What Can I Make With Ground Beef and Potatoes? 12 Real Recipes

A pound of ground beef in the freezer and a bag of potatoes under the sink is the most common pair of ingredients in the average kitchen, and also the one people get most bored of. Not because there's nothing to make — there are entire national cuisines built on this exact pair — but because most of us only know one thing to do with it, and that thing is usually “brown the beef, boil the potatoes, put them next to each other.”

The useful realisation is that the beef is almost never what changes. It gets browned with an onion and something savoury nine times out of ten. What decides whether you end up with a pie, a hash, a soup or a snack is what shape the potato is in when it meets the beef. There are five configurations, and once you can name them you stop needing to search for ideas.

The five configurations

• Potato on top. Mash spread over the beef as a lid and browned. This is the pie family.
• Potato underneath. Mash as a base, beef spooned over it as a sauce. Faster than a pie because nothing goes in the oven.
• Potato beside it, cubed. Both cooked in the same pan until the potato has crisp edges. The hash family.
• Potato around it. Mash used as a casing, stuffed with beef and fried. The snack family, and the one most people have never made at home.
• Potato in the liquid. Chunks simmered in broth with the beef. Soups and stews.

Twelve recipes below, grouped that way. All of them are real recipes from the Custrd librarywith actual ingredient lists and methods — not ideas generated on the spot to fill out a list.

Potato on top: the pie family

Worth clearing up first, because it causes more arguments than it should: shepherd's pie is lamb and cottage pie is beef.If you are making “shepherd's pie” with ground beef, you are making cottage pie. Nobody will stop you, and the recipes below are titled the way people actually search for them, but that's the distinction.

1. Cottage pie. The 20-minute version, which gets there by using instant mash flakes for the lid. Purists will wince; it browns under a grill exactly the same way, and on a Tuesday that is the whole argument.
2. Shepherd's pie. The from-scratch one — russets peeled, boiled and mashed with butter and milk. Thirty-five minutes, and the difference is real. Rough the top up with a fork before it goes in; the ridges are what catch and brown.

Potato underneath: mash as a base

The same two ingredients, half the work, because you skip the baking step entirely. This is what to make when you wanted a cottage pie and then looked at the clock.

3. Hamburger gravy & mashed potatoes. Four ingredients. Beef, butter, gravy, potatoes. It is not trying to be anything other than what it is, and it is very good at being that.
4. Meat sauce over mashed potatoes. Essentially a bolognese that gave up on pasta. If you have a tin of tomatoes this is the one to make.
5. Swedish meatballs with potatoes and vegetables. Rolling the beef instead of crumbling it, which costs five minutes and changes the meal completely. Cream sauce, and lingonberry if you have it.

Potato beside it, cubed: the hash family

One technique note that matters more than any recipe here: cook the potatoes first, take them out, then do the beef. Potatoes need dry heat and space to crisp. Add them to a pan that already has beef and its rendered fat in it and they steam instead, which is why home hash so often comes out pale and soft. Two batches, one pan, five extra minutes.

6. Picadillo with crispy potatoes. Cuban, and the best argument on this list for putting something sweet and something briny in the same pan — raisins and olives together. Trust it.
7. Labskaus, smashed potato and beef hash. A north German sailors' dish. Fair warning that it is served with pickled herring and a fried egg on top, which is either exactly what you want or very much not. The hash underneath works on its own.
8. Sweet potato ground beef bowl. Sweet potatoes behave differently — more sugar, so they catch and colour faster. Watch them a few minutes earlier than you think you need to.

Potato around it: mash as a casing

The configuration almost nobody tries at home, which is a shame, because it is the one that makes leftover mash worth deliberately over-making. Cold mash is much easier to shape than warm — make it the night before if you can.

9. Crispy papa rellena with avocado dip. Peruvian stuffed potato. Mashed potato moulded around seasoned beef, then fried until the outside is a shell. Eighteen minutes if the mash already exists.
10. Crispy beef korokke. The Japanese version, panko-crumbed and flatter. Fifteen minutes, and it is the single best thing to do with mash you made too much of.

Potato in the liquid: soups and stews

Waxy potatoes here, not floury ones. Russets will disintegrate into the broth and thicken it, which is fine if you wanted that and disappointing if you wanted to find potatoes in your soup.

11. Filipino pochero. Beef and potato in a tomato broth, usually with plantain or bok choy. Twenty minutes for a bowl that tastes like it took all afternoon.
12. Cheeseburger soup with crispy sides. Exactly as advertised, and considerably better than it sounds. The potato does double duty — some of it breaks down and thickens the soup instead of flour.

Two things worth knowing about the beef

Stop stirring it. The single most common mistake with ground beef is breaking it up immediately and moving it constantly, which drops the pan temperature and makes it grey and steamed. Press it flat, leave it alone for three or four minutes until one side is genuinely brown, and only then break it up. That crust is most of the flavour in every recipe above.

Fat percentage decides the dish.Around 80/20 is right for anything where the beef stays in the pan and you want the rendered fat — hashes, pie fillings, gravies. Leaner is better for soups and stews, where the fat has nowhere to go and just sits on top of the broth. If you only have the fatty stuff and you're making soup, drain it after browning and keep a spoonful back.

The wider point

Ground beef and potatoes are a good illustration of something that's true of most cooking ruts: the problem is almost never a shortage of recipes. It's that you're holding two ingredients and can only picture one dish, so you make that dish until you resent it. Naming the configurations — on top, underneath, beside, around, in the liquid — does more for a Tuesday than a hundred saved links.

It also helps to not have to remember what's in the house. That's the job Custrd's Kitchendoes — it keeps a running picture of what you actually have, so the beef at the bottom of the freezer surfaces while it's still worth cooking rather than after. It's the same instinct behind everything we've written about cooking through what you already own.

And if you've got beef, potatoes and two other things you'd rather use up tonight, the Custrd recipe finderwill match them against the library and show you what actually works — real recipes with real methods, not ones invented on the spot. It runs in any browser, no signup.

The iOS app is out now — it's free on the App Store.