equipmentmeat
How can I chop or mince meat more easily?
Currently I just use a knife and chop it up.
Meat grinders are no good. I am not trying to make sausage. I want to chop the meat up, not turn it into goo. Most meat grinders don't even have a hole big enough for a chicken breast or steak.
Is there any kind of device that you can just put a cooked chicken breast in it and it chops it up into small pieces? Just to make it clear what I am trying to do:
——INPUT——————————————————————————–OUTPUT——–
With thin cuts of meat (like chicken breast or a steak), you want to make sure you put the thermometer in to the thin side of the meat so that the whole thermometer goes in to the meat, rather than putting it in through the "top" so that only a little of the thermometer is in the meat. If you're putting it in the top, you can get wildly inaccurate temperatures. Also make sure that the thermometer isn't touching a pan, exposed to air, or touching a bone. Any of those can have a negative effect.
Also, you only need to cook chicken to 74C / 165F. That may be part of the problem in your case.
You may also want to check that your thermometer is accurate. You can stick it in boiling water to check that it reads 100C / 212F (assuming of course it goes up that high).
Thanks to science, it has become very hard to determine the actual quality of meat these days. Packaged meat is flushed with a gas that has a high concentration of oxygen (60-85% or so) to oxidize the myoglobin in meat, which keeps the meat red.
What this means is that you cannot visibly determine if the meat is good, ever. It could've been "only" refigerated for a time and then frozen, without any optical change due to the gas that's in the package. Indicators of bad meat, however, are a bad smell (of course, you can only determine this at home) or if the container seems to be under pressure, which indicates that microbes produced additional gas that can't get out of the container.
Sadly, I have given up on trying to find out if meat from the supermarket is fresh or not, as there doesn't seem to be a way of knowing. While still having a lot of tricks at their disposal, going directly to a butcher seems to be the only option that gives you at least a better chance of getting fresh meat.
Best Answer
You could try using a vegetable dicer. This professional one specifically says it works for chicken breast. If you have a lot of chicken to dice it maybe worth it, but it won't be real quick to clean.
If this is too much machine for what you want to accomplish, smaller home versions are made, something like this home vegetable dicer might work for you.