What To Use In Place Of Ground Beef
Shopping for food is hit or miss. Many families have a selection of meals that are their go-to dishes. In normal circumstances, this works well allowing you to keep the budget low and keep your family fed. Many go-to meals for families include pasta dishes, burgers, meatloaf and other dishes using ground beef. The price of ground beef is skyrocketing and that is if you can even find it in the stores.
Substitute ground turkey for ground beef
One of the easiest substitutions for ground beef in your home cooking is ground turkey. This is leaner meat with a milder flavor. When mixed with ground beef it can help it go further for be a complete replacement.
A great way to help flavor ground turkey is to save the drippings ground beef to add to turkey later to give it a bit of a beef flavor. For this reason, I will usually drain ground beef into a bowl and place in a freezer bag so I always have a pack as back up in the freezer.
This is one reason people saved the fat and drippings when hooking during the great depression.
Like ground turkey, ground chicken is an option to use if you find in in your stores.
Use breakfast sausage as a substitution for ground beef.
Ground beef is hard to find but the breakfast sausage at my local Aldi is in abundance and still under the $2 mark. We recently stocked a few extra ground sausage for our freezer on our last trip to Aldi and plant to grab a few each trip just to help keep our stock up. We use ground sausage in whole or mixed with ground beef and turkey to make:
- Meatballs
- Meatloaf
- Spegentii
- Burgers
Chopped up burger patties in place of ground beef
One thing I have used before when out our ground beef is burger patties. thawing and chopping or cooking and chopping works great for replacing ground beef in your favorite dishes.
Burger patties make a great ground beef substitute for pasta dishes and chili.
You can use this trick to substitute veggie burgers for ground beef if that is what you can find.
Try a different cut of beef.
Sliced steak or even a roast sliced thin makes for great tacos or additions to pasta meals. Generally more expensive this is best left to dishes you really love. We do this for making our own street tacos and other popular Mexican and Tex Mex dishes.
Try ground bison
Bison is a great alternative to ground beef. Costly and not available in all stores it is generally left unsold because people have no idea what to do with this. Ground bison makes a great chili and amazing Bison burgers.
Black beans make a great ground beef substitute.
If you are looking for a pantry stable option for your ground beef substitute black beans make a great option. Black beans can be found dried and canned and can be found in most stores between the two options. This is a great food to stock up on if you are working on building your pantry.
Like other ground beef substitutes swap pound for pound with black beans. Depending on the recipe you can mash the beans to make the texture more like ground beef or use whole.
Skip the ground beef in your favorite dishes
Sometimes the best way to deal with situations like being low on meat is to opt to use less meat. Cooking with less meat is a great way to save money when feeding your family. many pasta dishes can skip the meat altogether. We like to make pasta with tomato sauce and adding cheese on top then slipping into the over to melt the cheese for a fun meatless dish.
