How To Make Regular Ground Beef Leaner

The last three months have been full of celebrations and travel. It's been so fun, but I still haven't quite got the hang of budgeting for special occasions. So, now we're going into frugal mode while our finances recover. That means lots of Googling for money-saving DIYs and freezer food recipes, so I can take full advantage of the small deep freezer I bought a few months ago.

I rarely buy ground meat since it costs so much more per pound to get lean ground beef or turkey than it does to get (unground) chicken. Plus, I assumed the high fat content of regular ground beef outweighed the lower price tag. 

Google to the rescue!

I found two great articles on lowering the fat content of regular ground beef on Hillbilly Housewife and Democratic Underground. The first article is cool because Mrs. Housewife posted a chart that shows how much weight each type of ground beef loses while cooking (regular to super lean). It turns out that even though regular ground beef (30% fat and 70% lean) costs less than half as much as super lean (7% fat and 93% lean), you lose less than 2 oz. more per pound while cooking (12 2/3 oz remaining versus 11 oz). Half the price for 90% of the meat? Sold!

Stock pot filled with regular ground beef

Hillbilly Housewife Method

Her method is to brown the meat, drain the fat, then put it in a colander and run hot water over it to get even more fat out. You could then season it or put it back in the pan to cook with your favorite aromatics (garlic and onions <3) and/or freeze for later use.

I was also impressed by the comment left by Damie about running the cooked beef crumbles through a food processor along with your favorite meatball ingredients, forming the resulting mixture into balls, and browning them in a pan. I am planning on trying this out on freezer meatballs for lazy dinner nights.

Boiled hamburger spread out on a cookie sheet to cool

Democratic Underground Method

I liked lildreamer316's method on Democratic Underground for defatting ground meat even more for its frugal creativity. She (had to guess on the pronoun here) puts about an inch of water in the bottom of a pan, adds 5-6 lbs of ground beef, brings it to a boil, and stirs it around until it is no longer pink. 

Less work and clean up is good. But I liked even more that she reserved the broth. I make soup stock pretty regularly, and will likely post about it another time. In case you haven't done this before, when you cool the broth in the refrigerator, the fat floats to the top and will form a solid layer that you can easily lift off and throw away.

Look at the amount of fat I lifted off the reserved beef broth the next morning!

Your Method

Do you have a favorite method to make your ground meat healthier? What other frugal food tips do you have to share? I love hearing about this stuff!

A New Beginning

I think I might take another crack at this blogging thing. It's been floating around in the back of my mind for a while now. My interests have always changed pretty quickly (hence the boxes of various crafting tools and supplies around my house), so I think I may have limited my subject matter too much on previous attempts. This time I'm just gonna have at it with whatever my favorite topic of the day is, and see what happens.

This is a blog about learning. And probably about mistakes, too. I love finding out how things work, how things are made, and why things are done. I have really always been that way, but these days technology makes it so easy that I sometimes wonder if it's becoming unhealthy... 

Naaaaah! 

Does anyone else get twitchy when you aren't able to Google random questions that pop into your head?