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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.
Fermented beverages like kombucha aren’t too difficult as they are typically tasty, fizzy and delightful.
Probiotic rich, digestion soothing fermented foods, on the other hand, are a completely different animal for children to accept. The inherently sour and sometimes tart flavors seem to overwhelm their young taste buds and turn them off even in the small, condimental amounts used by Ancestral Societies.
I’ve had better luck over the years getting creative when a brickwall is firmly erected rather than trying to force the issue.
Homemade Sloppy Joe with Probiotic Rich Sauce
There is no doubt that a tasty sloppy joe sandwich is one of the most beloved of all time for children. In our home, I make it with grassfed beef and lacto-fermented ketchup to sneak it into the children’s dinner in an enjoyable way that they don’t mind at all.
The trick to this particular sloppy joes recipe is to add homemade fermented ketchup so that the probiotic rich sauce isn’t actually cooked and therefore retains all the beneficial probiotics and enzymes once served at the dinner table.
Try this homemade sloppy joe recipe if you’ve been encountering obstacles introducing digestion enhancing fermented foods to your family. This is one dish they won’t complain about at all!
Traditional Sloppy Joe Recipe (bun optional)
This traditional sloppy joe recipe using an easily made enzyme rich fermented sauce is a tasty and easy way to get probiotics into your family at the dinner table. Use with or without buns as desired.
Ingredients
- 1 pound ground beef preferably grassfed
- 1 small onion preferably organic
- 1 clove garlic preferably organic
- 2 Tbl butter preferably grassfed
- 1/2 tsp sea salt
- 1/4 tsp pepper
- 1/2 - 1 cup ketchup preferably homemade or organic
- 1/2 cup frozen peas optional, preferably organic
- 1/4 cup raisins optional, preferably organic
- 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 - allow to sit for 5 minutes more while still warm but not hot to mix the flavors.
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Serve the sloppy joes immediately over cauliflower rice, sprouted or sourdough buns or alone as desired. Refrigerate leftover sloppy joes after a complete cooldown.
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Refrigerate leftovers after a complete cooldown. Reheat gently not exceeding 117 F/ 47 C to preserve enzymes and probiotics in fermented ketchup.
If you’ve tried this recipe using a fermented sloppy joe sauce already, what did you think? Please let us know your thoughts in the comments section.
Hey Oliver, don’t you have a job or something you should be doing??? Instead of annoying people…
I don’t find him annoying. I like/need the diversity of ideas
This is the largest part of what I do. It is in part extended research, and getting the word out. My name is Oliver if you see it just don’t read what Oliver has to say. Annoying is a relative term.
I will always “annoy” people when I speak to either what they may not know, be familiar with, or like. I can’t be too concerned with those who i annoy, if my genuine intent is not that at all. And I know the diference..
There are so many annoying posts on this and every blog – even by the hosts. We move on, we be respective, we engauge and we are polite – and hopefully, we all learn. That’s why I’m here? What are you doing here? How is it you have time in the day to read something that annoys you and remark with ill will – what’s that about?
If you disagree, that’s fine. You may be annoyed with my refusal to be felled by stats and links that say this that or another. As one of your fellow posters mentioned there is a link to make a case for evey argument. I tend not to deal in the world of links and studies and tests etc.
I acknowledge chemical realities – both lab wise and in the natural world. Those things usually win out over “links”.
Whatever it is that i do that annoys you, I am an old dog, and like you i probably won’t be able to change much – Actually I have grown over the years – why just last year this response could have be laced with all manner of vile, unnecesary comments. I have found that that truly can derail a thread – I am here to learn from others while sharing what I know – pretty much like everyone else – we’re all experts and critics here.
If you don’t like or agree with me, that still is no need for mean remarks. I was having a spirited conversation with the other poster – it might have been contentious but we didn’t call each other names.
I am not going to use this new fangled ketchup idea. It doesn’t sound great. I put fresh tomatoes on my pasta. With garlic and some basil and olive oil.
Sounds great! I can think of a number of dishes I could add this ketchup to, just before serving. I think pretty much any tomato based dish would work, like spaghetti. Very good tip!
Great recipe I am saving this one. I have not made ketchup yet, but plan to.
I “hide” (by not telling them) the healthy stuff in our food, like milk kefir, and they don’t notice. My daughter will drink kombucha all day, but with my son, I have to mix it it with another beverage or food, he’s 11, she’s 7. She’s more inclined to like something because I do, but the boy just won’t cooperate so I have to be sneaky! He’s a skinny thing, but he lacks majorly in nutrition. (We’ve just recently been enlightened about real food in the last several months, wish I had learned about it before having kids.)
Jessica, with all due respect to Sarah and you – there are no nutrients in the above meal. I am thin – and we shouldn’t confuse skinny with being malnutritioned – calories and nutrients are two different things.
Now if your son is eating soda and chips all day there could be a problem – I suspect you don’t let him do that. I am sure he also likes at least one type of fruit (banana, pineapple, watermelon). Those have tons of nutrients in them.
That tea does not. There is no vitamin – A, any of the B’s, C, D and on through Z that can withstand 212 degress of boiling water – if that is how your kombucha tea is made (as opposed to sun dried and the old camp method where the tea leaf leaches out it’s nutrients into a jug of water over a day or two at room temperature. This leaching process still kills off many vitamins – minerals can hang around in the water which will be drunk.
Perhaps there is a fun salad or combo fruit and veggies salad that can provide real nutrients in a stealthy manner. Or a fruit and veggie smoothie. Raw nuts will provide good protein and good fats.
That ketchup thing is so damaging to the dense amount of nutrients that a tomato has to offer originally. It’s a waste of fine tomatoes – and money if you can’t afford it and you need to nutrate your kids properly on a budget, which may not be the case for you but is the case for so many parents across this nation..
@Julia That’s awesome!!!!
My husband isn’t a fan of ground meat, so we don’t eat many burgers or sloppy joe’s around here, but I’m thinking that lacto-fermented ketchup would be fantastic in a chicken and tomato-based pot of chili. Served over a soaked cornbread? Oh man – delicious!
*dessert
@Rachel Perry Hanses. Oh Goodness. That is so adorable! It’s spicy? Kids crack me up.
Yeah, seems like I’m one of the lucky moms. My boys ask for MORE fermented veggies, sometimes even after desert! Especially sauerkraut. In fact, my oldest hated vinegar pickles, but loved lacto fermented pickles right away! Makes it nice and easy for me!
My family loves Bubbies pickle relish and kraut and eat them with most every meal and have seen an amazing improvement in our digestion. I know they are not organic but both are raw and lacto fermented with only 3 ingredients, cabbage or cucumbers, water and salt. I’m scared to ask :), but am curious, what is your opinion of these? Are they OK? You haven’t mentioned them though they are widely available and affordable (and so tasty!) so I figure there must be something wrong with them.
Bubbie’s pure kosher dills, dill relish, and pickled green tomatoes are listed in the 2012 Shopping Guide of WAPF under the “Good” category of lacto-fermented vegetables. It acknowledges that they are non-organic but are vegetables cultured with raw vinegar and so okay.
Traci – The Acetic acid in the raw vinegar (or any vinegar) will degrade most if not all of the nutrient molecules in your vegetables including and especially proteins and amino acids.
Bubbies does not contain any vinegar, raw or otherwise (it clearly says this on the label) and is traditionally lacto fermented using only salt and well water. Also, wouldn’t that mean you shouldn’t use raw apple cider vinegar?
I use all types of vinegars- I don’t really sweat the details, because when i am in a certain cooking or eating mode I don’t get caught up in all of the molecular nutrient damage thing – I just enjoy the meal for flavor and texture.
When I am in “Nutrient Damage” mode then yes, vinegars will impact negatively many nutrient molecules. If we want a “healthy” salad, for me that means raw elements – only. Lemons, wines, vinegars, and even the acidic tonmato can and will impact the other nutrient molecules.
Anytime you do something to a raw entity, brining, pickleing, fermenting, steaming, frying, baking, marinating, dehydrating, curing, and a host of other ways to “preserve” something, you will invariably devalue the nutrient content. This will always be the case. Man and science can never enhance or augment a nutrient molecule or any whole food.
A raison will have some nutrients but it won’t have the same as a grape, it won’t have as many either. The pickle doesn’t have a fraction of the wonderful things a cucumber has – and for health benefits, the cucumber is amazing.
Throwing salt into any mix will always cause a chemical reaction (s), one that usually yields a less nutrient dense product.
Actually, dill pickles have more vitamin C than cucumbers.
Bubbies is a lifesaver. Its the only brand of sauerkraut that I will use if I’m all out of my homemade kind. Homemade is best but but Bubbies does a very good job.
I knew you would be the one to know 🙂