Grocery Shopping Series Part I: Cheaper Ground Beef

If you're visiting from the Festival of Frugality, welcome! This week's host is Aaron Stroud of On Financial Success.

Thank you, Aaron for hosting and including me in The Paragraph Edition | Festival of Frugality 122.

This is Part I in a series on saving money on groceries.

When I was six years old, my mom worked as a meat wrapper for the butcher shop in a local grocery store. All my life she's taken the sale cuts of meat to the butcher to have them ground. Most people don't seem to know that's an option - or maybe they are afraid to ask?

Have you checked the price for hamburger lately? It used to be fairly inexpensive, but nowadays it runs $3 to $4 and more a pound! But did you notice that cross cut rib roasts are on sale this week for $1.37 a pound?

If your grocery store has a butcher section, they will happily grind a cut of meat for you. Just gather up a four or five pound roast, and go on over to the butcher. Ring the bell and ask him to grind it for you. I have never had one turn me down, unless I got there after they just closed for the day and just finished cleaning the grinder.

If you only want a couple pounds of hamburger, ask him to cut it in half and grind half, and give you the rest as a roast. You can even make your hamburger leaner by asking him/her to trim off the extra fat. You can have them grind up a seven bone steak and package up the bones for your dog, or take them home and freeze them to use later to make beef stock. For that matter, you can ask him to put a round steak through the tenderizer to make it less tough.

Generally you can only ask to have beef ground. They can't mix types of meat, so don't ask to have pork or chicken ground.

If you have a food processor, you can grind small amounts of meat yourself. Sometimes I like to take a pound of chicken breast and mix it with a pound of beef. Cut the meat into squares one inch or smaller and put a handful of chunks into the processor at a time. Blend for a few moments, then stop and see how the meat looks. Remove that bit and blend up another handful of chunks.

You can save a lot of money on meat using this little trick.

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