My Sloppy Joe Stuffed Meatballs
I love making sloppy joes “from scratch” – meaning I don’t use the manwich can or any of the premade seasonings. Just good old fashioned ketchup and some sneaky extra nutrients from sauteed peppers and onions I add to the mix.
My Sloppy Joe Stuffed Meatballs
Ingredients
Meatballs
- 1 lb ground beef
- 1 cup breadcrumbs.
- 1 tbs Montreal Steak seasoning
- 2 eggs
- pepper to taste
My Sloppy Joes
- 1 lbs ground beef
- 1/2 Onion diced
- 3 small sweet peppers diced
- 1 tsp yellow mustard
- 2/3 cup Ketchup
- 1 tbs balsamic vinegar
- 1 tbs Worcestershire sauce
- 1 tbs brown sugar
- 1 tsp Chili powder
Instructions
- For the sloppy joes brown the hamburger and then drain the grease – this takes about 10 mins
- While the ground beef is cooling off, sauté the peppers and onions in the same pan. This will take about 10 mins. If you’d like them to be cooked down longer you can cook them to your preference.
- Once the peppers and onions are cooked to your liking, add the beef back to the pan and add the rest of the sloppy joe ingredients and mix thoroughly.
- Take the sloppy joe mixture and spoon it into the silicon molds and put in the freezer. Depending on your freezer and how warm the mixture is, it will have to be in there for about 4 hours minimum.
- Once your sloppy joe mixture is frozen and you’re ready to make your meatballs, preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit
- In a bowl combine ground meat, breadcrumbs, Montreal seasoning, eggs and season to taste with pepper.
- Take a good scoop of the meat mixture and flatten it in your hand. Take two of the frozen sloppy joe pucks and place them in the middle of the meat mixture. Wrap the meat around the frozen sloppy joe pucks and roll it into the shape of a ball.
- Place your meatballs on a greased baking sheet and place in the oven. Bake for 22 mins.
These meatballs are a pretty simple base because I really wanted the sloppy joe filling to stand out. It seems a little weird to stuff ground beef with ground beef but these are really delicious. I figured if I kept the meat mixture lightly seasoned you would be able to taste the sloppy joe filling a little better.
I wanted to pack these meatballs full of Sloppy Joe filling so I decided to use two of the half circle molds to fill the meatballs. This of course makes some rather large meatballs and also with only one pound of ground meat you only get about ten meatballs out of this recipe. If you’d like to make more than ten meatballs I recommend that you double the Sloppy Joe recipe for the stuffing – I used almost all of mine for the meatballs that I made, and double the meatball mixture recipe as well. This way if you’d feeding an army of folks or just a really hungry bunch of friends, you’ll have enough to share. This amount worked perfectly for me since I was having a Sloppy Joe Meatball-off with our friends for happy hour. These meatballs are so large and I made three different kinds so there was plenty of food.
In my other Sloppy Joe Stuffed Meatball recipes I got 11 meatballs out of the recipe. I will say that making ten in this recipe helped keep the Sloppy Joe Stuffing in the meatball better.
My Sloppy Joes are always made from “scratch”. I don’t make my own ketchup or mustard or anything for the actual ingredients I throw together, but I don’t use any of the premade Sloppy Joe mixes or seasonings when I make mine. I think it’s fun to play around with the traditional ingredients that people use to make Sloppy Joes and see what I can come up with that fit into my favorite flavor profiles.
One of the ingredients that I love to add to a lot of things is Balsamic Vinegar. It has a really distinct flavor and I think it adds a nice amount of sweetness to a lot of things, including these Sloppy Joes, but it also adds a nice hint of acidity that brightens up the dish.
The peppers for me add a nice textural difference to this Sloppy Joe. I think it’s nice to have little pops of sweetness from the peppers here and there when eating this recipe. It also makes the dish a little more colorful. If you’re not a fan of chunks of peppers in your Sloppy Joes you can always throw these in a food processor or use a stick blender to puree them and then add them to the Sloppy Joe mix.
I really love freezing ingredients – especially in silicon molds – and using them as meatball fillings. There are a couple of benefits to doing this, one being that your meatball filling already comes in a meatball shape! These silicon molds are half circles so using one or two of what I call pucks inside a meatball helps naturally form a meatball around the frozen mixture. Also, when freezing the meatball stuffing it helps the stuffing stay together during the cooking process and also helps prevent the stuffing from leaking out while in the oven. I will admit that there’s a really good chance that you’ll never have the meatballs all come out perfectly with no stuffing explosions, but having a frozen center to start really helps keep things together.
In a lot of my photos I like to show that these meatballs to have a tendency to open up during the cooking process and I do that on purpose! I don’t want to show these meatballs as perfect when in reality they probably will have some if not all that leak a little while cooking.
If you are concerned about having the insides come out during the cooking process you can always add a little more meat around the stuffing. Like I mentioned in this recipe I made ten meatballs instead of eleven for this recipe and everything thing held together a little bit better than the ones with less meat around the filling. I figure since these are Sloppy Joe recipes the sloppier the better so a little filling coming out is fine by me.
I’m hoping that these meatballs or just my Sloppy Joe recipe becomes a staple go-to comfort food in your cooking repertoire. The Sloppy Joe recipe itself is really easy to throw together and is super yummy on its own. Since I’m a fan of meatballs (as you can tell by this site…) I think adding them as stuffing is the absolute best way to serve them. You can have these meatballs as sliders or just eat them with a fork and knife – no matter how you try them I know you’re going to love them.
More Recipes By Category
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We live in the Midwest and there are so many classic recipes that the rest of the country is missing out on. I’m here to help share those recipes in meatball form.
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Stuffed Meatballs
I love stuffing meatballs – and once you start browsing the site you’ll see that I’m pretty creative with what I can come up with to stuff my balls with – and every recipe is delicious.
