Have you noticed the rising cost of meat at the grocery store lately?
What's a hungry carnivore to do? Don't panic! We're here to help! Watch until
the end to learn what cheap meats are a "go" and which are a definite "no"!
Pork shoulder is usually separated into a couple of different cuts. Lower down close to the leg,
you'll find something that's sold as either a picnic roast or a pork shoulder.
Farther up is a slightly richer and fattier cut called the butt. According to The Spruce Eats,
while there are some minor differences in the meat from these two shoulder cuts,
in practical terms, you can almost always substitute one for the other.
Whether you end up buying a picnic roast or a butt, these cuts reward time,
love, and attention in the kitchen. If you cook pork shoulder via any low and slow method,
you'll end up eating the most tender and flavorful pork you could possibly imagine.
If you want to speed things up a little bit, an Instant Pot is the perfect tool
for making carnitas out of pork shoulder. You'll be glad to include pork shoulder as one of your
favorite ways to feed a crowd on a budget! You can pick it up at Walmart for about $2 a pound.
Just the mere mention of ground turkey may have some of you saying…
"No! God, please, no! No! No! Nooooooooo!"
Quite frankly, the headline of this Reddit thread says it all:
"Why did no one tell me how gross ground turkey is?"
While the thread does attract some ground turkey proponents,
we tend to agree more with the haters. One declared,
"It's pretty disgusting. Mealy tasting, bland, and funky."
There's just something kind of off about the taste of ground turkey.
It's a little bit gamy and it makes for a very dry, unappetizing burger.
The best part about it is the price. It goes for just north of $3 a pound at Walmart.
Ground turkey's main selling point is that it's a healthier, leaner replacement for ground beef.
While a lot of ground beef is certainly fattier than turkey, you can easily find beef that's
just as low fat as turkey, if not even leaner. EatingWell broke it down and found that lean
ground beef that contains 93% lean meat and 7% fatty meat is nutritionally very similar to ground
turkey. The beef actually contains slightly more protein and significantly more iron than turkey,
so in some ways, it's actually healthier. Additionally, ground beef, even lean ground beef,
has a delicious red meat flavor that turkey just can't replicate, no matter how hard it tries.
Lamb can be pretty pricey in American grocery stores. For example,
lamb loin chops from some grocery chains can go for over $25 a pound. However, if you choose a
less popular cut, you can score a delicious piece of lamb for a fraction of the price.
Next time you're craving this meat, try the breast, which Simply Beef & Lamb explains
actually comes from a lamb's belly. It's somewhat similar to pork belly, but it can
also come with the rib bones attached. Like pork belly, it's streaked with thick layers of fat,
so it benefits from low and slow cooking to render out the fat and tenderize the meat.
Lamb breast has a strong flavor and, if handled correctly, is perhaps even more delicious and
succulent than more-expensive chops. Walmart sells it for $4 a pound, which is an absolute
steal for lamb. If you're the type of person who spends all summer smoking meat on the grill,
why not try replacing the usual pork ribs or beef brisket with lamb breast?
When it comes to ground beef, we want to discourage you from buying the pre-packaged
stuff that's sitting in your grocer's cold case. Although it is convenient and relatively
affordable, it's not worth buying. For one, as Cook's Illustrated explains,
regular ground beef is not particularly food-safe. That package of ground beef at
your grocery store could very well be made from literally hundreds of individual cows.
Each one of those cows could potentially have been mishandled or contaminated at some point.
Prepackaged ground beef also has a high chance of containing lean finely-textured beef,
which has been famously dubbed "pink slime". This beef product is made by taking the
trimmings from slaughterhouses, grinding them into a slurry, separating out the fat,
and then spraying the resulting lean beef matter with ammonia to hopefully kill bacteria.
Particularly if you like your burgers cooked rare or medium,
it's much safer to pick out a whole piece of meat and have a butcher grind it to order. That way,
you know it's all from the same cow. This also lets you choose which cut of meat you want and the
degree to which it is ground. Freshly-ground beef requires much less processing, which we prefer.
You're going to see a lot of pork and chicken among the recommended items on this list.
In terms of value, almost any cut from these animals beats all but the cheapest
cuts of beef by a mile. Take pork loin, for instance. It's a tender, juicy cut that can
be cooked in many different ways. It has just enough fat to give it flavor, but not enough that
you need to slow-cook it to be palatable. You can buy it deboned for convenience or choose a bone-in
loin roast that is basically a budget-friendly alternative to a rack of lamb or prime rib.
Any cut of beef that combines this much convenience and flavor is going to be
at least a little bit expensive. Pork loin, on the other hand, is shockingly cheap. You
can pick up a nicely-trimmed boneless loin roast from Safeway for around $4 a pound.
If you're willing to eat around bones, a bone-in pork shoulder blade roast costs
half that by weight. Beef lovers looking for meat deals may want to reconsider the hog.
Valued for its believed health benefits, chicken breast is the most expensive cut of chicken.
However, chicken is generally cheap, so even the priciest piece of chicken is relatively
inexpensive — running around $3 a pound at Target. Just because something is cheap
doesn't make it a good deal, though. Boneless, skinless chicken breast kind of sucks. And you
don't have to take our word for it; Chrissy Teigen agrees with us. In a series of tweets,
she had a less than stellar take on chicken breast:
"chicken breast is extremely popular for being literally the worst part
of a chicken [...] I dunno I just like moisture and stuff."
She continued by saying,
"the best breast is equal to the worst thigh."
We have to agree.
Boneless, skinless chicken breast is very low in fat, which makes it particularly vulnerable
to overcooking. Unfortunately, you can't cook chicken medium-rare unless you want to play a
little game of salmonella Russian roulette. That leaves very little margin for error
between dangerous and dry. Other cuts of chicken have more fat, so they remain juicy and delicious
when cooked to a safe temperature. Plus, they're also cheaper, which makes it a win-win. Since the
breast is the least delicious and most expensive part of a chicken, you're better off skipping it.
We all know beef can be expensive,
and sometimes the cost of a good piece of meat can feel like a slap in the face!
“Uh. What the heck are you doing!?”
If you really want good beef for a reasonable price, it's best to forget about steaks.
Great deals can be found in tougher, fattier cuts that need to be cooked for a long time
in order to release their deliciousness. The good news is that these tough, load-bearing
muscles are exceptionally beefy and flavorful. And it's no secret that fat adds flavor.
For the perfect combination of taste and value, seek out beef chuck roast. It comes
from a cow's shoulder and shares many of the attributes of pork shoulder: It's flavorful,
fatty, and loves being slow-cooked. Since we're talking about beef and not pork,
it's still more expensive than most other meats on this list at around $7 per pound
from Target. That's still not too bad, however, and the flavor is worth it.
Here is a sentence that may make you a little queasy:
"A product like sausage may contain a limited amount of mechanically
separated pieces that may contain bone particles."
That comes from the USDA's official statement regarding
whether bone pieces are allowed in sausage.
Mechanically separated meat is made by taking animal carcasses that have had most of the
meat already removed and shoving them through a "mechanical deboner" that scrapes the rest of the
meat from the bones. This material is then ground into a paste by being pushed through sieves that
also filter out most of the remaining bone matter. Ultimately, a large portion of mechanically
separated meat is not muscle tissue, but instead, connective tissue, fat, and possibly skin.
Rest assured that high-quality sausage is probably not going to have any mechanically separated meat
in it. It's the cheapest sausages that are more likely to contain unsavory ingredients.
Sausages can make for a wonderful meal,
but it's best to stay away from the bottom-shelf stuff if possible.
Chicken thighs are everything that chicken breast is not. They are flavorful, fatty, and delicious.
As Allrecipes explains, thighs are much more forgiving if you happen to overcook them. You
won't be left with dry cardboard if you neglect to take them off the heat for a couple of minutes.
They're way less bland than even the best chicken breast, and they're cheaper too. If you're not
down with skin and bones, you can easily buy boneless, skinless thighs at most supermarkets.
You can use a chicken thigh in pretty much any way you'd normally cook a breast,
and you're guaranteed a tastier result. If you're worried about your health,
rest assured that chicken thighs aren't really less healthy than chicken breasts, as we now
know that avoiding fats isn't necessarily the healthiest dietary choice you can make.
Now, we know how much some people love their chicky nuggies. And while we can appreciate
the inherent appeal of eating foods in the shape of dinosaurs, might we suggest that,
much like the majestic creatures they resemble, it may be time to leave them in the past.
"Nooooo!"
“Nooooo!”
Okay, okay! Have it your way! However, no matter in what fun shape they may appear,
chicken nuggets are another type of meat where it pays to spend a little bit extra for the nicer
brands. In our ranking of store-bought chicken nuggets, the generic store brands from Target,
Walmart, and Sam's Club all fell toward the bottom of the list.
In terms of pure horror, Walmart nuggets were the worst offenders.
Reviewers on the Walmart site found a variety of foreign objects in their nuggets, including
large bone fragments, feathers, and possibly pieces of plastic. Reviewers who didn't get
stabbed by their nuggets reported an off-putting rubbery texture and deficiencies in the breading.
Compare that with our winning nugget — Tyson Fun Nuggets — and the difference is stark. The Fun
Nuggets have an almost five-star average review, and customers rave about their taste and texture.
As a bonus, they also look like dinosaurs! They cost about $0.25 an ounce, almost twice what you
would pay for the Walmart brand, but we would happily pay that to avoid bones and feathers.
Chicken thighs have had something of a renaissance lately,
increasing dramatically in popularity over the last several years. The other section
of a chicken's leg — the drumstick — has not achieved the same level of attention. Indeed,
even as American culture has realized that dark meat chicken is worth buying,
drumsticks have actually gotten less popular. Clearly, we're all aboard the thigh bandwagon,
but we're not exactly sure why the rising dark meat tide failed to lift the drumstick's boat.
Drumsticks have many of the same advantages as thighs; their generous levels of skin, bone,
and fat give them a strong, rich chicken flavor, and they're difficult to overcook.
Drumsticks are also an easy piece of bone-in chicken to eat, as they have only one large bone.
They're super cheap as well, selling for under $2 a pound at Kroger.
"My god! That is one heck of a deal!"
Pork is generally guaranteed to be fatty and juicy, which makes dry pork chops especially
disappointing. While any kind of pork chop can dry out if you cook it for too long,
the worst offenders are boneless loin chops. As HuffPost explains, the number one way to prevent
the tragedy of a tough, leathery pork chop is to select the right kind of meat. The best pork chops
are sold on the bone and should have a decent amount of fat attached to them. The bone helps
protect the meat from overcooking, and the fat will melt as the chops cook to make them juicier.
Boneless loin chops set you up for failure. If you buy this type of meat,
you'll notice there's hardly a scrap of fat to be found.
While that might appeal to people who think of pork as the other white meat,
for us, it's a serious turnoff. You might as well buy chicken breast at that point.
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