How To Meal Prep Ground Beef
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Prepping Ground Beef For Easy Meals makes weeknight dinners so much easier! Time… there is never enough time! Dinner time overlaps with soccer practice, homework time, and errands. If I can find a way to save money, I will, and this is one of my favorite ways to save time when it comes to dinner time at home! I love that I can pull out the meat after freezing cooked ground beef and thaw it for a quick dinner later.
Sometimes, little things can go a long way in making a big difference in your life. I love to find meat markdowns in the store. I stock up whenever I can find a deal. You can never have too much meat when you have kids! Bonus points when you can prep it and freeze it to make dinner easier down the road.
How prepping ground beef can save more time and money:
- Easy to defrost and throw in a casserole, meaning no ordering takeout or a drive-thru
- No waiting for the meat to brown
- Weighed and frozen in size for dishes, it is super helpful
- Perfect for the nights you burn the regular dinner as a backup plan
Supplies for prepping:
- Large Stockpot- Browning several pounds of ground beef at a time to brown meat goes faster than browning individual pounds for each dinner individually
- Over the sink strainer– This makes draining the grease off the cooked ground beef easy. A large batch of ground beef will create quite a bit of grease.
- Tin Foil– This will be used to line a large mixing bowl. Using the filter over this, the foil will be wrapped up to throw away the grease.
- Freezable containers– You could use Freezer Ziploc bags, but I like how the containers stack.
- Food Scale– I use mine to measure the cooked meat so I can note how much meat is in each container. and then to serve sizes on almost everything coming out of the kitchen
- Funnel– I use this when I don’t line the bowls with tin foil (occasionally, I forget the foil till it’s too late) to drain the grease into a container.
How to prep ground beef
Dump your ground beef into the large pot.
Season if you want to while browning. I prefer my all-purpose seasoning and minced onion. That way, it is ready for anything and can have different seasonings added to it. But you could skip this seasoning if you want to.
Next, set up a large bowl with your strainer over it! This is to strain the grease quickly.
Once the meat has browned, dump it into the strainer and start the next batch of beef.
Be sure to mix up the meat in the strainer for efficient straining of the grease.
While the second batch is cooking, start filling and weighing out your containers for the meat. Â I do 6-ounce and 11-ounce containers of ground beef. And one large one for taco night, so we have leftover meat for taco salads!Â
Be sure to refrigerate your meat before freezing it to allow it to cool down before freezing.
How do you bulk prep your ground beef? What is your go-to ground beef dinner?
Slow Cooker Ground Beef Recipes
There are nights when crockpot ground beef recipes save dinner time!! Easy Weeknight Ground beef dinners are always a massive hit with all my teens. They are easy to make and fuel the family! Plus, they tend to be budget-friendly as well.
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I do the same but vacuum seal in bags, freezes well and saves a ton of space. 🙂
I find ground beef tastes a bit rancid after freezing, so I freeze it with some sauce or spices to keep that from happening.
For example, i will divide a jar of spaghetti sauce between 3 containers of cooked meat. Stir it up, then label it for spaghetti & freeze.
For taco meat, add some taco season & a 1/2 cup or so of salsa.
Anything you would use canned soup for, I put 3/4 cup or so of canned beef gravy in the containers.
This also helps me decide what to make when I open the freezer not having a clue. Whatever sounds good when I see a label 😉
I cook large batches with onion. Drain on paper towels the lay flat and put in the freezer drawer for a short time. Then take out, slightly frozen, pack in vacuum bags. Freezing a little first keep the juices from getting in my Foodsaver.
I should’ve added, i dispose of the paper towels, I separate into several batches for multiple meals.
That’s a great tip! I was wondering how to keep the juices, but not have them squish up the bag when I vacuum seal it! Thanks!
A pound of raw ground beef is no longer a pound after the greased is drained. When packaging it to freeze, do you add more cooked ground beef to make a pound or do you go ahead with what was once a pound and label it as a pound?
I always package after cooking. So I tend to buy large amounts of the ground beef cook it, then weight it out. But I also do smaller sizes of the meat as well and just roll with how it weighs out after cooking.
I think that’s why the article said she labels it 6 oz and 11 oz it was 1/2 lb and 1 lb raw. It depends what percent of fat the meat has. I’d label it as if it was raw 1 lb. no matter what it weighed after cooking, if thats how you cook. But most recipes are not exact to require a full 1 lb. You can cut the meat or add more, your choice.