This is my ode to ground beef. I am a huge fan. You can do so much with it and it is one of the most budget friendly proteins to buy in bulk.
This week, our local grocery store was having a sale on 10 pound packages of ground beef making it $3.89 a pound. With the national average of just under $7 a pound, I happily brought a huge log of ground beef home with me and this part of our Eating Well on a Budget series is all about making the most out of it.
Let’s get started…
Portioning…
Now unless you have a whole bunch of kids (or friends) living with you, you will probably not need 10 pounds of ground beef all at once, so the first step is portioning everything out.
This is easiest and most accurately done using a kitchen scale, but if you don’t have a scale (you should definitely get one!), you can place similarly sized containers on your counter top and visually divide the ground beef between them.
When it comes to portioning, you can either divide everything into equal portions (16 ounce or 32 ounce portions are most commonly sold in stores, so this is how I suggest portioning it out) or if you have a plan for recipes you are going to be making, you can portion specific bags out for specific recipes.
Marking weights & dates…
Be sure to mark your portions with their weights and expiration dates since you are likely discarding the original packaging.
Once I have decided which portions are going to be kept thawed and which ones are going to be frozen, I like to press the portions headed to the freezer out flat, so they don’t take up too much space.
Planning ahead…
Benjamin Franklin once said that, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” and this is definitely true when it comes to cooking on a budget. Even when you bring home a whole bunch of wonderfully priced ground beef, it is amazing how quickly you can use it up or let it go bad if you don’t have a plan for how you are going to make the most out of it.
I am a huge note taker. I love lists and I love planning ahead, but even if you are not a nerd like me, defining how you want to use this meat will definitely help you make the most out of it.
Now everyone’s diet, meal planning, preferences and requirements are unique, but this is just an example of how many meals you can get out of a 10 pound portion of ground beef..
How I divided up a 10 pound portion…
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- 32 ounces – taco salads/10 portions (meal prepped lunches for the week)
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A 4 ounce portion is a typical lunch sized portion of ground beef and this ended up being 3.2 ounces per serving, which contains 22 grams of protein. The salads were simple… shredded lettuce, diced tomatoes, black beans, corn, cilantro and my favorite cilantro lime dressing.
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- 32 ounces – lasagna/12 portions (meal prepped dinners for the week)
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A meaty lasagna is so filling and this is one of my favorite ways to stretch 2 pounds of ground beef into 12 portions, which can be bulked up with a dinner salad and crusty bread. Plus, lasagna heats up so well!
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- 16 ounces – stuffed peppers/4 portions (weekend dinners)
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You can use ground beef in any of my stuffed pepper recipes on the blog! This recipe will give you 8 stuffed peppers or 4 two pepper servings.
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- 16 ounces – spicy beef tacos/4 portions (weeknight dinners)
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I love super meaty tacos just like the next guy, but adding shredded lettuce, diced tomatoes, cheese and even some steamed rice will help make a pound of ground beef easily stretch to 4 servings!
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- 12 ounces – lahmacun flatbreads/4 portions (weeknight dinners)
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I threw in a fancier element to this plan to show how versatile ground beef is and how far you can stretch very little ground beef! Twelve ounces will make 8 of these delicious flatbreads and 2 of them is definitely enough for a portion! Try them out!
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- 16 ounces – burgers/4 portions (weekend lunch)
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Quarter pound burgers can be a serving in themselves or can be part of a double that will fill the hungriest of husbands up after a weekend of yard work. You can also make 8 sliders with a pound of ground beef!
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- 16 ounces – fajita rice bowls/5 portions (meal prep lunches for the following week)
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These fajita rice bowls are originally made with ground turkey, but they are fabulous with ground beef too! They are very filling and full of nutrients. These rice bowls are one of my husbands favorite meal preps!
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- 20 ounces – honey bbq sloppy joes/4 portions (weekend dinner)
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We had 20 ounces left over and I decided to make a batch of my honey barbecue sloppy joes. Sloppy joes are surprisingly versatile! We got 2 sandwiches, 2 sloppy joe grilled cheeses (recipe will be coming soon for these!) and then used the rest with sour cream and tortilla chips, so we technically for 6 meals out of them, but I am going to keep the stats at 4 portions to stay conservative.
Add everything up…
If you were calculating as we went, that is 47 portions! At $3.89 a pound, our 10 pound portion cost $38.90 and if you divide that by the 47 portions, it would be just under .83 cents per portion.
Amazing!
Now, of course, this is just for the ground beef and yes, there will be all sorts of other ingredients required to make these meals, but nothing listed above requires anything particularly expensive and the protein portion of a recipe is often the most expensive element.
I am so excited about this series! The goal of stretching out this 10 pound portion of ground beef to its maximum value was both exciting and rewarding. We were able to make a wide variety of meals, all delicious, filling and nutritionally beneficial and you can do the same thing!
A few other things to consider…
Never forget the beauty of those “bulking” ingredients. The simple addition of adding shredded lettuce into a taco or rice bowl helps to make them seem and feel like much more and adding garlic, onions, peppers and tomatoes into ground beef will help pasta meat sauce and sloppy joes go so much further!
Be sure to research what the actual serving size of a protein is. With ground beef 4-6 ounces is a commonly agreed upon serving size and this can be something to base your meals around or at least be a starting point to help make sure you are portioning meals out accurately and not over serving and in turn, over spending…
These suggestions are simply how I ended up dividing the ground beef this time. There are so many meals that you can make with ground beef and I find that using the same protein for a wide variety of meals can help keep you and the family interested longer term.
If you are interested in the Eating Well on a Budget then I would love to hear from you!
- What are some of your favorite ways to use ground beef?
- Where is your favorite place to find ground beef at a great price?
- What is the next protein that you would love featured in this series?
Cheers to Eating Well on a Budget my friends!
