Saving money on Ground Beef (by using ground Brisket)

You can score huge $avings on ground beef by stocking up on brisket sales and grinding your own meat. You can turn a whole brisket into ground beef and it's easier than you think. 

I'm sure, no matter where you live, you've noticed that beef prices are going higher each time you visit the grocery store. In order to keep our budget in check, we have had to be careful with our grocery spending. One way that we have considerably saved money is by purchasing a whole brisket and grinding it ourselves versus purchasing ground beef at the grocery store.  

The cheapest - decent ground beef I have found is at Costco for $3.99 a pound for 80/20. Which is a great price, but by purchasing a whole brisket on sale for $2.49 a pound (in our area) and grinding it ourselves, we can save on the cost per pound and we know that it's a good quality of ground beef. Yes, grinding the brisket ourselves is more time-consuming, but in the long run it's cheaper, has amazing flavor and we know exactly what's in our ground beef.  

We have found that when grinding a whole brisket (removing the deckle fat) it comes out to an 80/20 ratio of lean to fat, which is perfect for hamburgers and other ground beef  meals. It's easy to grind your own beef at home by using a freestanding meat grinder (like we have) or you can use the meat grinder attachment on your kitchen aid stand mixer. 

We purchased a 16 pound whole brisket for $41.33 and yielded 14 one pound packages of ground beef. In the end this came to about $34.86 total priced at $2.49 a pound compared to $55.86 for 14 pounds of ground beef priced at $3.99 a pound. The total price difference is $14.53 and for us this is a big savings and yields a clean, flavorful ground beef. 

If you want to grind you own brisket, you'll need the following: 

• Whole Brisket
• Disposable gloves
• Cutting board
• Sharp Knife
• Meat Grinder or Kitchen Aid  Grinder Attachment 
• Meat Grinder plunger
• 2 Large Bowls
• Kitchen Scale 
• Quart Size Zip lock Bags or Vacuum Seal 
• Slice of bread
  

To start, remove the brisket from the packaging and place on a large cutting board or cutting surface. Remove the deckle (the large fat cap that sits atop the whole brisket). We didn't have too large of a deckle on ours, but you want to make sure to cut out the fat cap out as well as any loose hanging fat (if you leave too much fat it will end up yielding more of 75/25 lean to fat ratio). Also thinly slice off any discolored or dark ends. 

Cube the brisket into smaller pieces that will feed into your meat grinder. Place the cubed brisket into  the refrigerator for about 30 minutes before grinding. Make sure not too feed a lot of meat through the grinder at the same time. You want to do 1-2 pieces at a time using the plunder to push the pieces down. 

We always grind our brisket twice. For the first grind we use the large grinding attachment this will get the meat all mixed up. For the second grind change out the grinding wheel to the smaller attachment.  Grinding the meat twice will allow you to have a more evenly distributed fat content in your ground beef. 

The photo above is after the first grind using the large attachment. 

This is after changing out the attachment to a smaller one and grinding the meat a second time. You can see how much better the meat is mixed up and now looks like ground beef. 

My husband usually cuts and grinds the meat and then passes it off to me to weigh, bag and label. 

We package ours into 1 pound packages which is perfect for our family of three. Make sure to turn the  edges of the bag over before packaging the meat so you will get a clean seal. We use Ziplock freezer bags, but you can vacuum seal the packages as well. 

Once I get the ground beef into the bags, I prefer to flatten the bags for easy storage and defrosting. 

I like to store the packages in a plastic container in our freezer and stand the bags upright. Now that you've learned how to grind brisket into ground beef you can use it to make several of your favorite ground beef recipes. Once you try ground brisket you won't go back to ground beef. It really does taste that good. 

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