Salt

What about grilled burgers?

my family has always added lawrys seasoning salt to their meat while cooking unless it calls for special seasoning like taco meat

Sprinkle, sprinkle. No idea of amount. Just enough to get a reasonable sprinkle on it. I’m guessing maybe 1/4 tsp for a quarter pounder?

My meatballs don’t get salt, the salt is in the tomato sauce. Different strokes and all that.

Meatballs are nothing more than round sausages. I make beef/pork Italian meatballs and marinara quite often and I can’t imagine not adding the appropriate amount of salt to the mix. The holy ingredients in most cooking are fat, acid, salt and heat. Leave one of them out and you’re doing yourself a disservice.

And it’s not just that, but the salt affects the texture. You get a more springy texture if you incorporate the salt in, and a looser texture if you don’t. Now, that’s all a matter of preference. For hamburgers, I don’t like that springy texture, so I never ever incorporate the salt into the meat. For meatballs and the such, I do, so I will incorporate the salt into the meat. But it does give the meat a tighter texture than a salt-less version. So do whichever you like. There’s no “correct” answer. I happen to like my burgers one way, but my meatballs and sausages the other way.

Nor I, although I sprinkle salt heavily on the frying pan as heats, so the surface of the burger is salted.

Other than burgers, I mostly use ground beef for dishes that will have tomato sauce, and that is typically quite salty. On the rare occasions when I use unsalted tomato sauce, I add salt to the dish with the sauce, not in the meat.

Yup. I really dislike the texture that salt gives to ground beef. It feels “fake” and “over-processed” to me. This is probably because I am not in the habit of adding salt to dishes made at home, but fast-food and other low-quality ground beef I eat has often been pre-salted. Anyway, I cook ground beef to be tender and loose, and add salt in other ways.

Also, I tend towards a lowish-salt diet, and my blood pressure is very sensitive to salt, so I generally prefer less salt in my food than most people. Unless I have a cold – then my blood pressure drops and I feel lousy, and a good dose of salt (I usually eat olives out of the bottle) makes me feel SO much better.

Wow. Ya’ll are eating a LOT more salt than I do, that’s all I’m sayin’…

Although mystery solved as to why I always seem to feel much more thirsty eating in a restaurant than at home.

Yep. Even if you think 3/4 - 1 tsp per pound of meat is a lot, restaurants and prepared foods are usually salted at even higher levels, in my experience. Just for fun, I checked and I see that a 79g serving of IKEA meatballs has 370mg of salt, which works out to 2.3 teaspoons of salt per pound (!).