I buy most of my meat from a local meat market (I'm Muslim so my husband prefers halal meat over meat from the supermarket). So I asked for lean ground beef this time around instead of regular ground beef. I also got some ground chicken too. So I was looking online to see how many calories are in 4 oz. of each. When I went to look up lean ground beef and to my surprise, I found that there are a zillion versions of lean ground beef (70/30, 75/25, 85/15, etc.). The problem is I don't know which version my ground beef is! At the meat market, it's just advertised as lean ground beef. Is there anyway I can figure this out? Should I just take out the ground chicken for now until I can figure out which ground beef it is?

If you got it at a regular supermarket, I would've said it is probably 70/30 but if you got it at a halal market, I'm not sure. If it was me, I'd probably estimate and say it was 75/25. With calories, you don't have to be exact every time but next time you go to the market you could ask them if they know.

Thanks, I was thinking about just estimating too. Next time, I'll be sure to ask if they know what it is.

I looked on CalorieKing.com, and even 95% lean ground beef gets 34% of it's calories from fat. If it is 90% lean, it would get about 50% of it's calories from fat. Even though it is a great source of protein, ground beef can be really high in fat and therefore not very diet friendly. If you have any recipes that require you to brown the meat and then drain the fat, that would be a good way to use this meat since you don't know the stats and this method would help reduce the fat. Here is a good article to help you as well: http://www.beefnutrition.org/uDocs/R...und%20Beef.pdf

There are laws regulating the max amount of fat in the ground beef. For the US< I found this:
Lean ground beef: Must meet the requirements of ground beef but may not contain more than 22 percent fat.



Extra-lean ground beef: Must meet the requirements of ground beef but may not contain more than 15 percent fat.

Here is the linkie:
http://www.beefinfo.org/Default.aspx...eID=56&SecID=8

ETA
Even says in the same link that if you rinse crumbled "regular" ground beef to remove some of the fat, once cooked, that it has less fat content than lean crumbled beef, undrained.

Hi FaithBW,

Maybe you could buy a top round steak or other lower fat cut of beef and have the butcher grind it to order for you? Then you could just look up the cut of meat and it might be a more exact calorie count.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I don't get ground beef too often. I drained the fat on the ground beef before serving it.

I usually get ground chicken or turkey.

I was using ground beef for a burger recipe on Self.com.