The Milk And Bread Trick That Makes Ground Beef Extra Tender

If your meatballs or meatloaf keep coming out dense and dry, there's a classic fix that should be well-known to many Italian-American cooks. It may sound unintuitive, but all you need to do is mash some bread and milk together and mix it into your ground meat before shaping the meatballs. It's called a panade (a French term that roughly translates to the somewhat visceral "bread mash").

There's some science to why this works. When ground meat gets heated up, the proteins inside it contract, causing moisture to get squeezed out. So, if you're making burgers or meatballs with only beef (and maybe a little seasoning), you'll lose a lot of moisture and end up with a potentially dry or rubbery end product. A panade circumvents this problem: The starches in the bread absorb milk and swell up, and when you mix this throughout the meat, this soggy bread gets in between the proteins. The starches are then able to cover the protein molecules and stop them from shrinking together into taut and dry pieces. This helps prevent some moisture from getting expelled, making for an end product that's more tender and juicy.

Historically, there was also another reason to add a panade to ground beef: For many Italian-American home cooks, it was a handy way to pad out their meat, saving money on a relatively expensive ingredient while also giving stale bread a second life.

A panade is an incredibly low-effort addition: Just tear up a slice of bread, mix it with some milk in a bowl and let it sit for a few minutes until the bread soaks up the milk and is mushy. Mash it into a paste with a fork and then mix it into the ground meat. Obviously, the quantities of bread and milk you need vary depending on how much meat you're using, but around 1 slice of bread and 2 tablespoons of milk per pound of ground meat is a good ratio.

Although some recipes will suggest using plain white bread, it's flexible, and you can use pieces of baguette or even panko or other breadcrumbs (a quarter-cup of breadcrumbs is a substitute for one slice of bread) . Other liquids like buttermilk and cream work in place of milk, as do non-dairy options like stock. It's not just for ground beef: It works for ground pork, chicken, turkey, or whatever else, and is particularly helpful for lean meats that dry out more easily when cooked.

As for where to use a panade, it works for pretty much any recipe where you're crafting ground meat into some kind of solid hunk. So, meatballs, meatloaves, and burgers are the obvious cases that come to mind.