The Absolute Best Beef For Old School Sloppy Joes

There are certain nostalgic meals many home chefs love to prepare and cook on repeat including oven-baked macaroni and cheese, fried chicken, and sloppy Joes. Though if you tend to enjoy making sloppy Joes the most, besides perfecting your recipe's sweet and savory sauce, you need to make sure you're choosing the right beef for the job. Luckily, Chowhound was able to get some exclusive advice on the subject from Dan Pelosi, the author of "Let's Party: Recipes and Menus for Celebrating Every Day."

According to Pelosi, the best ground beef to use for homestyle sloppy Joes is "85% lean ground beef! The extra 5% of fat keeps the beef tender and juicy throughout cooking." Unlike New Jersey-style sloppy Joes, which are composed of deli meat, Swiss cheese, coleslaw, and Russian dressing, the most common recipe for sloppy Joes includes a simmer sauce made of ketchup, mustard, onion, and lean ground beef. If you want your next batch of this hearty dish to be perfectly "sloppy," choosing beef with the right amount of fat makes all the difference.

Unlike ground beef that has only 10% fat, beef that has a fat percentage within the 15% to 20% range has more natural flavor and adds more moisture to sauce-based dishes like lasagna, tacos, and sloppy Joes. Particularly, when it comes to sloppy Joes, Pelosi adds, "The beef is the main character of this dish, so getting quality meat that you could season with salt and pepper and still be happy will be your best bet."

So you don't run the risk of losing any of the precious fat from your beef during preparation, cook your sloppy Joe mixture over medium to low heat. While the slightly fattier ground beef lends some extra moisture, this will prevent your meat from drying out. Furthermore, in order to build a sauce that has a significant amount of flavor, begin preparing your recipe by first sautéing any aromatic ingredients like chopped onions, peppers, and garlic. This helps layer the flavors of your sloppy Joe mixture from the start.

Then, before you incorporate the beef, cookbook author Dan Pelosi recommends taking one extra step. "A trick I learned from an uncle in my family was mixing the beef with a little baking soda before cooking. He said it helps keep the beef juicy through cooking...and he's right!" For every pound of beef, you can prepare and add a slurry composed of a ½ teaspoon of baking soda and 1 tablespoon of water.

Last but not least, when it comes to serving, for supreme flavor, use a simple topping that tempers the richness of sloppy Joes, such as crisp pickles or tangy coleslaw. To serve this classic dish with more of a twist, you can also take sloppy Joes to the next level with one spicy meat swap like chorizo. Since chorizo is pork sausage, its fat content is on the higher side, making it a worthwhile choice for equally tender and extra flavorful sloppy Joes.