A Go-To Protein for Economical Meals

New York Times

25-03-2025

I wish I liked the phrase 'ground meat' as much as I like the dinners you can make with it. Ground turkey, chicken, beef, pork and other meats are the delicious and easy-to-prep foundation of meatballs, kebabs and burgers, a key element of countless sauces and curries. 'Ground meat' isn't super appetizing to me; a platter of nachos strewed with browned beef is.
This week's newsletter is devoted to this ubiquitous but sometimes undersung ingredient, which is economical, convenient, easy to cook and hard to mess up.
I'm sorry to those of you who don't eat meat! Usually you'll find at least two meatless recipes here in the newsletter every week. Instead I'm going to send you to this collection of vegetarian sheet-pan recipes, and there's a tip on using plant-based meat below. And do you get The Veggie, our weekly newsletter devoted to vegetarian recipes? If you don't, sign up here; it's free.
A few tips: Most kinds of ground meat can be used interchangeably (especially ground turkey and chicken), though you'll probably detect a difference in flavor and texture. Nothing major. (Melissa Clark even wrote a recipe for meatballs using any kind of meat, and I love Tejal Rao's flexible keema.)
If you're using ground turkey or chicken, use dark meat if you can, though don't worry if you can't. It's harder to find but worth looking for; it has more flavor and is less prone to drying out.
Don't forget sausage, which is just ground pork, beef or other meat that's been salted and highly seasoned — which is to say, highly flavorful with no extra work from you. It's famously sold in links, which you can split open if you just need the meat itself, but I like to buy bulk (or loose) sausage, which is just the seasoned meat, no casings.
Plant-based meats, from companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, are their own thing. While you can often just swap them into recipes, you'll get tastier results if you read this article that Kenji López-Alt wrote for us and follow his tips. (He also created recipes for vegan cheeseburgers, chili and Turkish kebabs.)
It depends on what other ingredients are in them, but recipes made with ground meat tend to freeze and reheat well. (The meat itself, properly packaged, freezes perfectly.)
Thoughts? Requests? Email me at [e-mail]. I love to hear from you.
Porchetta pork roast; citrus salad with fennel and olives; sheet-pan pierogies with brussels sprouts and kimchi. Image Credit... Armando Rafael for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Hadas Smirnoff.
Kay Chun takes mildly flavored ground chicken to a better place by browning it with ginger, garlic and scallions, and then simmering it with sweet potato in coconut milk.
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