How To Cook With Fresh Ingredients On A Budget

Cooking with fresh, real ingredients isn’t as expensive as you might think.

Fruits and veggies, grains, legumes, dairy, and even certain meat products are honestly some of the most affordable ingredients at the grocery store. And by following a few simple practices that we’ve made a habit of over the years, we can confidently say that it is possible to cook with fresh ingredients on a budget.

We’ll dive into the 4 strategies that help us save money at the grocery store below!

Make A Meal Plan

Meal planning is the most helpful way to stick to a grocery budget. Here’s why:

• Planning meals in advance means you can buy exactly what you need, and avoid the extra impulse buys that rack up your grocery bill.
• Sticking to a meal plan reduces food waste, which means the ingredients you spent your hard-earned cash on won’t end up in the trash because you forgot you had them.
• Strategically planning meals that use shared ingredients can help you stretch food further during the week to get the most bang for your buck.

We typically plan specific dinners for each day of the week, make enough food to have the leftovers for lunch, and then have a loose idea of what we want to eat for breakfast and snacks. This helps us create a concise grocery list at the start of each week so we know exactly what to buy. 

It’s also worth noting here that one surefire way to reduce your grocery spend is to plan more meatless meals, if you’re not already vegetarian or vegan. There are tons of delicious vegetarian meals that are packed with protein and nutrients, but cost a lot less to make than meat-heavy dishes. Check out our best vegetarian recipes here for inspiration.

If you don’t already have a meal planning strategy, check out our best meal planning tips and tricks article for tips on how to get started!

Cook More From Scratch

The most expensive items at the grocery store tend to be the highly processed foods and ready-made meals. You can save money simply by cooking with real ingredients and making more from scratch.

Two of our favorite things to make from scratch are bread and tortillas, because it saves us money and tastes so much better than store-bought (and they’re healthier!). To make one loaf of delicious crusty white bread, Alex uses about 3.5 cups of flour, half a tablespoon of salt, a few grams of yeast, and water from the tap – all of which costs just over $1. A similar loaf of bread from our grocery store costs anywhere from $4 to $9 now!

But you don’t have to become a baker to cook more from scratch and save money. We also love making our own pizza sauce, nut-free pesto, and tzatziki for a fraction of the cost of store-bought options. Check out our collection of homemade ingredient recipes for even more ideas on what to make from scratch.

Shop Smart

“Shopping smart” involves a few different strategies we’ve put into practice over the years that save us money at the grocery store:

Most of these tips are self-explanatory and easy to implement, but they’re also easy to forget unless you make a habit of them. These strategies are also subjective – they can really depend on your individual situation and may or may not be worth your time. So take these tips with a grain of salt to figure out what works best for you.

Sales, Coupons, And Buying In Bulk

We like to stock up on expensive and shelf-stable grocery items whenever they’re on sale, like butter, condiments, tortilla chips, Triscuits, cheese, chicken, pork, and ground beef. This helps us save money on ingredients we use often.

We also like to bulk purchase our meat at Costco. This helps us get the best prices and it’s easy to freeze raw (frozen raw meat lasts for at least a few months) or batch cook and then freeze for later (like we do with our slow cooker pulled pork recipe).

Buying Generic Brand Items

Opting for generic brand groceries (when it makes sense to) is a no-brainer for saving money. Here’s why: most generic brand products are actually brand-name products wrapped in a different label. 

Big box stores like Target, Walmart, and Costco often go straight to the source that manufactures the branded items for their store brand foods. They can then sell these at a comparatively lower price, since there’s no extra markup to cover advertising spend.

Most of the time, store-brand items taste just as good as (if not better than) your favorite name brand items. We discovered that Target’s favorite day vanilla ice cream is better than Breyer’s, and half the price. We also prefer the flavor and texture of Signature Select english muffins over Thomas, at about a third of the price.

We will say, some brand-name ingredients are worth splurging for. Our store brand’s mayo is noticeably thinner and less flavorful than Hellman’s, and the generic canned green chilies are bland and poorly cleaned compared to Hatch green chilies. So always keep in mind that you may notice a reduction in quality from some generic products, but certainly not all.

Shop At Multiple Stores

Depending on how far you’re willing to go out of your way for a good deal, you may or may not want to scout multiple stores for the best deals. This is something that we put into practice slowly over time, as we shopped at different stores and mentally cataloged price differences in the items we were buying frequently.

When we lived in California, we were lucky enough to have a Whole Foods and a Target right across the street, so we often made a single grocery trip with a stop at each store. We bought produce, meat, and bakery items at Whole Foods for the best quality and price, while we found dairy and pantry staples to be a better deal at Target.

Check out a few grocery stores, local markets, and big box stores like Target, Costco, or Walmart to find the locations that give you the best balance of price and quality for the items you buy most often. If it’s convenient, you can even split your weekly shopping between two or three stores like we used to. 

Thankfully, most stores offer online ordering and pickup (or delivery) now, so you can spend the same amount of time hitting up multiple stores instead of wandering around one!

Work With What You Have

Keeping a well-stocked pantry can help you out when your grocery budget is tight. And if you take advantage of sales, coupons, and bulk discounts to stock up on shelf-stable ingredients, you’ll save even more money in the long run.

If you’re in the bad habit of letting canned goods or boxes of pasta get pushed to the back of the pantry never to be seen again, this is your sign to start taking inventory of your pantry before going grocery shopping – and even before meal planning. When we started doing this, two things happened:

1. It became much easier to plan budget-friendly meals around the pantry ingredients we already had on weeks when we didn’t have as much to spend on groceries, and
2. We stopped wasting food we didn’t even know we had until it was 3 years past its expiration date 😬

Having a mental note – or even a physical note on a piece of paper, or your phone – about what’s actually in your pantry will help you come up with meals that use those ingredients.

The other thing we love about this strategy? Meals can stretch pretty far when they’re based around pantry staples like pasta, rice, and beans. One box of spaghetti can turn into a week’s worth of meals when money is tight, especially if you get creative with whatever sauces, condiments, or dry seasonings you already have on hand.

Staples We Recommend Stocking Up On

• Protein – As we mentioned earlier, we like to buy value packs of meat at Costco and store them in the freezer.
• Starches and grains – Pasta and rice last a long time when stored properly. We always buy the 5 pound bag of rice and then empty it into our POP containers to keep it fresh, and we stock up on pasta whenever the brand we prefer goes on sale.
• Beans – Dry or canned beans are a great source of protein that stay good in the pantry for a long time, too. We always like to have black beans, pinto beans, and garbanzo beans on hand for use in a variety of recipes.
• Canned vegetables – Tomatoes, corn, chipotle peppers, and green chilies are just a few canned ingredients we also recommend keeping on hand. These ingredients especially come in handy when we can’t find them in season at the grocery store.
• Broth, stock, or Better Than Bouillon – We recently started using Better Than Bouillon to make our own “instant broth” at home, since it’s much cheaper than the boxes of broth at our grocery store.
• Potatoes and onions – We can often buy large bags of potatoes and yellow onions at the store for a good deal, especially when they’re on sale. When stored in a dark pantry or basement, they’ll stay good for a few weeks, and we add them to soups, stews, curries, and breakfast scrambles whenever we’re looking for easy meals.
• Baking essentials – Flour, sugar (granulated and brown), baking powder, baking soda, salt, cornstarch, and yeast are must-haves! You can bake almost anything with these simple ingredients.
• Oil and vinegar – We buy vegetable oil and cooking-grade olive oil in bulk since we go through it so fast. For more specialty ingredients like extra virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar, or red wine vinegar, we like to buy smaller bottles since the quality will degrade over time. 
• Dry seasonings – Our pantry is always stocked with dry seasonings so we can cook any cuisine we’re craving. Some spices can be a bit pricey, so we like to take advantage of sales or bulk options for the ones we use often.
• Condiments – These typically have a very long shelf life, especially before opening, and are never bad to have extras of. We also find that many of our favorite condiments, like peanut butter and Frank’s Red Hot, are often available at Costco in bulk sizes or 2-for-1 deals so we can get a great price on them.

Conclusion

Groceries are getting expensive these days, but that doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice flavor, quality, or the meals you love. 

By putting these strategies into practice, you can continue to buy fresh, nutritious ingredients and cook wholesome homemade meals while saving money at the grocery store:

1. Make a meal plan to avoid buying excess ingredients that might otherwise go to waste;
2. Cook more from scratch to reduce the number of processed foods in your grocery cart;
3. Shop sales, coupons, and generic brand items, and visit multiple stores to find the best deals;
4. And keep a well-stocked pantry so that you can work with ingredients you already have when money is tight.

Now tell us in the comments – which one are you going to try first?

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