Turkey meat

Turkey can be fairly cheap, but around Thanksgiving and Christmas when people are buying really big birds, it sure adds up. It depends on the quality of the meat too, if they are free range and fed good food they will cost more, and be healthier for you. Birds that are fed really low quality food and kept in very cramped quarters their whole lives tend to be very cheap. Of course, where I live, some people raise their own turkeys, and that saves even more money because they can scrounge for grub so you only have to buy them some of their food, not all of it.

 

Your grocer may be getting ready for Thanksgiving and processing a bunch of turkeys, to save the breasts for the holiday. They probably don't want to be stuck with a bunch of legs so they are offering good deals on them now to get them sold. A lot of people will only buy the breasts instead of a whole turkey since they are easier to cook, and they may not like the dark meat to begin with.

I know around the Super Bowl, you can often find chicken marked down pretty cheap too, because the buffalo wings are so popular then that the grocery stores get stuck with a lot of the other parts of the chicken that they cannot sell as fast, so they mark them down then too.

I don't know if I would go so far as to raise my own turkey though since I am too squeamish to kill it and clean it, so I would have to pay someone else to do it for me, plus I would have to pay to feed it - it would probably be cheaper for me to just buy it at the store.

 

It can be cheap but from what I found out if you want to really save money, just buy turkeys over the holiday season and cook it. The meat that you get from a whole chicken, by the oz, will be a LOT cheaper than if you buy the pre-packaged stuff. Plus you can make the turkey into any flavor you like, which is also nice! Not to mention all the other great things you can do with the turkey (stock, salads, sandwiches, casseroles, etc).

 

Turkey legs are still relatively cheap where I live too. I bake turkey legs for Thanksgiving and Christmas because I am only cooking for 4 people. The legs are alot less work than a whole bird. The price has gone up some like all the other meats this year. I cook turkey legs all year long if I can find them in the store. I can almost always find cured, smoked turkey legs but not the raw legs a lot of the time so I just buy them when I can find them and freeze them for later when I run out of dinner ideas. Turkey legs are still a great deal in spite of the price increase because they don't shrink much and give you a lot of meat for the money.

 

Turkey meat is pretty affordable where I live. I don't buy it often but I do get some for the holidays. I like to brine mine before I bake it. I will start looking at turkey at other times of the year too. There are probably some good sales that I'm missing out on!

 

I think it is pretty cheap the majority of the time, but around this time of year they definitely take advantage of a lot of people wanting "traditional" holiday meals and hike the price up at a lot of places. The rest of the year it's a pretty safe bet for a nice, cheap option though.