Mushy vacuum packed mince

[likelysuspect]

Im not having a lot of luck with vacuum packed products lately

Ive never bought it in the new packaging until this week.

I was in Lidl and didnt have time to go elsewhere so bought it as it was, that squished up stuff in the vacuum pack

Its all mushy when raw and it doesnt have the same texture once cooked as normal packed mince

Im disappointed.

Only something like 4% of meat is sold at an independent butchers. It's a more exclusive group than those who send their children to private school. I think the other 96% of the market might have something to say about how it is packaged, one way or the other, without being mithered by the smallest group who have outrun the bastardisation of what was perfectly fine mince by doogooders changes.

I can’t stand the vacuum packed mince, the texture is awful. Asda seems to only sell that now. They do have “Butchers mince” in an old style tray but that has been out of stock lately. This is in our local Asda, don’t know about their online offerings.

Otherwise it’s Ocado or Waitrose. Waitrose’s mince is not in a tray but in a vacuum bag. However it has some room around the mince and isn’t a solid brick. Texture is fine with those.

Vacuum packed mince is an abomination of sludgy gloop.

Morrisons (on the shelf and at the butcher's counter), M&S, and Waitrose all do nice unvacuum packed mince.

I want my mince to be a 5 on the Bristol Stool Scale, not 3.

Same - can't stand brick of mush.

I actually worried that it was off the first time. Second time i realised that's just what it's like.

There won't be a third time.

It's literally the same - I can never understand the fuss people make about this

I'm with the OP and the 90% vote that thinks the vacuum packed mince is shite. Having tried it a couple of times I won't buy the vacuum packed product now.
Fine for burgers or meatballs, but for cooking mince dishes I find it really difficult to cook with. Fortunately Costco still provide 'proper' mince.

I often buy the squashed up vacuum packed mince from Sainsbury’s. I just decant it into a bowl and break it up with two forks. It’s fine.

Sainsburys mince is disgusting these days - they need to sort it out. We go to marks or the butchers. Marks isn’t much more expensive, but the quality is significantly better.

I accidentally bought the fatty mince instead of lean. Tipped it out the fat separated it well. I just had to drain the fat. It tastes better too.

Doesn’t reduce my food waste - I took the mince out of the vacuum pack and the texture and smell made me retch. No way could I cook and eat that, it went straight in the bin.

I've had that with chicken. Just stomach heaving

I can’t abide the vacuum packed stuff, it’s absolutely dire. I purposefully buy from supermarkets that sell it in the old-style packets.

How can it literally be the same when it’s been squashed and forced together into a big lump? The texture of the finished cooked product is completely different.

😂

I dont know if its a me thing with any meat, but the taste as changed with it.
I dont really eat any meat now, although i do like th cooked bacon from my local polish shop, thats amazing.

But store meat asda, tescos, morrisons etc etc it just tastes different.

It must be my age creeping in.

I don’t mind it but I use one of those mince masher things and sear it in batches to get it browner

Home bargains mince is good - normal pack and not too expensive

Yes, my DP gets that all the time. Not a weird grey colour either.

Off topic but aged 15 in 1971 I worked in Sainsbury’s on Saturdays and for my first three months I was in the meat packing department. Usually I was heat-sealing and labelling packs of chicken quarters,

One week I had to prep mince. There were huge bins of stewing, or braising steak, big slabs of beef. I had to feed the slabs through a mincing machine into another huge bin, then pack and label weighed portions. After about half of it had been done, the mincing plates were changed to smaller holes for a finer mince. That wax then labelled as “minced steak”, although it was the same meat as the “minced beef”. And finally, a small amount was labelled (and priced higher) as “Scotch beef” again it was from exactly the same bin of meat!

Our closest grocery store tried to start carrying this stuff. We all clearly refused to buy it because they finally relented and brought back real mince despite the corporate edict that they had to switch. (Multiple people in the community talked to management. It’s a small town, people were unhappy, and changing the mince is about as big as news gets around here. Hence knowing how it all played out.)

There are a couple of stores that are convenient to shop at that carry it and I just don’t buy meat there anymore. If that is what they stock for mince, I don’t trust their other meat selection.

the pink mush masquerading as mince is awful. It is passable as food if all you need is something to be browned and hidden in a sauce, but if you try to make a hamburger or a meatloaf, it quickly becomes obvious there is something wrong with it.

You just need a mince chopper.

One of these

Oh God, the vacuum packed mince is absolutely rank. Plus it requires an unfeasible amount of breaking down. I don’t buy mince in Sainsburys anymore.

I shop in Aldi but refuse to buy their mince so we actually eat far fewer mince based dishes as a result. It used to be a staple ingredient!
When I do want to buy some I have been going to Tesco as it is marginally better.

Yes, we have a local Lidl that I stopped using entirely because I would rather get all my food from one shop - and that one shop won't be one that makes their mince smelly, gray and mushy.