I always say that if you find a good price, you should buy as much as you can store and eventually use. Meat, however, poses its own special set of problems when it comes to buying in bulk.
You can’t just pile meat products up in your pantry. They’ll go bad before you family can eat them all. On the other hand, when you find hamburger or chicken on sale for half of their regular prices, you hate to let the sale pass you buy. Isn’t there a way to apply the pantry ideology to meat, too?
You bet there is! The answer is to freeze the meat. In my household, we’ve actually got a small storage freezer out in the garage that exists for just this purchase. Thanks to this little wonder, I can buy pounds of hamburger, multiple frozen chickens, and even a turkey or two without missing a beat.
You might be wondering, though, how this translates to real savings. Well, let me break it down for you. Hamburger, for instance, typically goes on sale (really on sale) a few times a year. It’s not the puny, little packages that usually feature the best price, though. It’s the big, family-size packages. So, on those occasions I buy three or four packages, enough to last my family for weeks.
Once I get it home, I break the packages down into smaller, more user-friendly servings. These servings fit nicely into re-purposed storage containers, such as margarine containers. I label the containers with the date (so that I know I’m using the oldest stuff first) and nestle them into the safety of my freezer. Now they’re ready to be pulled out and incorporated into any meal.
Other meats work the same way. My kids love chicken drumsticks, so I always make sure I pick up several packages of those when they are featured in my grocery store ads. On sale, drumsticks are just as cheap as whole fryers, but I don’t have to go to all of the work of cutting up the chicken before I fry it.
Having a store of meat at my fingertips is like having my own butcher’s shop in my garage. I love browsing through the freezer’s contents to plan our meals each week. It makes meal-planning convenient and frugal, my two favorite things!
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Just hope you don’t lose power for an extended period of time >_>
I just did this when a local grocery store advertised tri-tip for $2.77 a pound. It typically sells for $4-5 during the summer months. I bought as much as our little freezer could hold as we’ll use it up this summer.