How to Save Money with Batch Cooking

Batch cooking is a great way to stretch your grocery budget and prepare healthy meals each week. Learn more with these useful tips on How to Save Money with Batch Cooking.

If there is a way to save money, I want to know about it. Saving money on everyday tasks is one of the best ways to seal up those leaks in our budget that can lead to overspending. The area of our budget where we have the greatest ability to cut costs is our grocery budget. We can’t lower our house payment, but we can greatly reduce the amount of money we spend on groceries. There are lots of money saving tips for groceries out there, but most of them have to do with coupons or store sales. Batch cooking is one way to further extend those savings at home. Here are some tips on How to Save Money with Batch Cooking.

How to Save Money with Batch Cooking

Batch cooking helps you buy only what you need. When you do batch cooking, you make a list of groceries that you will need to complete a set of planned recipes. Having a plan helps you navigate the store without buying items you don’t need as you try to guess what you will feel like cooking over the week.

Cooking from scratch gives you better control over ingredients and lowers costs. When life is busy, it is easy to turn to convenience foods because you are crunched for time. In most cases this is understandable. However, batch cooking allows you to spend less time actually cooking every night so you are able to make better choices even on busy nights With convenience foods you end up paying for the convenience as much as 5 times the amount of money it would cost to just make it from scratch. When you cook from scratch, not only will eat better, you will save money. With batch cooking, you can cook large amounts of basic items on the weekend to use throughout the week. By batch cooking rice and meat in advance, you basically make your own convenience foods for a fraction of the cost.

Batch cooking lets you utilize bulk purchases. If you don’t shop for your meat, grains, and dry goods in bulk yet, batch cooking will encourage you to do so. When a basic item like chicken breasts are on sale, buy it in bulk, plan some meals around it, batch cook it, and then store it in usable portions. Since you don’t necessarily need space to store things long since they will be eaten up throughout the week, you will be able to enjoy the freedom to buy main ingredients in bulk when they are on sale, saving you money over time.

Batch cooking cuts waste. When I cooked every night, we often had leftovers. Occasionally, we wouldn’t get a chance to eat them up in time, so we wasted perfectly good food. On top of that, I sometimes bought too much of something and ended up with rotting produce in my refrigerator. That’s money in the garbage! With batch cooking, you plan your meals in advance, so you are only buying what you need and using what you buy. And you also have a plan for all of the items you cook in the batch – even if the plan is to freeze some of it for future use.

Batch cooking makes it easier to meal prep. With precooked meats, rice, and beans, it is easy to quickly assemble make-ahead breakfasts and meal prep lunches. This allows you to save money while eating a wholesome breakfast and lunch instead of hitting the drive-thru. You can find recipes for meal prepping breakfasts and lunches in my cookbook Prep-Ahead Breakfasts and Lunches.

Are you new to the concept of batch cooking and meal prep? You will find detailed instructions for batch cooking in Prep-Ahead Meals for Scratch as well as over 100 quick and easy recipes using batch cooked ingredients. You may also find these Batch Cooking Videos helpful.