How to Use and Find Cheap Recipes

Grocery shopping is intense right now, even if you know how to save money. With prices exploding everywhere, it’s hard to keep up. After all, the best way to save money is to cook at home, but if you don’t have the right recipes, you’re going to up spending more money than you need to. So, let’s talk recipes, specifically finding cheap recipes that aren’t going to explode your grocery budget. However, before we get to where you can find cheap recipes, it’s important to talk about what a cheap recipe entails and how you can take advantage of them.

Setting yourself up for cooking success

Before we even get into cheap recipes, let’s talk about the basics, which is basically having a well-stocked kitchen. By this, I mean having the cheap or important stuff already. This means anything you’re going to cook with a lot, especially spices. Sea salt, black pepper, onion powder, and garlic powder are a must. I also recommend Italian spices and some paprika or ground ginger. But honestly, it’s whatever flavors you want.

Plus, any sauces you eat frequently, like soy sauce or Worcester sauce. Don’t forget the bullion, either! It’s way cheaper to buy bullion than it is to constantly buy stock.

On top of this, you’re going to want to buy specific things in bulk, especially if you eat them often. This includes staples like rice, beans, and pasta. Having flour and breadcrumbs on hand is also probably going to be helpful.

Finally, invest in your cooking oils, and buy the bigger bottles if you can afford it so they last longer. This is whatever you prefer to cook with, though I always recommend some extra virgin olive oil and vegetable oil.

Be flexible with your cooking

It’s worth learning more about cooking substitutions. If you don’t have one thing, you might have another that can easily be substituted, bringing your overall cost down. This doesn’t just apply to things like olive oil or flour vs. cornmeal. It also applies to the major ingredients themselves. Maybe the recipe calls for beef, but chicken was on sale this week. Maybe the recipe calls for bell peppers, but it’s easier for you to get carrots. This also means it’s easier to shop in season as well. Shopping for seasonal produce vs what exactly the recipe calls for can save you some serious cash. If you’re into meal planning, knowing how to be flexible is important.

Just be sure to choose a substitution that makes sense. Using an earlier example, you wouldn’t replace bell peppers with spinach. Spinach wilts far too quickly and would burn during the time it would take bell peppers to cook. This especially goes for baking, which is more of an exact science. Make sure you’re looking up appropriate substitutions.  

Utilize leftovers whenever possible

When it comes to having recipes be as affordable as possible, using leftovers is your best friend. There are so many ways to do this. One of my favorite ways to use day-old rice and make fried rice with whatever protein and veggies we have. Leftover veggies or whatever you have in the fridge can be great for a hash too. Hash is basically just onion, sausage or bacon, a type of potato, veggie, and egg. That’s all you need, which means you can get pretty creative with it.

Basically, shop your fridge first and see what leftovers you can incorporate into your recipe.

Invest in the right cookbook

By this, I’m referring specifically to How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman. It’s amazing. It strips recipes down to their bare bones. Here’s how to simply cook everything you can possibly imagine. It’s a gigantic book, but it’s worth keeping around. It tells you how to cook a thing’s most basic form, and you can adjust or add as you’d like. This makes it a one-stop shop for finding cheap recipes.

The problem with other cookbooks is that they tend to have a million ingredients, including something you probably don’t own and will buy just for this singular recipe. This doesn’t mean you should never buy them. Sometimes, you want to cook something really specific, or you just want to do something fun. But if your goal is to find cheap recipes, it’s better to avoid bigger, more complicated cookbooks. I’ve discovered that celebrity cookbooks are the worst offenders when it comes to being expensive, so avoid them when you’re going for affordable.

Look for recipes with 5 ingredients or less

When it comes to evaluating recipes, you’re going to want to stick to those that have five ingredients or less. When I say five ingredients, I’m not including things like spices or cooking oil. This is where your standard, well-stocked pantry comes into play. But anything that actually adds to the volume of the recipe counts AKA protein, veggies, starches, fruits, etc.

When you add in more ingredients, you’re increasing the risk that the recipe’s going to get too expensive. This isn’t a hard or fast rule, but it’s a good guideline. In general, just pay attention to how many ingredients the recipe requires.

Check out the right places

As I said, cookbooks can be a tricky place to find cheap recipes. Luckily, there are tons of places where you can find cheap recipes. My personal favorites are Budget Bytes (which is dedicated to budget recipes) and TikTok. TikTok is great because you can specifically search for cheap recipes and bring up tons of creators who are creating simple but delicious meals. They often have a website that you can use to get the full recipe, too.

Pinterest can be a good resource as well, but it’s a little more hit or miss. If you search for cheap recipes, you will be able to find some. But often, Pinterest recipes come with a lot of ingredients that can get expensive fast. So, be sure to evaluate every recipe you find like we’ve talked about above.

When it comes to cooking cheap, finding affordable recipes is key. You want something that’s going to get the job done (read: be delicious) without breaking the bank. Hopefully, these tips have helped, and you’re armed with what you need to find cheap recipes. If you’ve got your own favorite tips or places to find recipes, drop them below!