Is it normal for ground beef to be brown in the middle

You associate bright cherry red color with the freshness of ground beef, right? Faced with a choice between a package of bright red meat and a package of brownish meat, you go for the red meat every time. Has the supermarket wrapped fresh meat around old meat?

Has the meat spoiled? An official website of the United States government. Have a Question? Why is pre-packaged ground beef red on the outside and sometimes dull, grayish-brown inside? Information Knowledge Article. Oxygen from the air reacts with meat pigments to form a bright red color which is usually seen on the surface of meat purchased in the supermarket. The pigment responsible for the red color in meat is oxymyoglobin, a substance found in all warm-blooded animals.

It is better to use your nose and smell for sourness, or feel for a tacky or slimy texture. If you detect shy of these, pass. Besides, bacteria and other pathogens can harm far before the ground beef gives you signs of spoilage. You should be careful and always buy the freshest possible product.

When freshly slaughtered meat is cut into steaks, the muscle tissue comes into contact with oxygen in the air. The myoglobin in the meat binds this oxygen, forming oxymyoglobin and giving the meat a red color. However, if fresh meat sits for a period of time, generally over the course of several days, the structure of the myoglobin changes. The iron molecule in the middle is oxidized from its ferrous to ferric form and a different complex is formed called metmyoglobin.

This compound turns the raw meat a brown color. The meat is usually still safe to eat when cooked, but the brown, unappealing color turns off most consumers. To avoid having your fresh meat turn brown, use it as soon as possible after purchasing it. I haven't seen this in a long time, but purchased ground beef from a larger store and opened to make hamburgers.

It smelled fine, inside and out, but that red-dye actually showed up on my hands after forming patties. This is an old trick by the meat department at large grocery stores. They often take the meat that was prepacked and browning and grind it.

It is now browning ground beef. This is a great way to keep food costs down as nobody would likely by brown hamburger meat. Meat does not brown from the inside out but the outside in. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Ground beef and hamburger may look nearly identical in their supermarket packaging, but they're actually two different products.

Ground beef can only be made from "skeletal muscles," meaning no organ meat can be included, and it can only include up to 30 percent fat, from the beef trimmings used to make the ground beef. Beef fat cannot be added separately from the meat trimmings. Hamburger can also only contain up to 30 percent fat, but fat can be added to the lean beef mixture separately to create the desired fat-protein ratio.

Other names you might see on your label are ground chuck and ground round. Ground chuck is a type of ground beef that comes from beef shoulder, and ground round is made from the hind leg via SF Gate.

The good news is that, no matter which type of ground beef you're cooking with, they're similar enough that you can use the same tricks to tell if it's fresh at the store, and the same techniques to determine if it's gone bad via USDA. Unfortunately, because of the way it's processed, ground beef has a tendency to go bad or be contaminated more than other meats.

That's because bacteria present on the surface of cuts of meat gets mixed into the rest of the beef when it's ground together, which is why it's recommended that you cook ground beef to degrees all the way through via Consumer Reports.

But, as previously mentioned, if your ground beef is sticky, tacky, stinky, or turning green, you shouldn't risk cooking it at all.