A Sloppy Joe For The Rest Of Us

This probably won’t come as a shock to those of you who read the Tribunal regularly, but most of the time I have no idea what I’m doing. I know I’m going to write about three sandwiches every month, and I have a good idea which sandwiches they’ll be. Our schedule does change from time to time but is currently planned out through April 2020 and after that we’ll spend at least 5 months working our way through sandwiches that were added to the List after we were already past that part of the alphabet. There’s no lack of sandwiches to write about. What I’m constantly scrambling for is, what will I write about these sandwiches? Where will I find them or how will I make them? Most importantly, at least recently: what is this sandwich’s story?

My Mom gave me a head start this month. She reads most if not all that I write on the site, and she knew that sloppy joes were coming up this month. Near the beginning of the month, she texted me this photo:

This 3×5 card contains my grandmother’s sloppy joe recipe. As you can see, the cooks in my family are not much for measuring things. The card is in rough shape, but it would be–it’s in my grandmother’s handwriting. Grandma wrote out several recipes for my mother on 3×5 cards like this one, when mom was a young wife and I was a wee baby, almost 50 years ago.

With that pedigree, I couldn’t not make this recipe. But I knew I’d probably try some other paths as well. Mostly homemade though–I’ve never ordered a sloppy joe in a restaurant that I recall, though you’ll see them on a menu now and then. My friend Mike pointed out to me that White Castle is even serving sloppy joe sliders now.

Still, I figured I’d make grandma’s recipe, maybe do a head-to-head comparison against a commercial brand of sloppy joe sauce or two, and call it a day. How much could there be to say about sloppy joes?

These sandwiches, they’ll surprise you sometimes.

I got the skinny from Mom on the approximate amounts she used making grandma’s recipe and ended up with 1 onion, 1 green pepper, and 1 celery stalk, each finely diced, along with a clove of garlic.

These went into a cast iron pan along with a pound of ground beef and cooked until the beef was done and the vegetables had softened.

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There was not any excess liquid to remove, as I was using a somewhat lean mix of ground beef, so I simply added the tablespoon of chili powder and a 15 oz can of tomato puree.

I let this simmer until it had reduced just a bit, seasoned it and then served it in hamburger buns.

This was easily recognizable to me as the sloppy joe of my childhood. The bell pepper forward flavor, the chunks of onion, the celery that never quite gets soft enough while cooking. It’s spicy though–I feel like Mom probably didn’t add a whole tablespoon of chili powder when she made it, or if she did she used a less potent chili powder than I did.

Frankly, I could have stopped right here. This is what I think of as a sloppy joe. But the perverse child in me who always wanted Mom to make me a Manwich instead decided to try that.

Making the manwich was easy, and I followed the instructions to a T, including demanding that my family address me as Chef once the sauce had been added to the browned ground round.

The “chunky” style of Manwich sauce I bought had some visible pieces of pepper in it, but was otherwise highly kid-friendly. It was sweet–not Sweet Baby Ray’s sweet, but it tasted quite a bit like Arby’s sauce, and not in a good way.

I would take grandma’s recipe over the stuff from a can any day.

So Where Do Sloppy Joes Come From, Anyway?

There are 2 competing theories as to the origin of the sloppy joe. The one that until now has always appealed to me is the Iowa origin. A cook in Sioux City Iowa–one assumes his name was Joe–added tomato sauce to that state’s signature loose-meat sandwich recipe and something new was born. Since I grew up in a town with multiple Maid-Rite locations, this origin spoke to me. It felt familiar; I felt included.

The other origin though, takes us back to our previous post, on the New Jersey style Sloppy Joe. As discussed therein, there is a famous bar in Havana, Cuba, patronized largely by Americans through much of its history, called Sloppy Joe’s. To continue the story, there is another bar in Key West, Florida, also called Sloppy Joe’s. Ernest Hemingway, who frequented the Havana bar while staying in Cuba, visited the Key West bar often in the 1930s, when it was called first the Blind Pig and then the Silver Slipper. He recommended the name change to Sloppy Joe’s.

Two very different sandwiches, ultimately named after the same bar? It sounds ludicrous, and yet… The national dish of Cuba is a type of pot roast called ropa vieja. It consists of skirt steak, cooked until it falls to shreds in a mixture of tomato sauce, beef stock, onion, and bell peppers. It is normally served over rice but here in the US is often put in a sandwich roll and pressed like a Cubano.

That… sounds familiar, no? To confirm, I stopped by the nearest Cuban sandwich shop to my house, Taste of Havana Cafe in Burbank, IL, and tried their rendition of the ropa vieja sandwich.

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There are things to like about Taste of Havana Cafe and things that they could improve. I try to mostly talk about what I like on this blog, and this sandwich was one such thing. The shredded beef of the ropa vieja formed a matrix that held in the highly savory sauce, and what it didn’t hold soaked into the sturdy pressed Cuban bread. The only condiment on the sandwich was a single swipe of mayonnaise, and it needed nothing else. It was fantastic.

It tasted quite a bit like my grandma’s sloppy joe recipe. Oh, the texture was different of course. But the flavors were there, enhanced for the most part–beefier, more savory, more vibrant and complex, yet less spicy. A touch sweeter, but not sugary sweet–possibly sweeter from the use of red and orange bell peppers instead of green ones, or the onions may have been more caramelized. Could it be that the perfect sloppy joe recipe will be found in a ropa vieja recipe?

Starting Again

Another day, another pound of ground beef.

This time, though, I browned the beef in a hot pan first, then removing it and leaving the drippings, in which I sauteed a combination of finely diced sweet onion, red, orange, and green bell pepper, shredded carrots, and about four or five times as much garlic as grandma’s recipe called for.

Doing it this way allowed me to get some nice brown color to the meat. When cooking the meat with the vegetables, the moisture from the vegetables keeps the meat from getting that hard sear that provides so much flavor and texture. By adding the ground beef all at once, in one or two big clumps, and letting it cook for a minute before starting to break it up, I get some of the same benefit that a good sear gives a braised roast.

Before adding the aromatic vegetables to the pan, I lowered the heat somewhat, allowing me to cook the vegetables longer, deglazing the pan occasionally with a bit of beef stock, and letting the sweet flavors of these vegetables come out.

After the vegetables had cooked long enough, I mixed in the cooked ground beef and spices.

For spices, I used a teaspoon each of cumin, oregano, and paprika, along with a quarter teaspoon of clove, a bay leaf, and a couple dried peppers. I dried these peppers with a dehydrator last fall, and they consist of a mixture of goat horn, Thai, and serrano peppers from our garden.

In addition to a 15 oz can of tomato puree, I also added a cup of beef stock, to replicate the extra beefy flavor of the ropa vieja. I also added 2 tsp of Worcestershire sauce, to sub in for the salted anchovies that often provide a savory boost to ropa vieja recipes in the Caribbean.

This mixture was simmered for 45 minutes or so, to reduce the sauce to a sloppy joe consistency, before being seasoned with perhaps 1.5tsp of salt and 1/2tsp of black pepper.

To serve, instead of squishy white hamburger buns, I used “petite Kaiser rolls” that I found in the bakery section of my local grocery store. The Kaiser style roll has firmer crust than a standard hamburger bun, which I thought would help the sandwich keep its shape better.

The finished product:

This was, as you may be imagining, a very good sloppy joe.

The sweetness from the carrots, the sweeter red and orange peppers and sweet Vidalia-style onion did help. It could use a touch more sweetness. I understand some ropa vieja makers add sugar to their recipes, but I’d like to avoid that if possible. I’m also missing something, some vague additional umph that made the ropa vieja pop, perhaps a splash of white vinegar or a little bit of chopped up green olive, as one often sees in ropa vieja.

The petite Kaiser rolls were a mixed bag. The crust did help the roll keeps its shape better; however, the more open crumb of the Kaiser roll took on more liquid than the hamburger buns did. The buns held together, but these were every bit as sloppy as any other joe I’ve had.

It’s so close to what I’m looking for. It’s almost there. I plan to keep tweaking it, and my next iteration will use a few of the ideas I mentioned above. In the meantime, here is the recipe for this batch. It was almost perfect.