Frugal Intuition

I have long been in a debate with two of my friends about what grade of ground beef to buy.  One of them is very very health conscious and only buys the leanest of the lean ground beef–and she pays an arm and a leg for it.  My other friend is far more concerned about budget, so she buys the cheapest ground beef available, usually about 70-73% lean.  My first friend justifies the higher price on the lean ground beef by saying that she’s getting more usable meat once it’s cooked.  My second friend doesn’t think there’s an appreciable difference in the amount of cooked beef when she uses the fattier grades.  I’ve always been somewhat on the fence on this issue because I’m interested in both health and frugality.  I’ve been meaning for over a year to go  buy a pound of each of the grades of ground beef, jot down their prices, cook them, drain them, and see what was what in terms of how much it cost per ounce to finally set this debate to rest.   Well I never got around to doing it.  But, someone else has been kind enough to conduct the experiment for us!  The Hillbilly Housewife has painstakingly broken everything down for us.  I encourage you to go read the whole article for yourself, but the take home message is here in the numbers:

Unless you are making hamburgers or meatloaf (which you obviously aren’t going to rinse and drain), any other recipe calling for ground beef (such as spaghetti sauce or taco filling) is going to have you fry up the meat, drain and rinse it.  Nobody (at least I hope nobody) actually eats all that grease remaining when they brown beef for a recipe.   In which case the fattiest ground beef, once it’s cooked, rinsed, and drained, is actually the leanest.  And according to her calculations, it costs about half the price of the leanest ground beef with only a difference of about 2 oz.  So the take home message here?  Buy the cheapest ground beef available unless you’re making a recipe that doesn’t allow for draining and rinsing.

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