(HealthDayNews) -- Here's a neat trick for making great-tasting ground beef dishes that are low in fat and cholesterol.
It's from the New England Journal of Medicine, and if you've tried New England clam chowder, you know they understand fat and cholesterol.
If you simply cook ground beef, you'll remove about 10 percent of the fat, and 2 percent of the cholesterol. But the trick is to first heat the beef in vegetable oil. This extracts the fat from the meat. Then rinse the whole thing in boiling water. Allow the water, which now contains the vegetable oil and beef fat, to settle into two layers, and then discard the fat layer. Now you have water with beef flavor to mix with the beef.
The final result depends on how fatty the beef was to begin with, but in one sample, this method removed almost 68 percent of the cholesterol and 43 percent of the fat. Since some of the vegetable oil remains in the meat, the ratio of unsaturated to saturated fat also improves.
