Copycat Not so Sloppy Joe Sauce (2024)

Copycat Not so Sloppy Joe Sauce here. How to make homemade sloppy joe sauce so you can make it yourself at home for your kids! Kinda’ a Manwich Copcat recipe we have used to make 3 ingredient sloppy joes for dinner for years.

What happened to Hormel Not-so-Sloppy Joe sauce you might ask. Well it is harder to find nowadays and may have disappeared from your local grocery store all together. NO worries, we have a pretty close choice for you here. Making it at home you can tweak it too to add a bit of spicy if you like. (post may contain affiliate links)

How to Make Sloppy Joe Sauce

Let me tell you that once you make this, taste it, and hear the OOhhhhhhs from your kids you will never buy canned or bottled again!! Seriously it is so easy and tastes much better than the toned down flavors at the store. NO preservatives either and you can add a bit of red pepper flakes if you want it spicy too.

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I will tell you first off we have made this for YEARS. When my kids’ friends come over and I make it they are wowed. It is my youngest daughter’s favorite meal and she makes sure she stays home for dinner if she knows this is on the menu. You can toss it with ground meat, and serve it inside buns or as sloppy joe bread bowls.

Homemade Sloppy Joe Sauce with Ketchup

Whether you are going to eat this as is without bread, served as sloppy joe sliders or open faced on toast this is the way you make the main star of the show. You first need to choose your protein and then this can be added after it has browned just a bit. NO need to mix together before that time, you can just throw it in and adjust as necessary.

You may have always used this stuff out of a can in the past. Ehhhhhh. To make this one you just mix together the first 3 ingredients on the list below.

The remaining 3-4 are used in the not so sloppy version. A tweak you can do because you are making it fresh is to dice finely 1/2 a green pepper too and cook to soften with the meat too. We do this when making a batch of slow cooker sloppy joes.

Copycat Manwich Recipe

I will say that there is a bigger difference between canned and fresh. Nobody likes preservatives if you can avoid them so from scratch can get rid of all of those.

Another biggie is sitting on the shelf for long periods of time will kill the tang that tomato products offer. Yes the ketchup itself is processed, but you could make it homemade here if you really wanted.

3 Ingredient Sloppy Joe Sauce

• Whisk together the ketchup, mustard, brown sugar in a bowl, set aside.
  • relish and Worcestershire are included with not-so sauce too
• Set a large skillet on your stovetop and add thawed ground beef or ground turkey + 1 tbsp olive oil.
• Sprinkle in dehydrated onions (could add diced green bell peppers too if desired) and cook until meat has very little pink left.
• Then fold sauce into meat mixture and cook on low for at least 5, for up to 20 minutes stirring occasionally along the way.
• Taste and if you want it sweeter add a bit more sugar, tangier add more mustard.

Turn heat off and put lid on the pan to keep warm, get sauce to thicken further and meat to soak up flavors for at least 5 minutes. If you want to bake frozen rolls to serve this as sliders you will need to allow some time for them to quick rise while this is being cooked, then baked. Hawaiian rolls work well too.

Sloppy Joe Sauce Recipe

Ok so what can you do with this when done beyond making loose meat sandwiches on toasted buns?? I mean think outside of the box like we do!! With large groups it is great to have a few choices going on, kinda’ like creating a bar with slider buns, hamburger or even hot dog buns are fun! You can go way beyond the bun though y’all like;

• A fun one is to air fry tater tots to crispy and then add the ground beef saucy mixture to the top with cheese on that.
• Make lettuce wraps for less carbs, but still a way to pick it up wrapped up like a burrito.
• My kids’ favorite way to eat this is lopped on top of an open faced Texas Toast sloppy joes
• Serve in bowls with chips so you can scoop it up and eat it this way. With the salt and pepper on your russet potato chips it adds even more flavor and a crunch too.

Any way you swap it up this is easy sloppy joe recipe is one of our favorite under 30 minute meals you can double or triple to feed a larger crowd too. Jump to recipe and get started yourself. Make it a part of your meal planning and try all sorts of different ways of serving it up to see which is your favorite.

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