Every beef cut, ranked by what you actually get

By Buffr LLC · Published September 1, 2026

Beef is the cut of meat where the shelf price misleads you most, because the cuts lose wildly different amounts between the package and the plate. Short ribs are 60% bone and rendered fat. Filet is 85% edible. Comparing them by the pound is comparing two different things.

The fix is simple arithmetic: divide the price per pound by the fraction that survives cooking, and you get the price per pound of meat you will actually eat. Sorted that way, the beef case reorders considerably.

Computed from this week’s advertised prices in the Midwest. Yields are typical figures for each cut cooked to a normal doneness; cook something longer and it will lose more.

What the ranking tells you

The table above is built from this week’s advertised prices, so the exact order moves — advertised prices are promotional, and a cut that is on ad somewhere will sit lower than usual. The patterns below hold across weeks even when individual rows shuffle.

Ground beef and the lean roasts anchor the bottom

Ground beef, bottom round, and brisket are almost always in the cheapest handful per pound of cooked meat, and chuck joins them in any week it is not carrying a premium. The lean roasts do well because their yield is high; ground beef does well because it is cheap to begin with and has no bone at all.

The braising cuts have a second advantage the table cannot show: they shred, which stretches a given weight across more servings than a cut you slice and portion, and they produce their own sauce. The catch is time rather than skill. A chuck roast is genuinely difficult to ruin as long as you give it three hours, and no amount of technique substitutes for the hours.

Stew meat is usually a tax on convenience

Pre-cubed stew meat is frequently priced above the chuck roast it was cut from, sitting a metre away in the same case, and its yield is slightly worse because the extra cut surfaces lose more. Cubing a roast takes five minutes and you can see what you are getting rather than buying an opaque mix of offcuts. Compare the two rows above before buying either — in a week when stew meat is genuinely cheaper, take it.

Short ribs are the trap

They look reasonable by the pound until you account for a 40% yield — the worst in the case — which roughly doubles their real cost and lifts them past cuts that appear far more expensive on the shelf. They went from an inexpensive braising cut to a restaurant one over about fifteen years and the price has not come back. Chuck delivers a very similar braise for a fraction of the money.

Sirloin is the steak to buy

Among cuts you would actually grill, sirloin is consistently the best value and it is not a compromise so much as a different technique: it is lean, so it wants medium-rare and thin slicing across the grain. Done that way it eats far better than its price suggests. Tri-tip and flank sit nearby and behave similarly.

Bone-in steaks hide a fifth of their price

A T-bone is around 20% bone, so its shelf price understates the cost of the meat by about a quarter — a $12 T-bone is really a $19 steak. That does not automatically make it a bad buy, since the strip steak it contains is often dearer on its own; it means the two are only comparable after the bone is accounted for, which is what the table above does. Compare the adjusted column, not the shelf column.

The number this does not capture

Yield is not the same as satisfaction. Four ounces of braised chuck in a sauce with potatoes feels like a full meal in a way four ounces of steak on a plate does not, because the braise brings its own liquid, and that liquid is a sauce you did not have to buy. Cuts that produce their own sauce are better value than even this table suggests.

Running the same arithmetic across chicken and pork is the subject of protein per dollar, and the general method is in how much food to buy per person.

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