Over the past year, I’ve seen the price of beef skyrocket at my grocery store. A couple of years ago, I’d be able to get 93% lean ground beef for well less than $3 a pound at the local military commissary. It was the best price in town.
Lately, I’ve seen prices of over $4 a pound. The prices for even 80% lean ground beef is over well over $3 now.
As a result, I’ve steadily been opting for poultry such as skinless, boneless chicken breast that is usually priced at $1.99 or less. A great side-benefit of that is that recent guidelines advocate lean meat.
The only problem: It’s hard to make burgers out of whole chicken breasts.
This past week, Aldi was having a sale on ground beef. The sale illustrates how high prices have risen. You could buy 5lbs of 73% lean beef in bulk at a price of $2.89. At the same time, I noticed something next to it… ground turkey at $2.79.
Perhaps you can see where I’m going with this. What if I mixed ground beef and ground turkey and froze the result?
A spreadsheet can help us look at the results:
| Pounds | Price/pound | Total Price | Percent Lean | Lean Meat | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ground Beef | 5 | $2.89 | $14.45 | 73% | 3.65 |
| Ground Turkey | 2.4 | $2.79 | $6.70 | 93% | 2.23 |
| Sum | 7.4 | $2.86 | $21.15 | 79% | 5.88 |
Focus on the bolded data above. The average price per pound of my Franken-meat is $2.86 and it is 79% lean. That’s better than paying $3.29 for 80% lean. From a numbers perspective, I could have simply gone with all ground turkey and had 93% lean meat at $2.79 a pound.
Of course, food isn’t all about the cost or the fat percentage. It is about taste too. I’m banking on the fact that by having twice as much beef as turkey, my burgers will still taste like beef burgers, not turkey burgers.
I had hoped to find someone on the internet that has done this before and reported on the taste. Maybe my searching skills have gone way down, but I couldn’t find a single record on the internet. I did find some tips suggesting that I could grind my own ground beef and save money that way. That’s interesting. If I’m going to grind meat, I might as well consider grinding chicken breast (at $1.99) or chicken thighs (even cheaper).
Maybe the right mix could get prices below $2 a pound, with good nutrition, and still taste good? If nothing else, it seems like a fun experiment.
I’ll have to come back and update this article with the results of the taste test.
If this experiment comes out well this Sunmile 1HP Meat Grinder that I found on Amazon looks to be the way to go. At a sale price of $80 today, I’m tempted to jump on it.