into the sauce? I'm convinced that putting it all back in would produce a sauce with too much grease for my taste, but a slight touch of grease may improve the complexity and flavor of the sauce

[hippywife]

1. If it's not an overwhelming amount of tallow,

which I'm suspecting it's not since you are draining the meat, I would leave it in or at least some of it.

When I make sauce I cook the meat right in it and don't skim it. There isn't very much fat as I tend to use slightly leaner cuts of meat.

I think leaving at least some of it in does add some depth to the flavor and overall consistency of the sauce.

:hi:

[Warpy]

2. That's not that much tallow for that much sauce

and that tallow is what carries flavor. The only reason for degreasing ground beef is to reduce the animal fat if you have to avoid it. You're reducing the flavor when you do that.

Personally, I'd keep the tallow and discard the liquid if I got fussy enough to discard any of it. I'd then sweat the aromatics in the tallow before adding the ground beef and tomato ingredients back in.

Two things carry maximum flavor in food, wine and fat. While a degreased meat sauce might taste like spaghetti sauce when you're done, a full fat one will carry the full flavor of the meat in it.

[grasswire]

3. I always degrease.

Most of it. I really hate heavy greasy meat stuff, and spoon as much of it off as I can.

Brown the meat well, and add seasonings and tomatoes or sauce. Then I add a cup or two of water and it all simmers for at least an hour. If water is added, the meat will be very tender, not just cooked through by browning.

The sauce cooks down and then I degrease the pools of fat.

After degreasing I add a dollop of olive oil. Much better for you than beef tallow!

And I sure don't think the sauce lacks any flavor.

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

4. After reading some classic Bolognese recipes, I now brown the ground beef in milk

The recipes say to let all the milk solids cook off and drain only when the grease is no longer cloudy. It makes an amazing difference in the tenderness of the meat in the sauce. I think there is enough residual grease in the meat even after draining that no additional oil is required.

[struggle4progress]

5. I'd be afraid of scorching the milk but I did something similar: I browned

each successive batch of meat in some of the juice and grease left from the previous batch, so it was pretty moist until drained

[Stinky The Clown]

6. This is entirely a matter of personal choice.

The fat is not harmful, except to those of us who may have health issues. The fat carries a whole, huge percentage of the flavor. It pretty much emulsifies in the sauce. What you're doing is neither wrong nor right. It is simply a choice.

Personally, when I make meat gravy, which is not very often, I allow the meat to cook in the gravy and then skim the finished product of any fat that comes to the surface.

When I make gravy with meat, I don't use ground beef at all. I use some or all of meat balls, sausage, pork "steaks" or beef "steaks" (steaks being slices of the fattier cuts that cooked until they fall apart and become one with the gravy). Depending on the meat, there could be a fair amount of fat that needs skimming.