How can ground pork be low in fat, but pork sausage not be?
Fat is often purposely added back into sausage to make it juicier.
I’m doing Weight Watcher’s and they suggested a recipe for turkey burgers recently that involved mixing some of the condiments (ketchup, mustard, relish, etc.) right into the meat before you cook it. I haven’t tried it, but it sounds good.
If you’d like to try meat substitutes, a good one to try is using the frozen soy crumbles (which are like ground hamburger), which taste ‘meatier’ than veggie burgers. I know most meat eaters balk at using soy, but bear with me.
If you add them to things like spaghetti sauce, it is really hard to tell the difference. Seriously – while I’m vegetarian, my family is most certainly not, but they use the soy crumbles in the place of ground hamburger whenever they’re trying to lose weight. My mom, who is a farmer’s daughter and an ardent meat-eater, swears by the Morningstar Farms stuff.
You can even make things like shepherd’s pie, and it’s pretty good, because it takes on the other flavors in the dish.
I also like them because of convenience - you can just throw the crumbles into the sauce, without browning separately.
As has been pointed out, red meat in of itself is not evil. It just needs to be consumed in small portions less often than you presumably eat it now.
Extra-lean ground beef still tastes very good in meat loaf, spaghetti sauce, chili, dishes which are not pure meat. It makes poor hamburgers.
Ground sirloin, etc. is much lower in fat than ground chuck. It has the same disadvantages as extra-lean ground beef.
Mixing medium ground beef with grated carrot, red kidney beans, dehydrated mashed potato and flavourings like Worcestershire sauce, onion, mustard, ketchup, etc. makes very tasty, lower fat burgers.
Ground pork, chicken and turkey are readily available and can be a good substitute for ground beef. (The best meat loaf mixes pork, veal and beef). Ground beef is also far less fatty than pepperoni as a pizza topping.
I actually eat a reasonably healthy diet, but I don’t get much meat because the only meat I knew about that wasn’t extremely high in calories and fat was chicken breast and I didn’t like it, or i’d eat a few deli slices on a sandwich. As a result I get cravings for meat every now and then and wanted some way to satiate them w/o eating ground beef or steak.
I found that Marsh sells a bag of 12 4oz turkey burgers for a pretty good price and that ground turkey in a tube is about $1/lb. The premade turkey burgers are good and only have 160 calories each.