Cooking with ground turkey

I don't eat beef but I can tell you I make turkey meatballs in tomato sauce from a recipe I got when I googled it and they are very good. Good luck.

If you put it in something spicy....chili, tacos, whatever.....you'll hardly notice a difference.

I bought a pound of lean ground turkey this weekend and I need to use it - but I gotta be honest that I've never cooked with it before. I'm going to make meatballs tonight and I'd like to use 1/2 turkey and 1/2 beef. Has anyone ever done this before, if not with meatballs then with burgers, and had it turn out ok? Anything I need to know about the differences in how they cook?

personally mixing turkey meat with ground beef sounds horribly wrong...

Jenneo has a recipe for turkey meatballs that is really good
typically other members of the family dont even notice they are eating turkey meat especially in spaghetti sauce

I made bleu cheese stuffed hamburgers with lean ground turkey meat a few days ago. They turned out awesome. But because the meat was so lean there was very little shrinkage of the burgers so they were huge! They were really delicious and everyone liked them.

My wife and I eat ground turkey a few times a week. It's usually burgers or tacos.

I used to switch it up between ground turkey and ground beef... but now we only do ground turkey. The macros are the same between the lean version we get... but I noticed I just liked the ground turkey more.

The burgers grill a bit differently than with beef... the turkey doesn't quite stick together as well as beef, but if you keep it on the first side long enough, you can flip it over just fine. We usually mix in diced hatch chili peppers with the meat.

I also just recently purchased a burger press thing from amazon (~ $8), and I highly recommend one for ease and consistency.

My wife uses it in spaghetti sauce and I can't tell the difference between it and ground beef.

You can use it pretty interchangeably with how you would use your ground beef bu there are two things you need to be aware of:

1) Turkey must be cooked all the way through - unlike ground beef which is ok to eat still pink (if that's how you enjoy your burgers - I like mine medium so they are still pink in the middle)

2) Ground turkey tends to be drier than ground beef - I find it works best to mix them as you've suggested, or to use it in something that has a sauce or lots of other ingredients - like spaghetti sauce, tacos, chili, etc.

I buy family packs of lean ground beef, and 1 lb containers of ground turkey - cook about 5 lbs total together, drain it and divide it into 5 individiual portions to put in freezer bags to use in all those things I mentioned above.

I make turkey meatballs, turkey tacos and turkey spaghetti sauce. I made turkey burgers and didn't really care for them.

I appreciate all of the responses! I'd like to switch to turkey for beef sometimes - we're mainly a chicken eating family but do eat beef burgers/tacos/meatballs/spaghetti sauce occasionally. My husband's not picky but I have a 6 year old and 2 year old and would like to ease into it, hence the reason why I thought to mix it...

Unless your 6 year old and 2 year old have much more refined palate's than my 5 year old and 2 year old, I would doubt they will even notice - I wouldn't even ease into it unless you are doing it more for the flavor/dryness of the meat.

I too use ground turkey pretty much all the time in place of beef. We've just started doing our hamburgers this way and they were a bit dry but I've gotten suggestions on this site to help with that.

Ground turkey or ground chicken sausage is great too! But you can pretty much find all sorts of recipes online and on pinterest.

Texture is a little different that ground beef...it's less crumbly, but really only noticable if you're using it straight up or in burgers. If you're using it in something like meatloaf, meatballs, casseroles, tacos, etc., you really can't tell the difference.