Cheesy Crockpot Ground Beef & Potatoes

I'm going to get this part out of the way. Don't forget the full ingredient list is going to be on my website. That's smokingandgrillingwithab.com and that's W-I-T-A-B dot com. Now listen, when you look at these ingredients right here, and it's going to show you the tools that we're going to be using, obviously it's in the title or the name, we're using the Crock-Pot, right? We got some canned goods right here. We got some other ingredients, but listen, we got some ground beef and we got potatoes. I like to use the Yukon Gold. These are the little small ones. You know, sometimes if I can get them bigger, I can, you know what I mean, but we're going to need about four cups. We've got a little bit of green onion we're going to be using. We got sour cream. You know, of course we're going to have fresh black crack. We got kosher salt. And again, it's all on my website, fully downloadable, screenshottable and all of that, right? And then if you guys take a look at some of the recipes on there, you can see that there's a little heart on there. If you guys want to save these recipes, you can save them right there. You can go through my whole website and just say what you want to say, and it's always at your fingertips. Now, with that being said, let's go ahead and put this food in this Crock-Pot. Okay, so if you guys come in, you can see I got like a little bit of a medium, just a medium flame underneath the bottom. This is already starting to get hot, right? So I'm using 80-20 ground beef. Like, that's normally what I cook with, unless I'm looking to get less, you know, fat. So what I'm doing here is just adding a little bit of extra virgin olive oil, right? We're going to run this around. Now, it's going to render its own fat, but I still want a brown with just having something like that on there. Now, I'm using a hex-clad pot, right? So, excuse me, hex-clad pan. Look, I just open this up, drop this in like that, and I just leave it alone. Now, this part over here, sometimes I say it, sometimes I don't, but I got to stay true to the game. Listen, you always got to have hot, soapy water at the ready, right? Now, here's something that I'd usually do, and there wasn't no need to do it for that, but listen, I like to just rinse it out, because I don't want to take all the residue. Like, just say I had something that left a film in here, I don't like to get that in my water. You know what I mean? You got to do it how you want to do it, but that's just like a good practice. Now, when we come back over here, I can hear it. I hope you guys can hear it. It's sizzling. It's doing great. You know what I mean? I'm just putting a little sear on the bottom. Let me get this set up for me this way. Now, I'm going to go ahead and use my meat masher. Talk to me down in the comment section below and tell me how many of y'all have gotten one of these. You know what I mean? You got to have one of these, folks. Now, listen. These work for all you guys that have like the ... They're a little bit more of the inexpensive pans that have like that coating inside of there that say it's nonstick. When you use metal utensils inside of that, what that does is like, if you ask me, it chips that chemical off, right? And then if we ingest it, you know, like I'm not no conspiracy theorist or nothing like that, but I don't want to eat that, and I don't want to ingest it, right? So I be thinking to myself like, is this why we have so many cancers, you know what I mean? So why not use plastic, you know, rubber and neoprene, you know, products inside of here? But if you guys are using hex clad, you guys know that there's no coating in here. It's actually the etched design that makes it nonstick. I know I'm on a medium flame, right? I've already started cutting my potatoes. You just want to cut them into bite-sized pieces, right? So I'm just breaking this up. All we're going to do is brown it. Believe me, once you got it broken up and you don't see any more pink, like where I'm at right now, I'm going to turn this off, right? I just turned my fire off and I'm just making sure that it's completely brown, right? You want to have something like that. Now, let me come back to this part right here. We're going to cut these down into bite-sized pieces, right? So it's up to you. What do you think your bite-sized piece is? You know what I mean? This is for me, right? Little pieces like this. You want to try to keep them all and get them as uniform as possible. After everything is cut, I've drained the grease. That's right there what you want to do, folks. You want to drain your fat. You know what I mean? I do it a different way. I don't know. Some of you guys might want to take the same method. I just take myself a couple of paper towels. I scrape everything over here to the side like this. I put my paper towels right here and just tilt it and let the paper towel do the absorption, right? It didn't render enough fat for me to be, you know, having to get like a screen or nothing to hold all of my beef back. But that right there will get it nice and dry, as you guys can see. Look. Look at that. And it retains just a little bit of moisture, right? So with that being said, I got my crock pot. I went ahead and pulled out the ceramic pot, right? So what we're going to do now is we're going to layer. So now that we got our potatoes cut, we just add these in here, right? We add these down to the bottom. Let's say about four cups. I think that'll be about four cups. You know what I mean? If not, anyway, I'm a meat and potato guy anyway, right? So if I got more potato, I don't mind, right? Ain't nothing wrong with the starch, you know? Don't forget, on my website, I'll have a number for you. Probably will be about four cups. That sound about right, right? So let me go ahead and take a picture of this because when you look at it, this is how you guys see the steps. That's one of the cool things about going through the recipe too, you know what I mean? Along with the video, after you guys look at it, you can see when I say layer, it shows you that. And this one seems to be just a little bit on the bigger side. For me, let's go ahead and cut that down, right? Get that in there. All right, now that we have the potatoes in, let's check this out. Now we're getting ready. You know what? Let's do it like this. I'm going to go ahead and add the ground beef on like this. Now, normally, because I'm trying to stay true to, you know, having a recipe for you guys, I probably would have put myself a couple of pounds of ground beef, a lot more. So, you know what? That's just really like doubling it. But, you know, when you're trying to come up with these recipes and you're trying to like, you know, get the amounts and the measurements and all of that, it takes, you got to have a starting point, right? So this was like a little bit better. So now we got our sauce here. These have already been opened. When it comes to my beans, what I want to do is I want to go ahead and drain them. You know, you got the liquid on the top, right? So we come over here, keep your top. Sometime I take things and I put them into, like, I could have took this and put it in my colander and rinsed them, but that's not it. You want to get some of this flavor here. I just get off the majority of it, right? We just leave it like that. Once it slows down a little bit more, that's good enough. All right, come on. Now we just take this and now we go ahead and put these beans right on the top, right? I kind of like distribute them a little bit so they're even, right? There we go. And then we got our sauce. All right, now that we have that in there, now really the only thing left, so I probably should have said something. Sour cream, you know, chives, whether you guys got fresh or dry, those work, right? This and the green onion, really it's just, I'll save this a little bit because I can get some more topping off of that. This is all for my garnish. And then obviously we got cheese, right? But this right here, salt, pepper, and this assortment of seasonings right here go right in here like that. This should be the only thing that you left with, right? So usually I put it in like when I do Crock-Pot and I'm taking pictures of them, I put everything down like in its own corner. Makes it easy, right? You know, for me to like put the names and the labels and all that stuff on there. But this time I'm going to do it this way, you know what I mean? This will be more evenly distributed, you know what I mean? So once we have it like that, we got them in here. Now you guys can see, right? We go with the fresh black crack. Now some of y'all are probably thinking like, A.B., you didn't put no salt and pepper and nothing inside of your ground beef. Did you notice how I did it? We got ground beef, right? And then we got everything besides the potatoes. And you're going to get your flavor from the beans, the sauce, and these seasonings we have right here on the top. That's what's going to go ahead and add its flavor, you know, to our ground beef. Once we have that in there, now we're going to add a couple of pinches of salt, right? I like that I have a background like that so you guys can see it. Sometimes it looks like I'm putting a lot of salt in there. That's not a lot of salt. Two pinches, you guys can see it. Remember, this is granulated, you know what I mean? Kosher salt so you guys can actually see it. Okay, folks, so look, I already got my power on, right? Now you got two ways you can do this. You can do it on low or you can do it on high. If we're going to do it on low, we're going to do it for six to eight hours. If we do it on high, it'll be three to four. So I'm going to go ahead and set mine on high, right? We're ready to eat it, you know? So let's go ahead and hit select. Let's go ahead and put that on high. And now we set our time, right? So I think I'm going to go with three hours. That'll about do it, especially since we used, you know, the small Yukon Gold ones. If you guys used russet, I probably would have went and added another hour off. But this is where we're going to go. It's already set. Now, let me give you guys a pro tip. Now, look, the pro tip here is, listen, we're using the Crock-Pot. I usually say this like in the, it seems like I be joking, but I want to tell you guys the truth. Listen, they got a saying, if you looking, you ain't cooking. Meaning, if you take this off of here, and if you guys want to, I'm going to give you guys like a little true fact about the Crock-Pot. Crock-Pot is designed to have the lid on, right? Every time you take this off, you might as well add 30 more minutes onto your cook because you got to build back that, you know, that heat inside of there, right? So the thing is, do not, you know, you got to like control your urgency. Don't lift this up and let it, you know, let it just do its due process. You know what I mean? We got to trust the process. With that being said, you've been informed. I'll see y'all in about three hours. All right, so look, it's 30 minutes left, right? So this is what we're going to do. I'm going to go ahead and remove my top, you know, sporadically on here. Try to like evenly do it, you know, spread it on here, right? We can mix it, you know, once it's all done, right? Man, it smells incredible, folks. Now, I'm going to go ahead and break this away from myself. You know what I mean? Ooh, come in here, y'all. Look at that right there. If you want to know, is that good? You can look at that and you can eat that with your mama. And this right here, it got this little cowboy-ish, you know what I mean, caveman-ish, you know, type of meal, but this is still, don't forget, it's meat and potato and we threw in the beans. What I did was I got my little rubber spatula slash spoon. If you guys look, it got a little, you know, a little cavity, you know, indentation right here. The reason I'm doing that, because we used the Yukon Gold, right? And those are going to be a little bit softer at three hours than it would be if we had used russet, right? So, I'm going to get under here. Now, let's go ahead and stir this up. Oh, and one more thing. I did grate myself some more cheese, so I can put a little cheese on it, right, to have a little topping. Let me just go ahead and break up anything that's stuck here on the side. And now let's just go ahead and just fold it all. Ooh, look at that, folks. Yes, sir. All right, so now it's all dressed up nice and pretty. You know what I mean? I've already tasted this. I can tell you right now, folks, listen, it got like a little bit of a chili, you know, like a little chili taste. But I'm going to say the real level of it is using the Yukon Gold, right? And baby Yukon Gold, them right there is nice. Now, if you got russets, those work too. I'm not going to ramble. I feel like I'm about to over-talk it. So look, I'm going to just say this. Cheers, y'all. Hold on. When we hit the action button, you know what I'm saying? Just to go ahead and start continuing to film, look what I put right here. You guys been watching the last couple of chili videos I've been putting out. This right here is the true level up, folks. You put this on top of that. You go to your TV, watch your favorite game, and you pass out, folks. If this don't give you the itis, I don't know what will. Now, if you're new to my channel, let me take the time to say thank you for watching this video. Don't forget to like, smash that subscribe button, and just tell everybody out there, check this out. There's a channel out here that's simplifying these recipes and taking the mystery out of cooking. Now, I'm about to spread this on a plate, dump this on top, and I'm about to eat, y'all. Enjoy, I'm out. Peace.