Crockpot Sloppy Joes & Mustard Bread buns

Spending some time slow-cooking makes this sloppy joe filling remarkably tender and blends the flavors in a way that just can't happen in 20 minutes on the stovetop.  The real beauty of this recipe (adapted from BH&G's Slower Cooker Recipes) is that it adapts to whatever your cooking time frame is...if you've got a whole day free before you need to serve it, you can do it completely in advance and reheat from fridged or frozen...if you've got just a little time to prep and more to cook, just measure, assemble and freeze the ingredients to finish on Dinner Day...or if you're in between, you can cook the beef and onions and freeze it with the sauce to dump into the crockpot on Dinner Day.  Options, options, options!

This recipe makes A LOT of sloppy joe filling, so serve it for a crowd or serve half for dinner and freeze the remainder for another day.

I'm serving this tonight with Mustard Bread buns, a recipe adapted from one of James Beard's.  If you use a bread machine, add the ingredients in the order recommended by your instruction manual and use the dough setting.  The bread dough can itself be frozen if desired.  If you freeze shaped rolls, simply thaw them at room temp, let them rise until doubled in size (if you take them out of the freezer in the morning, they should be good by afternoon) and bake them off.

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Big batch bread mix

I don't buy bread any more.  I know that sounds all hippie-pinko-commie (as my husband likes to say), and most people don't go quite this far in their preference for home-cooked food, but the primary purposes of this blog are actually a) my own entertainment and b) my personal reference source for stuff I've done that I write down somewhere but can't always remember where.  So this is more for my benefit than yours, but feel free to give it a whirl ;-)

I use this King Arthur Flour 13x4x4 pain de mie pan for sandwich bread, which is what "1 loaf" is for me (this recipe is also an adapted, scaled-up, prep-ahead version of the KAF recipe).  If you're using regular baking pans, I'd guess that a 9x5 pan will be a little small for the amount made by 1 portion of this recipe, so you could reduce the amount of mix and wet ingredients by around 75%.  I'd try baking it for about the same amount of time, though I've never done this so that's just an educated guess, not a final recommendation. 

If you want to do this in a bread machine, a 2 lb. loaf will take 4 cups of dry ingredients and a 1.5 lb. loaf will take 3 cups of dry ingredients.  Scale the wet ingredients back proportionately. 

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