Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophes, where one shut-in serves up some facts, stories, and occasionally, something useful. I’m your Smeagol of Sustenance, Jon O’Guin. Today’s post is, as already spoiled in Friday’s post, an exploration of an American classic from a foreign perspective, and a recipe for a dish that surprising, but not sickening. You can take that ringing endorsement straight to the recipe via this link and get cracking on your own culinary exploration, while the rest of us see how the sausage gets made.  

Sorting out some Strange feelings

Now, I’m going to post a link for you all. It’s to a video that’s like, 13 minutes long. But the thing I’ve asked MANY of my friends and family to do over the last week is watch just the literal FIRST MINUTE. The first 60 seconds of it. And I’d like to ask you to do the same. We’ll take a quick second right now, give some visual space, so that those who DO watch the video won’t have what they’re about to see spoiled for them, before I tell the rest of you what’s going on.

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We just need to wait a little bit here.

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Watch any good shows, lately? I’ve just been burning through my Youtube backlog and starting projects I fail to finish. Tried to repair some broken chair legs with Nate. Didn’t go great,

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Alright, if you DID watch it: yeah, that took a sudden turn, didn’t it? If you DIDN’T: the first minute of the video was about a group of Brits ragging on Trump (2 days before he got elected, tragically) while trying to make “the Ultimate American Food”, where one of them volunteered to make meatloaf, and his recipe started with

Meat, weirdly enough.

-Beef mince and pork mince(British people say “X mince” instead of “Ground X”, little cultural difference, no big deal. And while I know plenty of people who only use beef, there are plenty of meatloaf recipes that mix in pork, or even pork and veal, so that’s not a weird combo)

Garfunk-egg And Oates.

-Oats (A  little weird, but if you look at the recipe online, the oats are soaked in milk, so they’re basically a little healthier version of a panade, which is the fancy word for when your grandma soaked bread in water or milk before mixing it into meat. A slightly fancy technique, but not absurd)

-One cracked egg (perfectly normal)

Things fall apart

-Pecans

-Chopped Jalapeños (CLEARLY from a can, and quite likely pickled, given their pale nature, but hold that thought.)

-Marmalade

-Tabasco

-MORE Tabasco

-Cumin.

This almost looks like the start of some kind of mincement.

That’s where the first minute ends. If you kept going until the whole mix was done, you’d have also seen: red pepper flakes, paprika, Parmesan, and cinnamon go into it.

And, if you’re not an American, and are unaware of our Meatloaf traditions, allow me to make clear how many of those ingredients are in a typical American meatloaf: Once you remove the meat and egg…none. The average American meatloaf has NONE of those ingredients in it. In checking almost 20 meatloaf recipes, I found ONE that used Parmesan, 3 or so that used Cumin, one that used oats (though that was literally FROM Quaker Oats, so kind of expected), 2-3 that used Jalapeños, and 2-3 that used Tabasco. And That’s COUNTING overlap, meaning that out of 18-19 recipes, there were 5 that used any mixture of Cumin, jalapeño, and/or Tabasco. And THAT’s only because after the first 11 I specifically targeted “SPICY meatloaf”. The only Pecans I could find in Meatloaves were: A, in vegan recipes or B, a recipe that had a layer of pecan stuffing between two meatloaf halves. Marmalade didn’t show up.

Paddington would be heartbroken.

And I’m not saying this as an attack on the guys at SORTED. Far from it. I’ve talked before about how it can be fascinating (if a little offputting) to see how another culture SEES yours, and how it’s a natural process in a lot of cultures: “Mongolian” Beef is just an advertising term from Chinese Chefs, “Borscht” means a lot of things, but is a beef and tomato “russian” soup in Hong Kong, Japan’s attempt to replicate Italian pasta relies on Ketchup, etc etc.

But, while I’ve referenced the idea of seeing American culture through the eyes of other nations, I’ve never approached a DISH that did it. I’ve never made another country’s attempt at replicating American cuisine before. So I saw this, and immediately said “oh, I am FOR SURE making that.” Let’s go on the journey.

Making the Meat Mightier

Now, I said I didn’t cover this to attack the guys at Sorted. I’m a big fan of their videos, and I’m slowly coming to the inevitable conclusion that I’m GOING to buy one of their cookbooks, maybe before this quarantine ends. (I will also probably buy Kenji Lopez-Alt’s cookbook) But I will say: I hope their cookbook is better edited than their online recipe from almost 4 years ago. Because the ingredient organization on this page is a MESS. Like, a basic rule of ingredient organization for a recipe is “the order the reader will need them in, and/or by size/importance”. So like, a recipe of spaghetti and meatballs will have, pretty early on, “ground meat”, and will often wait until all the ingredients for the meat are done before listing “spaghetti”. This recipe does NOT do that. The list starts with “pork mince”, and then lists a series of spices, some veggies, an ingredient for the sauce, another veggie, A SIDE DISH (literally, the whole thing), more sauce ingredients *maybe*, and then there’s 3 more ingredients before the ingredient list goes “oh, and beef mince”.

They ate the mash.
they ate the mustard mash

Also, I think there was a change in plans during the recipe’s write-up, because of another error in the recipe. See, as Caption Jon’s madness just highlighted, they suggest you serve with a “mustard mash”, which if you watch the video, they explain is Mashed Potatoes with like, a tablespoon of mustard mixed in. And in the recipe, it’s just listed, as an ingredient. HOWEVER, the FIRST step of the written recipe is to bring a pot of water to a boil, reduce to a simmer, and…nothing. The pot of water is NEVER used in the recipe. And the ONLY reason you’d boil water for anything in this recipe is FOR the mustard mash, so I suspect originally Mike (the author of the recipe, and maker of the dish in the video) was going to include the process of making the mustard mash, and changed his mind, and missed it in the edit.

Anyway, the first step is putting together the meat mixture for the meatloaf, which involved an not-insubstantial amount of re-jiggering on my end, since, as Brits, the Sorted boys naturally use the Metric system for many of their measurements, while I use the Americanized Imperial System. (Which, I feel like I’ve touched on before, but also technically England’s fault. Yeah, the system of measurements America keeps using were originally ENGLISH measurements.)

I mean, these Scots didn’t just RANDOMLY decide to use Miles as the core of their song.

Anywho, the first thing you’re supposed to do is dice up half an onion (save the other half) and mince 2 cloves of garlic. Those are going to combine with your mixture of weird fillings such as jalapeños, chopped pecans, grated parmesan, chopped cilantro (parsley, in our case, since Nate can’t eat cilantro), and more.

This looks more like the beginning of another stuffing recipe than meatloaf.

Mix those fixin’s with a half pound each of ground beef and ground pork (technically, a little MORE than a half pound, as 250 g is around 8.8 ounces, but that’s the kind of imprecisions you end up with when converting, that sometimes blow up satellites.) Also, you add another ingredient here that Mike failed to mention in the video, namely, some chopped cheddar cheese. If you freeze the picture on the first photo of all the ingredients, as some psycho recently did,

Some sort of uncouth madman.

You can see that there’s a whitish block to the far right which LOOKS, to my eyes, at least, like an entire stick of butter. But there’s no butter in the recipe for the meatloaf, so it must be the cheddar, since the other cheese is clearly Parmesan. Anyway, mix your cheeses, veggies, meat, soaked grains and fruit condiments together, and get the mixture into a bacon-lined pan.

It will not look like this. I had to wash my hands while that went into the oven. This is what it looked like when it came out.

Slap it in, wrap the bacon over, and pop it in the oven to bake.  Then make the “Tommy Sauce” (a slang phrase meaning “tomato sauce”) and here’s another small disconnect. You’re going to chop up the other half of the onion, and another two cloves of garlic, fry them for a bit…and then maybe add red pepper flakes? In the video, Mike adds the red pepper flakes to the meatloaf, as I noted a while back, and none to the sauce. But in the recipe, he adds the flakes to the sauce, and not the meatloaf. I don’t think this really matters, other than “do you want the sauce spicier or the meatloaf?” hell, I might have mixed the flakes into both. What I will say, unequivocally, is I botched this sauce up something fierce.

Like, this is step ONE, and it’s followed by “add tomato puree, chopped tomatoes, and beef stock”, and unfortunately, I don’t think I got ANY of those. Maybe I did. I know I ended up using tomato sauce, but I don’t recall if that ended up being a replacement for the tomato puree (which I thought we had in the fridge, but apparently not), or chopped tomatoes (though if that was the case, why did I still puree the sauce later?)

Like, did I do it just to clean up the onions?

I just could NOT find our beef bouillon while cooking, and I don’t remember what I did to make up for it. I know I definitely leaned in a different direction, since his recipe is a more savory tomato sauce, while my family is more used to a sweeter sauce (a standard meatloaf glaze in America is a mixture of ketchup and brown sugar, maybe with some mustard), so I leaned a little more that direction, especially with the amount of fat in the recipe with all the cheese. I remember there was red wine vinegar, olive oil, Worcestershire sauce, more of the Tabasco, so I ended up with a bit sweeter, but still acidic sauce with some heat.

And the results were: weird. The big thing was that, I think I under-mixed the loaf due to a mild concern of over-working it. I think this because, well…

This is the only picture I took of the finished product. Drink it in.

There are STRIATIONS of color in that loaf. Weirdly, like, all the cheese seemingly just got absorbed into the loaf, as I didn’t hit any nuggets of cheese that I expected. The flavor is perfectly fine, it’s definitely skewing more toward Southwest flavors, with the smoky flavors and peppers. Texture-wise it’s not too weird. It felt a little firmer, and the pecans had just a touch of crunch, a little akin to the texture you can get with undercooked onions in some meatloaves. It wasn’t bad at all, it just wasn’t to my family’s taste. I had it for two meals, but it ended up getting purged after a couple weeks in the fridge. I legitimately think with some minor tweaks, it could click with us. AS it was, it was a strange but interesting dish, just like it was a strange and interesting insight into how we look to England. It’s another way to break the form of meatloaf and experiment. And that’s valuable, as we wrap up a week focused on breaking the norms and exploring.

MONDAY: MAYBE WE FINALLY START VEGGIE WEEK. OR AT LEAST, NO MORE EGGS

WEDNESDAY: JON’S HAVING A BIT OF BREAKDOWN, SO LET’S LET HIM SORT OUT MONDAY FIRST.

Recipe

Mike’s Meaty Loaf

Serves 6

Ingredient

Meatloaf

1 onion, divided into two halves

2 cloves garlic

1/2 pound ground pork

1/2 pound ground beef

1 beaten egg

50 g rolled oats, soaked in milk

1 handful grated Parmesan

1 handful pecan nuts, roughly chopped

1 small block cheddar, roughly chopped

1 handful cilantro (AKA coriander) or Parsley

2 tbsp marmalade

2 tbsp jalapeño peppers

1 tbsp smoked tabasco sauce

1 tbsp chilli flakes

1 tbsp smoked paprika

1 tbsp cumin

1 tsp cinnamon

10 strips of bacon

Tommy Sauce

1 glug olive oil

Remaining half of onion

2 cloves garlic

1 tbsp tomato paste

1 tbsp smoked tabasco

15 ounces chopped tomatoes (or tomato sauce)

3/4 cup beef stock

2 tablespoons red wine vinegar (optional)

1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce (optional)\

salt and pepper

Preparation

1. Make the meatloaf: Peel and dice the onion and mince the garlic (you can do all of it now, or save the other half of the onion and the other 2 cloves of garlic until later. Grab a large bowl and chuck in all the meatloaf ingredients except the bacon, and mix to combine.

2. Lay the bacon into a loaf pan with the ends draping over the outside. Form the loaf, and place it on top of the bacon, folding over the draping ends. Place the loaf pan on a baking sheet, and put in a 400 degree for 40 minutes.

3. While the meatloaf cooks, make the sauce. Dice the onion and mince the garlic if you didn’t do so earlier, then heat the olive oil in a skillet, and add the onions and garlic. Cook until onions soften 3-5 minutes, then add tomato paste, cook another minute, then add remaining ingredients. Season with salt and pepper, and let simmer 10 minutes. Puree smooth, and move to a bowl with a basting brush.

4. Remove the meatloaf from the oven, and turn from the loaf pan onto the baking sheet. Brush with sauce until coated, and continue cooking for 10 minutes, until sauce has caramelized.

5. Remove from the oven, slice into portions, and serve hot, with extra tommy sauce, and potatoes.