Chuck has more fat but it's tenderer and in my opinion tastier.
I would choose the chuck and pot roast it...make mashed potatoes and gravy and carrots and use leftovers for diner style hot beef sandwiches wiuth gravy!
yum!!
Linda C

Chuck - cook pot roast like Linda - use leftovers for hash and / or filling in burritos.

Definately chuck..but I do use round for stir fries and chili. I usually buy a roast and chunk up some, slice thinly some more and freeze it for pretty quick meal planning.

If I were really trying to pare the food budget, I'd probably buy more chicken and pork than beef. But, I think the round is more versatile, as long as it's the same price as the chuck. If you slice round across the grain, pound it well and marinate it, you can even use it in stir fry with acceptable results, stretching the meat even further as you use less per serving. With the chuck, I'd probably make chili, stretching the meat with beans.

I don't know just why, but few Americans seem to appreciate pork butt (pork shoulder). It's usually quite inexpensive, and can be used in any number of ways. Pork stew and pork chili are every bit as tasty (though different) from beef stew and chili but costs much less. Mexicans do a lot with pork shoulder...it makes great carnitas, posole, chile verde & pulled pork for tacos & burritos. You can even cut chops off it to grill.

I save a lot of money by spending some of my time instead of money. I buy large bags of chicken quarters or whole chickens for much less than pre cut pieces, and cut them up myself...and I end up with back sections or carcasses to make soup. From one good sized chicken, my husband and I can eat three meals. Thighs & legs one night, cooked on the barbecue or in some other fashion. Stir fry from most of the breast meat another night. Soup from the carcass, some reserved breast meat and wings for a lunch or light dinner.

You can often get pork loin roasts for quite a bit less than pork chops, and just cut them into chops yourself. I almost never buy hamburger anymore, unless there's a fantastic sale, because it is almost always cheaper to buy roasts and grind them myself.

A lot of money can be saved by spending more up front...buying in bulk. My second freezer more than pays for itself by allowing me to buy up large quantities of meat when it's on sale or marked down because the "sell by" date is coming.

Most Americans don't typically eat a large amount of legumes, and they are an excellent way to stretch a food budget. Cooking tasty meals with legumes takes a bit more time, imagination and pre-planning than throwing a steak on the grill, but in terms of food value for your dollar, they're hard to beat.

By the way, the...er...unfortunate affect that legumes have on the digestive system can be dealt with. Generally, the better cooked the legume, the less the distress. So, lentils, which can be prepared in a variety of ways involving cooking them until they fall apart can be a more gentle way of introducing your system to handling legumes.

Some rules to avoid post-bean distress:

If you soak your beans before cooking, do not cook them in the water you soaked them in. The soaking leaches out some of the gas producing potential, and it's better to drain and rinse the beans, and cook them in clean water.

A pinch of baking soda in the cooking water helps as well.

In India, where legumes are a mainstay, adding a small amount of asafoetida to the legumes is a time-honored method of reducing their "gassiness". It is available in Indian markets and many health food stores, or on line. Don't let the foul smell prevent you from using it. Once cooked into a dish, the smell disappears. It doesn't taste like it smells once cooked, and it adds a complexity and depth to the flavor of the finished dish that is hard to describe.

Kand, I would choose the round, too! The only time I use a crockpot is when I make Ginger's Crockpot French Dip and I always use round to make it.

Rachelellen, another way to cut down on gastric discomfort is to use epazote in bean dishes.

Rachel, you and I must be sisters.

KandM, I'd buy both cuts, actually. You can do lots of things with both. The round is certainly good for ground beef, and you could have the butcher slice some of them into steaks to simmer in their own broth and then smother in mushroom sauce. The chuck is excellent crock-potted any number of ways, but my favorite is with a can of beer. The gravy that results is to die for. Thicken with a little corn starch and add mushrooms and sour cream for a special treat.

The best tips I would give for the grocery store is to cut out the middle-man as much as you can. Meaning prep your food yourself and cook from scratch. Watch out for the little tricks marketers pull. DH has been doing the shopping the last several years, as he has been retired while I have been still working. I noticed that the big bags of cereal he's been buying are actually more expensive per ounce than the store brand cereal in boxes! I sure hate all that extra packaging though. Most grocery stores now post price per ounce on the shelf tag, which is helpful as I used to have to do that in my head. When things come in the same sizes, you can easily compare, but when they don't, you've got to know price per ounce. Read labels, make sure you know what you're getting. This is silly, I know, but it makes me smile to read the ingredients list on a pound of real butter. Cream and salt. Period. No artificial colors, flavors, thickeners.

If there's a sale, make sure it's something you can actually use, and that it's worth it to you, even at the sale price. After not shopping for awhile, I have lost track of what is a good buy and what isn't... I'm having to re-educate myself on what is a "normal" price for something, now that I've retired and am doing the shopping again. And that's kind of hard right now because prices have been on the rise for the last several months. It wasn't so very long ago that canned corn, peas and green beans were not a good buy if they were 50 cents each. Now that's a sale price. Tomatoes are higher. Except thanks to my garden this year, I won't have to buy green beans and tomatoes this winter.

On the topic of beans, once you get used to eating them regularly there will be a lot less gas. It also helps if you chew them well. (When I was a teenager somebody's mother told them they should chew every bite 100 times. We all tried that in the cafeteria and it took us so long to eat we were almost late for class! LOL) --Ilene

I'd buy the Round. It is the cut that I buy to make pot roast. Slow roasted in the oven.

Ann

I love buying pork butt too rachel. One of my favorite ways to prepare it is to make bbq pulled pork sandwiches. I also cut a lot of the fat off and save it to flavor beans.

I use a calculator and a willingness to substitute ingredients to save money. I was at Walmart the other day buying ingredients for pizza. They had an 8 oz of packaged pepperoni for 3.69 (calculated it to be 7.38/lb), a 3.3 ounce package for 1.30 (ie 6.30/lb) and when I checked the deli there was hard Italian salami for 4.50/lb. Guess which one I bought lol.

The two money savers I use most are to only buy what is on my list and don't go to the grocery store hungry. I'm sure I've saved thousands this way because when I don't follow these rules I make a lot of impulse buys.

We've been told for some time now that most Americans eat way more meat than the rest of the world. I would suggest to anyone wanting to keep their grocery spending in check to begin stretching smaller amounts of meat:

~ stretch a large hen by first simmering in a large pot with chicken broth added to the water, a rib of celery, a carrot, and a hunk of onion; let it cool in the pot then remove all the meat from the bones, but keep the carcass; make chicken and dumplings with a third of the meat, make a chicken casserole with another third of the meat, and make a big pot of chicken noodle soup with the broth, the last bits of meat, and the bones. If you are really stretching that bird and have a small family or are a single or couple, you might get additional meals with this plan

~ cut up a 6-8 oz. piece of beef sirloin to make a stir-fry recipe with vegetables and serve over rice or noodles; there are stir-fry directions in the Cooking Forum FAQ section

~ add only half a pound of ground beef to your favorite casserole, spaghetti sauce, or soup that calls for 1 lb. of ground beef

~ buy larger shrimp and slice them in two lengthwise down the middle to get 2 shrimp pieces for the price of 1 - great for creole, jambalaya, or pasta dishes; halve large scallops to increase the pieces per person

~ when the weather cools down, plan to fix a hearty soup at least once a week, focusing on the vegetables, rice, or pasta in the soup and using little or no meat; serve with a salad and cornbread, biscuits, or crusty yeast bread; make one night a week or the weekend your soup making time

~ plan one meal a week to be a Diner Vegetable Plate Special: have 3-4 vegetables such as slaw, baked beans, mac & cheese, green beans & new potatoes, baked sweet potato, lima beans & corn, peas & carrots, cooked mixed greens, scalloped tomatoes, squash casserole, ratatouille, marinated vegetable salad, tossed salad - whatever your favorite vegetables are, hot and cold.

For meat, am I the only one who looks in the marked down bin first? I regularly shop at either Albertsons or Vons, and both have a pretty big bin of meat that's either at or near it's sell buy date, both mark packages 30% or more off. While sometimes they only have tripe or calves liver, more often than not they have nice steaks and roasts too. I buy them when I see them and put them in the big freezer if we're not going to eat it that night.

And we're another family that loves pork butt - I like to make a pot roast one night, then turn the leftovers into bbq pork another night. Or I'll make a big pot of carnitas and we'll have tamale pie later in the week made with the leftovers. Yum :-)

Becky

* Exported from MasterCook *

Kathy's Carnitas

Recipe By :
Serving Size : 0 Preparation Time :0:00
Categories :

Amount Measure Ingredient -- Preparation Method
-------- ------------ --------------------------------
3 pounds boneless pork shoulder roast (3-4) -- cubed and trimmed of visible fat
1 can or bottle beer
tequila (couple of turns around the pan)
5 garlic cloves
1 onion -- chunked
1 teaspoon ground cumin (1-2)
1 tablespoon brown sugar
2 limes (2-3) -- juiced
cilantro springs
chicken broth or boullion cubes

Place meat, garlic and onions in large pot. Sprinkle with cumin and brown sugar. Add beer, tequila, lime juice. Add enough water to cover meat. Add one boullion cube for each cup of water. Or use chicken broth to cover meat. Simmer, covered, for 2 hours. Remove lid and increase heat to completely reduce liquid. Remove meat fron the pot and fry up in a large skillet.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Becky - Well, I look for the close-to-expiration-date mark-downs, too. My problem is that I often find it visibly different from the regular priced stuff, dull gray/brown as opposed to the nice red stuff next to it at full price. And then suddenly the extra buck or two seems worth it. No idea if I would taste the difference, but to me food enjoyment is very psychological.

I NEVER seem to find a chuck roast on sale. I consider grinding my own burgers a luxury as opposed to a cost savings.

This thread (actually, the reference to Ginger's French Dip) got me looking for a hunk of meat. Chuck roast $4.99/lb, top round on sale for $2.45/lb. Well there was no more top round in the case and when I asked the butcher for one he pointed to a higher grade top round which was on sale for $3.99/lb, told me to pick a roast and marked it down to the choice $2.45 price. Thank you very much! I'd be interested in how these compare to prices elsewhere.

I also check the marked down meats every time I'm in the store (which is about 4 times a week), and stock my freezer. The store manager is really aggressive about marking things down. Generally there are still at least 2 (sometimes 3) days before the sell-by date, and the discount can be quite impressive. Since it goes right into the freezer, it is fine.

Price comparisons...hmmm, I just happen to have my store sale papers here at my desk.

Safeway is offering 7-bone chuck pot roast at $1.69 lb. Cross rib roast at $2.99 lb. Top round London broil is $3.99 lb. Chicken drumsticks, thighs or leg quarters $.99 lb.

Savemart (where I do my day to day shopping, because it's the closest) has cross rib, rump, bottom round, sirloin tip, eye of round or flat iron roasts for $2.99 lb. Chicken drumsticks, thighs or leg quarters are $1.29 lb.

Raley's has London broil for $3.49 lb., Rump or bottom round roasts for $3.69 lb. Chicken thighs or drumsticks are $1.79 lb.

O'Brien's has cross rib roast for $2.89 lb. Whole chickens for $1.19 lb.

CostLess has untrimmed tri-tip roasts for $1.98 lb. (trimmed is $2.88 lb...I prefer having a layer of fat on my tri tips to baste the meat as it cooks, and have trimmed them to my liking and weighed the scraps and it is definitely worth it to buy the untrimmed. Even when their tri tip isn't on sale, they sell big bags with 4 or 5 roasts,usually priced at around $1.85 or $1.95 lb...tri tip also makes excellent ground beef, and it is one of the few roasts with enough fat to suit my taste to make hamburgers with...I can't stand hamburgers made with really lean ground beef. Since it's pretty rare to find good ground beef for under $2.00 lb, it's worth the trouble. I only had the one-page short ad, so I don't know what they're charging for other roasts this week. I buy a lot of my meats there though, because they are usually less expensive than the other stores. 10 pound bags of chicken quarters range from $6.99 to $7.99, and I like them because they are usually from larger chickens than the usual, and so there is more meat per bone as well. They also generally have whole fryers for under a dollar a pound, so if I want chicken breasts for something, I often buy the whole chicken and piece it out as chicken breasts have gotten ridiculously expensive.

All of these stores are within reasonable driving distance, or are on the way to one of my weekly clients' houses, and you can see that the prices can vary quite a bit from store to store, so it really pays me to take the time to read the ads.

I remembered another quick, inexpensive meal. S & W puts out a line of flavored beans that are quite good. Black beans with Caribbean seasonings, Santa Fe or San Antonio flavored chili beans, Louisiana style red beans and Pinquitos. The seasonings are just right. Good flavor but it isn't overwhelming. Mix in some leftover meats or browned ground beef and serve it over rice or polenta. Quiet tasty and they don't seem to have that odd "tinny" taste that some canned beans can have.