As I’ve mentioned a few times here, my local Albertson’s grocery (and many other groceries as well) have a little bin in the meat department where the put the stuff that is about to expire and mark it down for a quick sale. I call it ‘Remaindered Meat’. It’s perfectly good, you just have to either use it or freeze it within the next day or so. A few months back, I discovered what I have come to call The Meat Tray:
They take four trays of remaindered meat, bundle it together, and drop the price to a flat twenty bucks per. usually its steak, chicken, pork and then some other random meat. In the image above, the random meat is a package of precooked BBQ ribs. This is pretty much a weeks worth of dinner meat if you plan properly. I usually break the package in half – one half into vacuum sealed bags for the long cryo nap, and the other half goes in my kitchen freezer for immediate usage. Hey, for twenty bucks how can you go wrong?
Check your local grocery store next time youre there…chances are good they do something similar. You may find it all the way at the end of the display case, or you may find it mixed in with the ‘regular’ meats…but it’s worth the effort to find those remaindered meats.
When the apocalypse gets here, I am NOT eating TVP.
Those $20 trays are great. Got them here in CO, my wife discovered them. Since she doesn’t really eat much meat, I’m the guinea pig when it comes to expiration dates 🙂 Sometimes a package of discounted ribs come home, they are starting to get blotchy, I cook them up immediately and eat them up over the next couple of days or in one sitting, love those ribs.
“When the apocalypse gets here, I am NOT eating TVP.”
You say that like TVP is a bad thing 🙂
At my favorite store they stopped putting the on-sale meat in a sale bin. They put $1-$3 off stickers on the sale items – you have to search for them. More work, and I’m not sure if I’m getting a better than during the sale-bin days, but any reduction in price is good.
They do that here too… either 30% or 50% off, and it’s mixed in with the regular stuff BUT the stickers are a bright color so i can usually spot em pretty quick. I love buying pork roasts, a bag of potatoes and there’s dinner for three days for $8.
I have found that the Target meat man will put $3 off tags on products that are a day or two out from expiration if you ask. I use this to get the lovely organic chicken at a comparable price. I have found Weds and Thurs to be the best days to find them near their date. They are particularly happy to do so if you offer to take most of the items off their hands. Otherwise, they toss it into a throw away bin at a loss.
Day old baked goods on a cart that’s labelled “Oops! We made too much” and the meat department section between the beef and pork labelled “Sale Sale”. Good eatin. I have to admit I’m a a little jealous of your meat tray. (How often do you hear that from a stranger?) 😀
My local grocery store is big on “value packs.” It’s just me at home so I break down the larger packs, vacuum seal them.
40 years ago, they would take the expired meat and heavily coat them with spices in a red tinted sauce, and put it back on the rack at a steep discount. If you washed the meat, you would find it getting a little bit green. I don’t recall when they stopped doing that. I think it got outlawed.
Most of the time it was usable, although there were times I had to trim some really bad sections. I only had to toss one steak, IIRC. My cat liked it!
This reminds me of a story by my mother’s stepfather. He was a surveyor, among other skills, and did railroad trail laying at various places around the world (including No CA) about 1900-1930, approximately.
In Northern Africa, one of his camp responsibilities was to obtain food at the bazaars. He told me that the technique for determining if a side of beef was aged properly was to brush off the flies and poke a fingertip into it. If it sank to the first knuckle, it was old enough.
This was in the early 60’s, and I loved looking through his Nat Geo Magazine collection. Filled a good sized section of the cellar, where he had his desk/office arranged. It ran back into the 1800’s. Don’t know what happened to it. The house burned to the ground in the mid 80’s (dryer vent hose fire), but he died in the 70’s, so they may have been tossed by then.
My local FoodLion’s meat department guy will slap “Managers Special” stickers on both raw/fresh and precooked/packaged meats a few days before the “sell by” date which is usually another day or two before the “use or freeze by” date. They’re all mixed in still with the regular product but the stickers are a bright yellow and usually around a 40-60% markdown.
I’ve got a bunch of stuff frozen but only in the freezer above my refrigerator. We have a small house with no real room for a chest freezer but I think I’ve found a solution. I’m going to buy one of the Chard brand pressure cooker/canners and start canning a lot of the roasts and loins etc. that I get on sale.
I like to get the red meat markdowns, slice, overnight, and dehydrate. cheap jerky!