Iowa Loose Meat Sandwich

Too often, the justification for making an Iowa-style loose meat sandwich goes something like, “It’s from Iowa, and it’s really not that bad.” That’s fine for readers working through 50-state cooking challenges, but the sandwich deserves better—and so do you.

In the past decade, I’ve driven all over Iowa eating loose meats. I’ve had the Charlie Boy at the Miles Inn and the Tastee at the Tastee Inn & Out, both in Sioux City—one right after the other, at the end of a loose meat crawl. I’ve spooned beef crumbles off my plate at the Maid-Rite in Lamoni, which serves a monster of a Hawkeye State mashup that combines loose meat filling with the state’s signature plate-size, deep-fried pork tenderloin. I’ve had a sandwich and a slice of pie at the Canteen Lunch in the Alley, the Ottumwa institution that inspired Roseanne and Tom Arnold’s fictional Lanford Lunch Box on Roseanne. (Tom is from Ottumwa.)

I think the loose meat—also called a "Maid-Rite," after the Iowa-based fast food chain that popularized it, and, in the Sioux City area, a "tavern sandwich"—is a lot of fun. A sloppy Joe without the slop, it’s a mid-century Midwestern classic, bringing beef crumbles (ideally, but not always, well seasoned), onion, pickles, and mustard together on a bun. It’s a squishy, snackable sandwich and an undeniable combination of all-American flavors.

That said, I do understand the skepticism. There’s already an effective and popular way of serving ground beef on a bun, and Serious Eats has covered burgers extensively.

Why The Iowa Loose Meat Sandwich Matters

So what advantage is there in loosening the meat? In need of a gut check on that question, I turned to an expert—my fiancée, Liz Cook, a writer and native of small-town Perry, Iowa, who grew up eating the sandwich at Band Olympics and other school events. After reminding me that she has gone on record calling loose meats “terrible,” she offered a more gracious perspective: “It’s Midwestern practicality when it comes to feeding a crowd. If you’re feeding 300 hungry kids at a basketball game or a band contest, you’re not going to be frying up burgers in a school cafeteria kitchen. You’re going to be steaming 10 pounds of gray meat in a roasting pan, and doling out the little nubbins with an ice cream scoop.” Fair enough.

But, to me, there's more to loose meat than practicality: With a little effort, you can make a loose meat that’s an actual crowd-pleaser—a practically foolproof taste of Iowa and a burger alternative that’s a whole lot better than “nubbins” on a stale bun.

Loose Meat, the Io-way: My Guiding Principles for Creating This Recipe

To stay true to the form and purpose of this very Midwestern sandwich, I came up with three rules for the recipe development process, ensuring that the result was really an Iowa-style loose meat, not just a pulverized burger or a lighter sloppy Joe:

1. The meat should be loose from beginning to end. In other words, this is not a chopped cheese. No pattying, searing, and then loosening, which would make the recipe fussier and less crowd-friendly.) That’s the Iowa way.
   
2. The finished meat should not be swimming in anything—sauce or grease. It should be juicy but not sopping.
3. The ingredients in the basic recipe must be limited to ground beef, onion, simple seasonings, mustard, classic cucumber pickles, cheese, and a squishy burger bun—no "twists." Enhancements like pickled peppers, potato chips, chimichurri, hot sauce, cheese sauce, blue cheese crumbles, mayo, and chopped olives (all of which I’ve tried and recommend) are welcome and encouraged but not foundational. You can add those on your own.

4 Tips for Cooking a Loose Meat Sandwich at Home

Although I had basic guidelines before I even started developing the recipe, I did work a few tricks into the final recipe, based on dozens of tests. 

1. Grate the onions. First, for the final version of the sandwich, I grated, rather than diced, the onions. That helps the onion break down more quickly, softening at the same rate as the ground beef cooks through, which is important, given the short cook time. I wanted a relatively uniform filling with integrated onion flavor, not a chili-like medley of beef chunks and diced onion.

2. Add some MSG to enhance the beefy flavor. In my opinion, less is more where this sandwich is concerned. Every time I tried dialing up the seasoning—adding paprika, mustard, and brown sugar, among other things, to the meat mixture—I thought the result tasted garish and unwholesome, like bad fast food. I don’t put paprika in my burgers, and I don’t like it in my loose meat, either. That said, I added just a quarter teaspoon of monosodium glutamate to the recipe to give the sandwich a glutamate boost, enhancing its beefy flavor without overcomplicating the flavor profile. I’m listing the MSG as optional to appease the MSG averse, but I strongly encourage you to use it here.

3. Treat the meat with baking soda. Third, for the most unconventional step in this recipe, I velveted the ground beef before cooking it, using baking soda—a trick I learned from America’s Test Kitchen, though it originates in Chinese stir-fry tradition. Letting the beef soak in a baking soda solution before cooking tenderizes it and helps it retain moisture, resulting in juicy, burgerlike crumbles rather than the dry, pebbly pieces that make up many loose meat fillings.

4. Add some cornstarch. And for my last trick, I finished the cook with a cornstarch slurry to thicken the remaining liquid in the pan and help it cling to the beef. The result isn’t a sauce—remember, that’s not allowed—but it captures the flavor that’s often left behind when loose meat is spooned out of its simmering juices.

The result is a version of an Iowa tradition that’s both practical and delicious. It’s a loose meat good enough to win over the skeptics. How do I know? Well, even Liz says it’s not bad—really. And given her loose meat hangups, after all those years of sandwich meat scooped out of crowd-sized electric roasters, that means something to me.