Healthy and delicious Sloppy Joe recipe prepared traditional style with fermented sauce that retains probiotics and enzymes for optimal nutrition. Serve with or without the bun.
In my experience, fermented food is one aspect of Traditional Diets that is difficult to consistently incorporate into family meals with young children in the home.
Cultured beverages like kombucha aren’t too difficult as they are typically tasty, fizzy and delightful.
Probiotic-rich, digestion-enhancing fermented foods, on the other hand, are more tricky for children to accept.
The inherently sour and sometimes tart flavor seem to overwhelm their young taste buds.
To counter this, I devised a strategy to hide fermented food in a favorite dish.
For example, a tasty Sloppy Joe sandwich is a popular dish in our home.
When I prepare it, I use grassfed beef blended with lacto-fermented ketchup.
This sneaks it into the dish in an enjoyable way that the family likely won’t even notice.
The trick is to add the cultured ketchup at the end.
This way, the probiotic sauce is only warmed and not cooked. This retains all the beneficial elements at the dinner table.
Try this homemade Sloppy Joe recipe if you’ve been encountering obstacles with cultured foods in your home.
My guess is that this is one dish they won’t complain about at all!
Traditional Sloppy Joe Recipe (bun optional)
Delicious Sloppy Joe recipe prepared traditional style with fermented sauce that retains probiotics and enzymes for optimal nutrition. Serve with or without the bun.
Ingredients
- 1 pound ground beef preferably grassfed
- 1 small onion preferably organic
- 1 garlic clove preferably organic
- 2 Tbl butter preferably grassfed
- 1/2 tsp sea salt
- 1/4 tsp pepper
- 1/2 – 1 cup homemade fermented ketchup or organic ketchup in a pinch
- 1/2 cup frozen peas optional, preferably organic
- 1/4 cup raisins optional, preferably organic
- hamburger buns optional
Instructions
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Melt butter in frying pan on medium-high heat. Add onion finely chopped and cook until it begins to caramelize (5-10 mins).
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Mix in crushed garlic, salt and pepper and mix thoroughly. Stir intermittently for 3 minutes to ensure garlic is cooked but not burned.
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Add ground beef mixing in as you go to be sure it doesn’t clump in the heat. Stir continuously for 5 minutes to ensure meat mixes evenly with onion and garlic and begins to simmer uniformly across the whole pan.
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Add optional peas and reduce heat to medium-low for 5 minutes to finish cooking all meat.
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Remove the pan from the heat and let sit for a few minutes to cool slightly. Check with a digital food thermometer to ensure temperature is at or below 117 °F/ 47 °C before adding fermented ketchup.
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Stir in ketchup (and raisins if desired) and mix thoroughly. Make sure the pan is off the heat.
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Serve Sloppy Joe over cauliflower rice, soaked rice, or sourdough buns as desired.
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Refrigerate leftovers when room temperature. Reheat gently not exceeding 117 °F/ 47 °C to preserve enzymes and probiotics in cultured ketchup.
Funny how I don’t have kids but love these posts to get my husband to eat, lol.
Ha, no, I have no problem. My kid inhales sauerkraut. She eats anything. She won’t drink raw cow milk though because “i dont like cow milk, it’s spicy!” okay?
I bet you could ground liver into this! Make it even more nutritious 🙂
Sorry I should have done that below the soaked corn article. Seeing this new recipe reminded me of how I am trying to wait patiently for this also.
Kim.
You did an article on how to soak cornmeal in dolomite. You mentioned a follow up on doing your corn bread recipe. I am unsure what to do with the soaked cornmeal once it is wet. I really would love to see how you make cornbread.
Thanks,
Kim.
Glad you mentioned this. I’ve been wanting this recipe too! I just bought some corn to grind, but now I don’t know what to do with it! 🙂
Great idea! Something I also do to add to the benefit, is add a bit of liver to all ground beef recipes. The kids don’t even notice the flavor and I feel better that they have some organ meat in their diet.
Dear Sarah,
Could you please recommend a brand of sourdough buns? I use buns from Berlin Natural Bakery but they are not sourdough…
Thanks!!
Hey Sarah,
I have 6 children. The last 3 of which were raised eating plain yogurts, kraut juice and such from a very young age (first foods sorta thing) and they all LOVE fermented veggies; especially my youngest. Pickled beets are her absolute favorite. So if you start a baby on sour things they are more likely to not just tolerate, but LOVE fermented veggies. Beets are a very easy intro since they are naturally sweet. All of my kids like fermented veggies though.
My husband and I just sit amazed sometimes at the things they will eat. When my mother came to visit (who has a strong sweet tooth) she kept mentioning how everything we ate was so sour (our salad dressing, our smoothies – so I added stevia to her portion). I just laughed. None of us even consider the sourness. Funny how our taste buds can change.
My five children (presently 3 yrs to 10 yrs) also love fermented veggies so much that I usually cannot keep a jar of anything from being consumed the moment it is out of the fridge and placed on the table- sliced broccoli stems, yellow and green string beans, sauerkraut, pickling cukes, beets, zucchini, etc…. They love it all. They also love to drink the brine, and I give brine whenever they seem like they are not as well as usual. Of course they also love kombucha. I have also lacto-fermented beef and eggs, and ketchup and salsa, which are beloved as well. Our first fermentation was sauerkraut- 7 years ago- and they all loved it right away, and whenever I have added something new, they have loved that as well. It is, from my experience, not a given that young children do not enjoy lacto-fermented foods. =)
Sure, we eat it sometimes with no bun too. You can also mix in some brown rice pasta … keep that in mind after you start reintroducing grains after you’ve healed your gut on GAPS. Brown rice is the first grain to introduce.
We eat something similar to this all the time on GAPS. Never thought of adding lacto-fermented ketchup. Great idea!
Obviously without the bun… we call it noodle-less spaghetti =P
You might want to try shirataki noodles too.