How many burgers in a cow? This question is often asked in food and kitchen forums in the internet. Many of my friends also asked me this question. So, I decided to do some reserach on the topic This is why, I have written a full post about it to to give you all the answers related to this and I am sure those who are interest in knowing more about it should love it. .
Coming back to the point now, supposing that you have used all the available meat from an average cow to make a quarter-pound ground beef burger, you would roughly get about 1,600 burgers from one cow..
Usually, however, the best beef is graded for steaks and only the cuts are ground for meat burgers. If you assume the average of 200 pounds of beef from a cow is actually ground into minced meat, you get about 800 burgers per cow.
So the rough answer to the question of how many hamburgers come from one cow is either:
You will get 1600 quarter-pound burgers of a pound if you grind all the meat.
800 quarter-pound burgers if you have kept aside the best beef for steak cuts.
It is not easy to give an exact figure for this calculation because there are so many variables involved. Some of them are:
Different cows provide different amounts of beef.
It depends on how much meat you use for steaks and how much for meat burgers.
It depends on how much fat is in the minced meat.
It depends on the breed of the cow or the buffalo..
It depends on the size of the burger you are making.
It’s also important to remember that the beef you eat in a burger does not come from one cow. It is a mashup of beef from many different cows. So it is entirely possible that you are eating the beef from as many as 100 different cows when you eat a burger purchased from a fast food chain like Mcdonalds.
How do you find out how much hamburger is in a cow?
To know how much hamburger is in a cow, you will have to determine the average amount of usable beef from an average-sized cow and divide that by the amount of beef per hamburger.
1. How much beef can you get from a cow?
As a general rule, a cow or a bull totaling 1,200 pounds will provide about 350-550 pounds of meat in your freezer.
The reason for it is that a lot of weight is lost during slaughter and processing. This includes:
Bones
Skin
Horns
Intestinal stuffing
Blood
You must also consider the huge amount of fluid loss that occurs after the animal is slaughtered.
To calculate this, it is usually assumed that 40% of the animal’s live weight ends up in the freezer, while the rest is lost in two processes during slaughter:
Hot carcass weight (also called dressing percentage) – This is the weight of the animal immediately after slaughter. It will have been gutted and drained as per requirement. It is normally 62% of the live animal weight.
Processing weight – This is the weight of the beef you get in the freezer. The water has been removed from the meat and the bones have been removed, which gives the final usable weight of the meat.
After all this weight loss, a cow weighing 1200 pounds live will produce about 480 pounds of edible packaged beef.
2. How much of the cow turns into hamburger versus steak?
Clover Meadows Beef gives figures in the same order of magnitude as I gave above. They estimate that you can get about 440 pounds of beef from one of their cows. Of that, about 200 pounds of ground beef and 220 pounds of beef cuts (I know it’s not 440 pounds – but I’m using their rough calculations for that).
Among the 220 pounds of cuts, you’ll find cuts like Porter House, Tenderloin and T-Bone steak as well as ribs and brisket.
So… How many burgers can you get from one cow?
With the above calculations in mind, we can finally arrive at a more exact number.
A 1,200 pound cow typically yields 200 pounds of beef, which becomes hamburgers. That’s the equivalent of 800 quarter-pound hamburgers! Add to that 220 pounds of steak. At 1.5 pounds per steak, you also get 150 steaks.
How many cows are in a hamburger? (Over 100!)
The above points are all hypothetical assuming that you slaughter a cow for your own consumption, but that’s not how mass production works. So, it is just based on theory.
The burgers you find in fast food restaurants are mass produced in slaughterhouses across the country. In these slaughterhouses, the pieces of beef that eventually become ground meat are all mass-processed.
In other words, the ground meat in your burger does not come from a single cow. According to McDonald’s in the UK, the average McDonald’s burger contains meat from over 100 different cows.
Wrapping up
How many burgers in a cow
Determining how many burgers a cow contains is not easy, as there are many variables that affect this number. The size of the cow at slaughter, the final weight of the beef in the package, and how you divide the beef into ground meat and steak all affect what you get at the end.
I think most people who view this page want an approximate naswer. So, roughly speaking, the average cow produces about 800 burgers and 150 steaks, but this can vary greatly depending on the factors mentioned above. Hopefully, you have got all your answers about how many burgerrs in a cow.
