Recipe: Slow-Cooker Turkey Sloppy Joes

Once you nail the classic recipe for sloppy joes, you can continue to customize it by adding flavor and swapping ingredients to make this weeknight staple just what your family wants. In this rendition of the sloppy joe, we used light and lean ground turkey in place of ground beef, and made a few ingredient swaps to ensure the filling was Paleo-friendly and gluten-free.

Sloppy joes are a blank canvas. It’s a flexible recipe that lends itself to numerous customizations, all dependent on your tastes and preferences.

Maybe that means upping the heat (harissa, anyone?), altering the flavor profile (maybe soy and fish sauce?), adding more veggies, or simply using different types of meat. And that’s just where I landed with this version, using lean ground turkey in place of beef. But no matter how I customize this sandwich, the one thing I’ll never change is making this meal in the slow cooker.

Learn How: How To Make Sloppy Joes in the Slow Cooker

With a few simple swaps from the original version (like nixing ketchup for honey and using apple cider vinegar instead of Worcestershire sauce), it was easy to make this sloppy joe filling paleo-friendly. To keep it that way, it’s all about how you serve it (sayonara, hamburger buns). And lucky for you, the options are many.

Serve your sloppy joes over a warm baked sweet potato or wrapped in a leafy piece of kale, cabbage, or collards. You can also use the sloppy joe mixture as a topping instead of a filling, spooning it over your favorite spiralized veggies or spaghetti squash.