Teriyaki Ground Beef Stir Fry

You’re going to love this easy 4-ingredient teriyaki ground beef stir fry with zucchini and mushrooms. Paired with a lower calorie yum yum sauce and a blend of cauliflower and jasmine rice, it’s perfect for meal prep or healthy weeknight dinners.

Teriyaki Beef Stir Fry

This is a short and sweet recipe, with only 4 ingredients in the primary stir fry. Here’s a look at everything you’ll need:

• 96/4 Ground Beef – Can’t make a stir fry with ground beef without it, right? That said, ground chicken, turkey, or pork would all work fine as well.
• Chopped Zucchini – You could add/substitute other vegetables like broccoli or green beans. Check out my sticky sweet ground beef and broccoli and sweet chili ground beef and brussels sprouts for ideas.
• Sliced Mushrooms – I used a pre-sliced blend of shiitake, oyster, and baby bella.
• Teriyaki Sauce – I used Kevin’s Natural Foods teriyaki, which has 15 calories and 2 grams of carbs per tablespoon. You could also make your own healthy teriyaki sauce or use other options like my Japanese BBQ, firecracker, Chinese five spice, or black pepper sauces.

You’ll also need a half tablespoon of oil for browning the ground beef. I typically use avocado or olive oil.

And if you wanted to add more vegetables and really add some volume to your meal, I added eight ounces of broccoli florets and diced carrots in my teriyaki turkey stir fry. Though you’ll want to slightly change the cook method by cooking the vegetables on their own before the beef.

How to Make Ground Beef Meal Prep Bowls

The recipe is one of the best ways to meal prep with ground beef I’ve ever made. It makes 5 servings made up of 8 ounces of the teriyaki ground beef stir fry, 2 tablespoons of yum yum sauce, and 3/4 cup of a rice blend.

Low Calorie Yum Yum Sauce

If you’re unfamiliar with yum yum sauce, it’s a mayo-based dipping sauce typically found in American-Japanese steakhouses. It’s tangy, sweet, and slightly spicy. There are tons of variations, but I like the following combo:

• Light Mayo
• Sriracha
• Honey
• Rice Vinegar
• Garlic Powder

You can use other ingredients like chili garlic sauce, fat free Greek yogurt, and sugar free ketchup to make it even lower calorie or adjust the flavor to your preference. To pack some extra nutrients into the sauce, check out the blended kimchi sauce in my ground beef bulgogi bowls.

Update January 2024: I now have a low calorie yum yum sauce recipe made with Greek yogurt!

As a bonus ingredient, I highly recommend adding a drizzle of the Bachan’s Japanese barbecue sauce I used for my BBQ chicken fried rice.

Cauliflower Rice Blend

Cauliflower rice is “meh” at best. But when you mix it with “real” rice, like my Tex-Mex ground beef skillet, it becomes nearly indistinguishable. This is a great way to bulk up your meals.

You can obviously play around with ratios, but I think 3 cups of cauliflower rice to 2 cups of jasmine or basmati rice is the magic number.

Assembly and Macros

The recipe makes the following:

• about 20 oz or 5 cups of rice: 510 calories, 16g protein, 106g carbs, 0g fat
• about 1/2 cup of sauce: 240 calories, 1g protein, 30g carbs, 14g fat
• about 40 oz of teriyaki ground beef: 905 calories, 95g protein, 38g carbs, 31g fat

You can tweak the amounts in each meal prep bowl to fit your macros as needed.

And that should cover it. Have a question about this teriyaki ground beef I forgot to cover? Drop it in the comments below. I hope you enjoy this recipe!