There was a sloppy joe thread a year or three ago that induced me to make them for dinner one night. My gf was impressed, not having had one in a millennia or two. It started a bunch of comfort-food dinners, including Spaghetti Chicken (my gf’s entry), Barbecued Ham Sammies, Matzo ball Soup, and Chopped Liver (my three contributions).
I was wandering through the store a few weeks back (around the time the OP posted this thread, actually) and thinking, “What shall I make to freeze for my oops I forgot to plan for dinner nights?” and decided I’d make some Manwich into portions to thaw-and-reheat on short notice.
And it occurred to me that the format of the bun with sloppy joe sauce leaking out the back was not condusive to my coding/gaming all-nighters at a computer keyboard. It also occurred to me that the hot dog buns on the shelf in front of me seemed to hold about the same volume of meat as the hamburger buns on the shelf next to them and they would do fine so long as I didn’t overload the sloppy mess.
So I bought hot dog buns instead of hamburger buns, made my Manwhich ‘Extra Thick and Chunky’ sloppy joes with extra thick and chunky ground sirloin, and filled eight out of twelve divots on a cupcake pan with equal portions of the mess. After freezing them for a couple hours, I dumped the portions into cupcake papers*, stuck the portions into a freezer ZipLock bag and stuck the bag in the freezer with the hot dog buns.
When I fail to plan ahead and suddenly find myself hungry in the middle of a coding (or gaming) streak, I pull a bun and a sloppy joe portion out of the freezer and let them thaw for 45min on the counter. The meat is still half-frozen by then, so while I’m toasting the bun in a toaster oven for 3 min, I’m heating the sloppy joe mix in a ramkin (after peeling off the cupcake paper) in the microwave oven for 1 minute, stirring it, then blasting it for another 30 seconds. By the time the mix is ready, the bun is also ready.
I learned to eat hot dogs by lifting them horizontally and biting off the end. Tipping the hot dog to eat it would always let the ketchup – yeah, I prefer my hot dogs with just ketchup; Pit me for it later – slide off the back and be lost forever. So I lift the Manwich-on-a-bun horizontally, too, in order to avoid losing the sloppy-joe stuff.
I guess it’s kind-of a chili-dog without the dog?
–G!
*In a previous attempt, I discovered that lining the cupcake tin with papers first resulted in soggy paper sticking to the food later on. Freezing the mix first, then using cupcake papers later helped to keep the pre-measured portions in separate units that didn’t stick to each other in the freezer.
There was a very short-lived product in the 50s(?) called “Weiner Wagons” which were like trough shaped buns. They would have been perfect for your application.
A version that might work for the OP, or for a modification of what @Grestarian mentions:
I have a set of silicone “ice stick” trays that are designed to make frozen rods about the size of a highlighter.
I normally use them after making a big batch of saag in the slow cooker, and put it in trays and freeze. Easy to extract (comparatively) and we then wrap the rods in eggroll wrappers and pan fry for Saag eggrolls. Do the same with a pre-cooked sloppy joe (you’d probably want it to be cooked to a finer chop than usual though) and it should be easier to insert the rod into a soft roll for heating, or wrap it in whatever dough you have on hand for the same.