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| Gochujang gives this sloppy joe an extra bit of flavor. |
Warmed ground beef and sauce on a bun? Or shredded beef with not much sauce? Or some combination in between? Everyone seems to have grown up with their own definition of sloppy joes, loose meats, Maid Rites or taverns. In my family, we had taverns, which is how we referred to the same sauced ground meat sandwich other families around home called sloppy joes. We attributed this to our mother growing up in Des Moines, but I also see references to others thinking of taverns as being more like what I'm told Maid Rites were like, but never having been exposed to the chain, I couldn't verify that. I saw one claim that the tavern name came from a local restaurant named the Tavern, but given that my mother's childhood predated that restaurant's existence, I'm a tad skeptical.
At any rate, whatever you call them and however you choose to prepare them, at heart they are a simple way to fix a warm meal for a crowd, and easy to make ahead and keep warm in a slow cooker, making them a busy mom's uncomplicated way to get a kid-approved meal that could keep until whenever practice was over.
They are an unpretentious comfort food it there ever was one, and really don't need to be messed with. Of course, cooks gotta tinker, so I thought I'd explore some variations as an excuse to have a bite of nostalgia. All four of these are way better than school cafeteria sloppy joes, although that was comparatively edible as school meals went.
Gochujang sloppy joes
From Bon Appetit by Hana Asbrink in February 2023. They allege it serves 4. I would say it serves 10. See takeaway below.
This recipe smacks to me of how I used to approach making meatloaf when my mother put it on the menu. It showed up on the menu a lot, since we raised cattle, and it was not my favorite dish since the basic recipe seemed so very, very bland. So I would try to dump the contents of various condiments into the meat mixture in hopes of spicing it up. I can't say as it accomplished that, but it didn't make it any worse, at any rate. I was limited to the spice rack offerings and condiments of a Midwestern farm kitchen in the 1970s, so there was a limit to what I could get up to. No gochujang in sight.
Ingredients
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 pound ground beef
Kosher salt, divided
1 green bell pepper, seeded and chopped
1 medium onion, finely chopped
6 to 8 garlic cloves, minced
3 tablespoons gochujang
2 tablespoons ketchup
1 tablespoon soy sauce or tamari
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 tablespoon dark brown sugar
1 teaspoon yellow mustard
1 15-ounce can tomato sauce
¼ cup water
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
Buns for serving
Method
Heat oil in a large deep pot. Add ground beef and brown until mostly cooked. Push to the side of the pot and add green pepper, onion and garlic. Season with salt and pepper. Cook over medium heat until vegetables are softened. Add gochujang, ketchup, soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, brown sugar, mustard, tomato sauce and water. Cook, uncovered, until mixture tightens to a thick sauce; you don't want this runny. Remove from heat and add balsamic vinegar. Taste and adjust seasoning as needed. Serve on hamburger buns or potato rolls.
Rating: I still say this list of ingredients looks like the result of a condiment dump or cleanup, but it's a perfectly tasty one. Not spicy, but flavorful. Better than the taverns/sloppy joes I remember from school days. There are definitely worse ways to use up the condiments lurking in the door of your refrigerator. I froze the leftovers in the one-cup portion silicon freezer trays and thaw one of the cups when we want a no-fuss lunch.
Veggie sloppy joes
From Better Homes & Gardens, July/August 2024 issue. Serves 10 quite amply, maybe even 12. I actually made this recipe before the other three which led me down the sloppy joe rabbit hole to refresh my memory of the meaty version to see how they compared.
Ingredients
1½ cups brown lentils, rinsed and drained
½ brown rice
1 cup chopped carrot
½ cup chopped onion
1 garlic clove, minced
1 tablespoon yellow mustard
1 tablespoon molasses
½ teaspoon cayenne pepper
½ teaspoon salt
4 cups chicken broth
8 ounces cremini mushrooms, chopped
1 15-ounce can tomato sauce
2 tablespoons cider vinegar
10 hamburger buns, toasted
Pickled unions and lettuce for optional toppings
Method
Combine lentils, rice, carrot, onion, garlic, mustard, molasses, cayenne, salt and chicken broth in a large slow cooker. Heat on high for 3½ to 4 hours or on low for 6 to 7 hours. Add tomato sauce, mushrooms and vinegar and cook for another half hour. Serve on toasted buns.
Rating: Well, it's certainly got the sloppy part nailed. Definitely not a good candidate for finger food, since so much of it escapes. Dave refers to these as faux joes or loose lentils. He liked the flavor, but found them a challenge to consume since so much sploots out the sides. It's one of those sandwiches you really can't put down once you pick it up because of structural integrity concerns. The problem was eased a bit when I dialed back the filling to bun ratio with the leftovers to what I considered to be a more normal amount; they're plenty filling.
They don't taste that much like meat sloppy joes, but they are reasonably tasty, and apparently smell that way too. I opted to make these on high so we could have a lunch that didn't require much kitchen prep time while we had workers in the house finally repairing a plumbing disaster. When they departed, they said they were going to have to get it written into their next contract that there should be no crock pot meals being made while they're on the job site so they aren't tortured by smelling warm food. I wonder if they would have felt that way if they'd known it was lentils.
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| Definitely sloppy. |
Leftover notes: It reheats just fine. I opted to store some of the leftovers in some souper cubes so we can opt for some warm comfort food on short notice. Just remember to provide lots of napkins or else a spoon. Having since made the gochujang version, I'm curious to know if adding some of that to this lentil version would amp up the flavor to the point where it would be a more fair fight in a taste comparison between the meaty-but-meatless lentil version and standard meat versions. I did find that mashing up some of the lentils helped it bind together a bit more.
Sloppy Janes
I wanted to try another meatless version just to give it another chance, to see if the reason the meat version was so much better than the lentil-based version was the meat itself or the spice profile. This version from "Vegetarian Heartland" by Shelly Westerhausen seemed like a decent bet.
Note: If you opt to make the pickles, you'll need to start this days ahead. I'm not going to say they're required, but I will report that you won't mind if you do, even though the need to take the very simple steps to make them delayed me making these for far too long. It's so unpredictable when I'll feel lazy in the kitchen.
Ingredients
1 24-ounce jar dill pickle spears
2 cups sugar
2 cinnamon sticks
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 medium onion, diced
2 celery stalks, diced
2 medium carrots, diced
3 garlic cloves, minced
2 teaspoons ground cumin
1 teaspoon dried oregano
2 cups broth or water
½ teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
1 teaspoon tamari
2 teaspoons seasoned rice wine vinegar
1 teaspoon honey
1 6-ounce container tomato paste
½ cup finely chopped walnuts
1 15-ounce can pinto beans, drained and rinsed
1 15-ounce can kidney beans, drained and rinsed
Hamburger buns (figure on 8 to 10, depending on how full you fill them, we used 10)
Method
Drain the pickles and cut into bite-size chunks. Place back in the same jar and cover with water. Let soak for 24 hours, then drain and place into a large jar. Combine sugar and 1 cup of water until dissolved and pour mixture over the pickles. Tuck in the cinnamon sticks. Cover and refrigerate at least 48 hours to allow the flavors to blend. The recipe notes that they'll keep up to 6 months, but once you try them, you'll pretty quickly find uses for them.
For the filling, heat olive oil in a large deep pan. Cook onion, celery and carrots over medium heat until very soft. Add garlic and cumin and cook for 1 minute. Add oregano, broth, red pepper flakes, tamari, vinegar, honey, tomato paste, walnuts and beans and simmer until it thickens into serving consistency. Season with salt and pepper if desired. Serve on buns and top with the pickles.
Rating: OK, so these work on a lot of levels. It's kind of like going to a place that you know has a good bean burger when that's what you're in the market for; it's not a meat burger, but it's good at being what it is. It definitely brings the flavor profile. And those pickles add an interesting touch. I'm not super into sweet pickles, but this kind of splits the difference, and the cinnamon pairs with the sloppy joe spices for a nice effect. Would definitely consider making this one again.
Sloppy Ottos
And then there's Sloppy Joe's cousin, Sloppy Otto. I ran across this one online and found a number of variations. They didn't always agree on the meat, but there seemed to be a greater tendency to use pork sausage. Sauerkraut and pretzel buns seemed to be a constant, but they varied on whether you added cheese to the assembled bun and melted it. There was wide variation in the ratio of kraut to meat. Sour cream crept in, or didn't. One suspects there are as many recipes for this as there are German great-grandmothers.
Here's where I landed. It's probably closest to the Taste of Home version as any other.
Ingredients
1 pound bulk spicy pork sausage
1½ cups sauerkraut, well drained
2 medium bell peppers of the color of your choice, chopped
1 medium onion, chopped
Pretzel buns for serving (8 to 10 depending on meat serving size of choice)
Sliced Muenster cheese
Method
Preheat oven to 350.
In a large pan, brown sausage. Add sauerkraut, peppers and onion. Cook over medium heat until vegetables are tender.
Dish meat onto buns. Top with a cheese slice. Bake for 4 minutes or so or until cheese is melted.
Rating: The addition of cheese to this version makes them much less sloppy since the melted cheese helps hold the mixture in place. The flavor is going to depend on the spiciness of your sausage, and I would avoid a bland cheese. These weren't bad, or anything, but they do fall into the category of worth trying but not worth repeating unless you had that German great-grandmother who made these.
Takeaway
I'd kind of written taverns/sloppy joes permanently off my menu as kid food, and we no longer eat much in the way of beef, but maybe I was a bit hasty. Given that each recipe yields a lot of servings that you can freeze to pull out later, they count as a pretty good meal prep option.
And whatever you call them, there seems to be one other point of contention: how much they serve. Ordinarily I quibble with the number of servings in a recipe in the other direction: that they're way too stingy, but the original specified serving amount in these recipes were off wildly in the other direction from my perspective. If you tried to pile on that much meat it would immediately squelch out when you pick it up and result in a soggy sandwich that instantly loses integrity. Dave remembers being served the same quantity per bun as I do, so perhaps it was a Midwestern church basement standard serving size we were used to. It was farm country, so it's not like people were always trying to stretch the meat since that was one thing for which you didn't have to pay retail. I don't know how to account for that disconnect, but it was consistent across all the recipes.
