Sloppy Joes
In general, we call for 1 pound of ground beef to make 6 sandwiches in our sloppy joes recipes. That works out to 3 ounces of ground beef per sandwich. Depending on the size of your bun and how meaty you like your sandwich, you can increase or decrease that amount an ounce or two either way. Based on the 3-ounce guideline, purchase this much ground beef to serve your crowd. To be safe, go ahead and round up to the nearest full pound, if you like.
10 sandwiches = 30 ounces or just under 2 pounds ground beef15 sandwiches = 45 ounces or 2¾ pounds ground beef20 sandwiches = 60 ounces or 3¾ pounds ground beef25 sandwiches = 75 ounces or 4⅔ pounds ground beef
Burgers
Our Test Kitchen uses a range of 1 to 1½ pounds of ground beef to make 4 burgers. That’s 4 to 6 ounces per burger. Check out our best tips for grilled burgers and use these guidelines to know how much ground beef per burger to buy.
10 burgers = 40 to 60 ounces = 2½ to 3¾ pounds ground beef15 burgers = 60 to 90 ounces = 3¾ to 5⅔ pounds ground beef20 burgers = 80 to 120 ounces = 5 to 7½ pounds ground beef25 burgers = 100 to 150 ounces = 6¼ to 9⅓ pounds ground beef
Meatballs
To be frank, this one is tricky to determine. Cooks make their meatballs in quite different sizes and who is going to eat just one meatball?! That makes it hard to know how many meatballs per person to plan. Most of the meatball recipes from our Test Kitchen use between ⅓ and ½ ounce ground meat (we usually use a mix of a couple of different ground meats) per meatball. Certainly we’ve seen much larger meatballs than that, but sticking to our usual amounts (and assuming you’re using all ground beef), here are the numbers.
30 meatballs = 10 to 15 ounces = ⅔ to about 1 pound ground beef40 meatballs = 13 to 20 ounces = ⅞ to 1¼ pounds ground beef50 meatballs = 16½ to 25 ounces = 1 to 1½ pounds ground beef60 meatballs = 20 to 30 ounces = 1¼ to 2 pounds ground beef70 meatballs = 23 to 35 ounces = 1½ to 2¼ pounds ground beef80 meatballs = 26 to 40 ounces = 1⅔ to 2½ pounds ground beef
These are just general guidelines to help determine how many pounds of hamburger to feed your crowd. Adjust as needed, but note that the amount required to make sloppy joes, burgers, and meatballs varies quite a bit to serve the same number of people.
