What’s the difference between a sloppy joe and a loose meat sandwich? What is a loose meat sandwich anyway?
I vote barbecue.
I remember eating A&W BBQ Beef sandwiches when I was a kid. (Does A&W still offer these? I haven’t eaten at one in ages.) They were basically pulled BEEF sandwiches, and tasted nothing like the Sloppy Joes I’ve known. They were absolutely delicious, however. 
I make sloppy Joe’s and tater tots maybe once a month. I grew up with Manwich, so that’s what I like, as well as the Aldi version. When the price of ground beef increased sharply, I experimented with half lentils and half ground beef. It’s quite good that way.
The ground beef is simmered in one kind of sauce or another until it’s broken down. Instead of being shaped into patties, it’s loose.
Ever try mixing the filling with mac and cheese? Heaven! 
That makes sense, of course. You basically got an ersatz chili mac then.
No. No sauce for a loose meat sandwich. The trick is to keep cooking the beef until every last bit of moisture is gone from the pan. All that should be left is the sizzle from the remaining (little) fat. The hamburger should be in little pellets, not clumped together into clods. If sauce is involved at any step I’d call it a Sloppy Joe.
I’ll have to try that sometime. How is the meat seasoned?
It’s basically a sloppy joe without the sloppy sauce. Or the sloppy joe is a loose meat sandwich with that barbecue/tomato-type sauce added to it.
LIke a Maid Rite would be your loose meat sandwich:
You add ketchup/mustard/whatever condiments you want to that.
Lightly. Mine just has some seasoned salt, pepper and some dehydrated onion flakes in with the hamburger meat. Then scoop it onto a squishy white bun, dress with mustard, ketchup and pickle chips and chow down. Maid Rite is the definitive LMS for me.
I hadn’t thought about sloppy joes in years. My mother used to make them and I hated them - I don’t know her recipe, but from what I recall of the taste she browned some beef, then threw in some finely diced green pepper, then added a very sweet barbecue sauce - not sure whether it was from a bottle or homemade. If the latter, I’m guess the recipe was mostly ketchup, sugar, and a little cider vinegar.
The result was a very sweet, unsophisticated meat sauce with membranous little bits of pepper adding a somewhat jarring texture. I believed for years that I hated BBQ sauce because I thought that the sloppy joes she made represented what BBQ sauce was supposed to taste like. (I know better now.)
Reading this thread I now believe that a sloppy Joe could be something delicious. I might give it a try, following some ideas presented here.
I’m curious. How are we defining “barbecue sauce” here? I think of it as thick, tomato based, sweetened with brown sugar, and smoke-flavored. (With maybe a little added cider vinegar or booze.) Examples in my pantry include Bull’s-Eye Bold Original and Clubhouse Wild Whiskey.
I realize there are many variations (Carolina, Texas, Montreal), but the above description covers most of them pretty well. And none of them (to my mind) can be confused with Sloppy Joe sauce.
Our favorite drive in, The Dairy Twist outside Oberlin, Ohio has them. Nicely homemade by the cook. I get several each summer, each with three dill pickle slices.Wrapped in foil and guaranteed to ruin your shirt if you aren’t careful.
For me, any type of sauce you would serve with barbecue. Typically, my barbecue sauce starts on a base of ketchup, brown sugar, vinegar, maybe mustard, maybe Worcestershire and spices. That’s pretty much exactly what goes in my sloppy joe, except I may hold off on the vinegar to keep it thicker.
Sloppy Joe sauce isn’t going to have the brown sugar, usually. It’s more tomato than sweet, although Manwich is really pushing it sugar-wise. HFCS is the #2 ingredient on the label.
I like to eat Sloppy Joe’s in hot dog buns, so much less messy. I have made them from scratch but Manwich Bold is fine for me. It’s a quick tasty dinner every once in awhile.
You can taste green pepper, onion, and garlic in Manwich, but not in any of the bottled BBQ sauces I have.
Green bell pepper has no place in any BBQ sauce. But it is a quite common ingredient in Sloppy Joes. As someone mentioned upthread, in school you could see the bits of vegetation left over from previous lunches that week.
IIRC they dipped the bun in the grease. I’ve never seen or had one…my guess was it was scraps, essentially sliced bits. So it’s more like ground beef, then?
My mom used to make Sloppy Joes once in awhile…she didn’t dump a lot of sauce in them. I’m thinking she used BBQ sauce. I don’t think she put any vegetables or other spices in them.
I’ve never made them but it gives me an idea: try making them with A-1 sauce.
I name the Adam Sandler song Lunchlady Land as the official song of this thread.