You’re not going to like this then. My recipe is as follows:
(1) Brown ground beef
(2) Add ketchup until you get a sloppy joe like consistency
(3) Add plain yellow mustard until it tastes right
(4) Serve on white buns (nothing fancy…white bread if that’s all you’ve got)
I honestly don’t like them any other way than the way my poor ol’ mama used to slap them together. Despise Manwich.
I am learning what a broad range of things people classify as “Sloppy Joes”.
This sort of thing is one of the reasons I love this Board.
Yeah- I had no idea! Forget the chili cookoff, there needs to be a Sloppy Joe cookoff!
Not really. I generally despise ketchup, but this is one place I will use it.
Basically, for me a sloppy joe is ground meat + homemade tomato-based barbecue sauce (you know, the stuff without the Liquid Creosote, I mean “Smoke.”) Depending on my mood, my (semi-)homemade sauce may start with ketchup (or mix of ketchup and tomato sauce) and a good dose of cider vinegar, a little brown sugar, and then I build from there. Prepared mustard is a perfectly acceptable addition, as well. As for spicing, I usually like a bit of cayenne and a kick of clove, perhaps a dash of Worcestershire. I usually like diced onions and bell or chili peppers fried with my ground meat, as well.
Not at all. The ketchup adds a sweet/tangy element to it (it’s only 1/4 cup for a pound of ground meat).
You SJ purists are going to hate me for this…
Chop up a bunch of onions and start frying them.
Take some leftover cooked meat - like uneaten chicken or defrosted Thanksgiving turkey. Whack it with a knife or cleaver until you get lots of smallish chunks. Dump into the onions and brown.
Squirt BBQ sauce and ketchup into the pan - around 3 times as much of the former than the latter. Use a lot, until it’s basically a stew. I prefer using Jack Daniels BBQ sauce, if I have any.
Add salt, pepper and tabasco.
Serve in a white bread roll of some sort. I prefer baguettes - why not be classy?
My mom made them the same way, except she added a can of Campbell’s Chicken Gumbo. I have no idea why or where that came from, but it’s the only way I like them.
The trick is the right consistency and right…brownish color.
To each his own, but to me ketchup has altogether the wrong sort of taste.
But you haven’t tried it, right?
This is almost exactly what I typically do for homemade sloppy joe, except that I usually leave out the peppers (either variety) because we have pepper-haters in this household. I usually include garlic, also.
Ketchup? Tried it plenty of times.
I’ll have to check when I get home to see if I have anything written down, but my sauce base is mostly a mixture of ketchup and BBQ sauce. I add a lot of other solids, too: Peppers, onions, green tomato relish, etc.
And it’s absolutely essential to add lots and lots of garlic. You will need more garlic than you think. I’ve found that, when my joes seem to be lacking something I can’t quite put my finger on, it’s almost always not enough garlic. Oh, and add half the garlic when you’re browning up the meat and onions, and the other half right at the very end: You get very different flavors out of it that way, and both are good.
Nice dodge 
. Many of the recipes in this thread call for a combination of barbeque sauce, tomato sauce, sugar, worcestershire, and the like. Ketchup is just tomatoes, sugar and vinegar, so I have no issue with it in this dish. Slogging it all over perfectly innocent hotdogs and French fries that did nothing to deserve such a horrible fate is a different story.
Yeah, chili sauce (which to me is just slightly “grown-up” ketchup) is a pretty standard base for sloppy joes (that’s what’s called for in Joy of Cooking), but I usually don’t have chili sauce around, so I use tarted-up ketchup instead.
Ground Beef, onion, clove of garlic, Heinz Chili sauce, vinegar, and mustard.
Sloppy Joes are the only reason I keep those last 2 ingredients around.
In a fit of nostalgia I swung by the store today and picked up some onion rolls, ground beef and a can of Manwich and made Sloppy Joes. It was solid, but not quite as flavorful as in my childhood memories. I’ve occasionally made an even lazier man’s version where I just mix some spicy BBQ sauce and ketchup in with some ground beef which is tasty if a bit on the cloyingly sweet and salty side.
So, how do you guys like it?
There’s nothing wrong with Manwich that a small, finely minced onion can’t solve. Saute gently, and add it to the Manwich when you add it to the browned ground beef.
That is one are where my cooking fails miserably. Every once in a while I get a craving for one and think “I have all the ingredients for the basic plot, how hard can it be?”
And inevitably I end up with a horribly disappointing spaghetti sauce sandwich.