The Legend of the Garbage Plate
In this post we’re reviewing the garbage plate — a creation from Rochester, NY.
There once was a time where we didn’t know what a garbage plate was. Those were the simple times — children played in parks, they drank from garden hoses without fear, and we could go to a convenience store with $5 and load up on snacks. Then, suddenly and without any warning, the garbage plate blew up on the internet. Jenna Marbles made her boyfriend cook it for her, Binging With Babish created a video on it — it seemed like everyone was talking about the garbage plate and where the hell this thing came from.
The Garbage Plate peaked in popularity the week of October 22 - 28, 2017.
So naturally, we decided that we had to recreate this thing and try it ourselves.
This was last year around the time of the spike on Google Trends.
As far as complexity is concerned, making a garbage plate is pretty straightforward. There are no special ingredients — you won’t have to make a special trip to that specialty market that you always drive past but never go into. The techniques are also pretty simple (sautéing, boiling, mixing, frying). The only two problems with this recipe are the timing and the enormous amount of dishes that need to be cleaned afterwards. There. Were. So. Many. Dishes.
The four main components of any good garbage plate are: meat sauce, pasta salad, home fries, and your choice of protein (hot dogs or hamburgers). We break down how to make each of these parts so you can combine them together to make a legendary dish.
Put on your leisure suit, it’s time to get to work. 😎
Making the Meat Sauce
Ingredients:
1 cup diced onion
1 pound ground beef
4 ounces tomato paste
¼ tsp ground cloves
¼ tsp cinnamon
¼ tsp allspice
¼ tsp cayenne pepper
¼ tsp ground cumin
¼ tsp paprika
¼ tsp garlic powder
salt and pepper to taste
The start of this meat sauce, much like many other meat sauces, is onions. So place your diced onions in a pan over medium high heat, add a little oil, and let them cook until they’ve gone nice and soft. Remove them from the pan and set them aside for later.
Next up is the ground beef. Turn the heat up to high on the pan and put the ground beef into the residual onion-y/oily goodness and let it cook until the beef is brown and cooked all the way through. You want crispy brown bits on your ground beef chunks, so keep cooking until those start to appear.
Once you have browned your beef, add the tomato paste to the pan and stir. You need to give the tomato paste a chance to cook out a bit — this will remove the metallic taste from it.
Once that’s done, it’s time to add in all of your spices. And boy, are those spices bizarre. We aren’t sure what the garbage plate meat sauce is supposed to taste like, as we’ve never had an authentic garbage plate before. We followed Babish’s recipe and the meat sauce is no bueno in our opinion. It was just a tad odd. If you want to try the recipe Jenna used, check it out here. It uses brown sugar, includes chili powder, has more cayenne, and has a few other alterations that might make it more familiar. We’ll try it next time!
Mediocre Tip: We didn’t have any allspice on hand, so we simply added more of the cloves and cinnamon with a pinch of nutmeg to round it out as a substitute.
This thing was weird.
Assembling the Mac Salad
Ingredients:
1 ½ cups macaroni noodles
1 cup cut carrots
½ cup cut celery
½ cup chopped green onion
1 cup parsley
½ cup peppadew peppers*
½ teaspoon garlic powder
1 pinch kosher salt
1 pinch freshly ground pepper
2 tablespoons mayonnaise
1 tablespoon sour cream
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
Dill to taste**
*We didn’t have peppadew peppers like Binging With Babish’s recipe calls for, so we chopped up some sweet red bell peppers instead. If you can’t find peppadew peppers, you can find a list of substitutes here.
**This is an addition that we think makes the pasta salad pop a bit more. Dill is delicious. Add it.
Macaroni salad is easy to make — there’s a reason why people choose it as a dish to bring to BBQ parties. However, we’ve had a lot of bad macaroni salad. And by bad we mean it’s usually drenched in mayo and bland as heck. Your macaroni salad should have LIFE. It should be bountiful with vegetables and taste tangy and fun. Yes, fun. Not lifeless and boring. /endrant
Anyways, to make your macaroni salad (the one cold component of the garbage plate) cook your macaroni noodles based on the box instructions. While your noodles are boiling, dice your vegetables and herbs.
Once your pasta is cooked and drained, rinse it with some cold water and add your chopped veggies, herbs, spices, and everything else. Taste your pasta salad. Does it need more seasoning? More sour cream or dijon? Add and taste. Repeat until perfect. *chefs kiss*
🍽️ Mediocre Tip: Remember, a recipe isn't a bible. If you think something doesn't taste right, improvise! Taste your food and season it to your preference. We know we said this above already, but it’s so so so important and will help you level up your cooking game.
Don’t cheap out and use macaroni salad from the deli. Shit probably has nasty ass eggs in it or way too much fucking mayo.
Once you’ve reached this part, congrats! You’re half-done making this mess. 🎉
Frying Up Home Fries
Ingredients:
3 peeled potatoes
3 tablespoon white vinegar
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 tablespoon butter
1 teaspoon paprika*
Salt and pepper to taste
*We recommend using smoked paprika if you have it. Paprika is good, smoked paprika is better.
Next up comes the home fries, which are essentially oversized hashbrowns. Home fries take a couple of steps to make, but they are worth the time and effort. To make your home fries, dice three russet potatoes (any brown potato will do) and boil them in salted water with a touch of vinegar to get them ready for frying.
Once the potatoes are tender (i.e. you can stick a fork easily into them) remove them from the pot and allow them to cool slightly. While the potatoes are cooling, put your oil and butter into a pan, and let it heat up over high heat.
🍽️ Mediocre Tip: Don't skip out on the oil. The oil will prevent the butter from burning and turning a nasty grey colour. If your butter burns, empty the pan, wipe it clean and try it again with more oil.
Be careful to not add too many potatoes at once as this will crowd the pan, lowering the heat of the pan, and thus making the potatoes take way too long to cook.
Once your potatoes get nice and golden brown and crispy, transfer them to a bowl. While still hot, season them with salt, pepper, and paprika. These home fries were life changing, and honestly, probably the best part about the whole dish.
10/10 would eat every day for the rest of our lives.
Choosing Your Protein
The final step in this recipe is to cook your hotdogs or cheeseburgers. Use whatever you prefer — Jenna Marbles used cheeseburgers for her garbage plate, while Babish used white hots, a type of hot dog from Rochester, NY. We had Costco hotdogs available to us, so that’s what we used. (#notsponsored)
Place whatever you’re cooking in the residual butter/oil mixture from the potatoes, and let them fry for a few minutes on each side. Or you could BBQ them. You do you, boo.
These hot dogs are greasy. So is the image quality.
Putting It All Together
Now comes assembly time!
Fill half your plate with macaroni salad and the other half of your plate with home fries. Then, add some of that weird meat sauce on top and delicately place two fried and butterflied hot dogs on top (or cheeseburgers if that’s what you’re going with). To truly finish this hot mess, drizzle ketchup and yellow mustard on top to maximize how unappealing it looked.
Ta-da! You’ve made a pile of garbage on a plate. Hot garbage. A garbage plate!
Our Mediocre Thoughts
👨🍳 Trevor: I’m honestly not sure what to say about this thing. When we had finally finished and plated up this thing, my first thought was, “oh no, we may have gone too far”. My mother even phoned me from Ireland asking me what the hell that thing with the potatoes and hot dogs was. She called me from another country simply to inquire about my mental state for so proudly posting this hot mess on Instagram. I doubted myself. Can we bounce back from this? Will anyone ever take us seriously again?
But then I mixed it all up and took my first bite. And it wasn’t bad — it wasn’t great mind you, but, importantly, it wasn’t bad. For some reason unknown to me, these flavours worked together. The tangy kick of the macaroni salad complemented the weirdly spiced meat sauce. The salty home fries brought the best out of the meat sauce and the macaroni salad. The hot dogs, well, they were just hot dogs, but they added a bit of texture to this creation. It, somehow, was not as bad as it looked.
I can completely understand how if you were drunk off your ass at 2am, and someone made you a garbage plate, that it would be the best thing ever. This thing begs to be eaten with a cold beer in the wee hours of the night. Sadly neither of us were that drunk, so most of the charm was lost. Not to mention that I would not want to attempt to make this while totally smashed. There were way too many things to do, and I don’t know about you, but, my multitasking abilities take a massive hit after a few pints. In my opinion, this thing is best made by a sober mind for a drunk mind.
👩🍳 Brittany: When I was little, I was a picky kid who hated any food that was mixed together. Goulash? Hated it. Peas, carrots, and corn mixed together? Hated it. Young Brittany would be so traumatized that future Brittany would make such a mixed monstrosity. Hot home fries with cold potato salad? WTF. Meat sauce with more meat, and topped with ketchup and mustard? Questionable. In Jenna’s video, she cuts up everything on her plate and mixes it together. The garbage plate would have given young Brittany nightmares for weeks.
Me showing my displeasure towards mixed food when I was younger.
Individually, the components of the garbage plate taste great (besides the meat sauce, which I’m not 100% sold on). Together, it’s an explosion of flavours in your mouth. One bite you taste ketchup, pasta salad, and hot dog. The next bite is mustard, meat sauce, and home fries. Interesting? Yes. Would I make this again? I don’t know. I eat mixed foods now (I grew up, eventually), I still prefer to eat each item on the garbage plate individually. Eating them all together is an assault on your taste buds, but it sure is a taste to remember. I can definitely see it being popular with the college drinking crowd: “Instead of McDonalds, let’s grab a garbage plate!”
If you want to try the garbage plate but don’t want to make each component, plan a BBQ in the summer with friends and have each person bring one part of the dish. Once you have all of the components, you can either eat them separately (if you’re not feeling brave) or combine them on your plate and experience the legend that is the garbage plate.
Our Final Review
Taste: 3 confused taste buds out of 5 👅👅👅
Presentation: 1 hot mess out of 5 😱
Affordability: 3 hungover twenty-year olds out of 5 🍺🍺🍺
We give the garbage plate a 3/5 for taste because it’s not anything to write home about, but it’s definitely not bad — it’s an experience. It’s probably not something that you’ll love so much that you add it to your monthly meal plan. However, the components individually are tasty and worth making again. The pasta salad makes a great side dish for any meal, and the home fries can help you step-up your breakfast game.
Now, for the part of the blog post you’ve all been waiting for. We present to you, our garbage plate:
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Yeah, it’s not attractive. It’s called a garbage plate, what did you expect? Of course we’re giving this a 1/5 for presentation — we don’t think topping any dish with ketchup and yellow mustard (not even fancy dijon) will make it look good. That being said, it’s not supposed to look good. A garbage plate is a weird mash up of food — if it looks aesthetically pleasing, you’ve fucked up.
While the individual ingredients themselves aren’t very expensive, you do need to buy a lot if you don’t have any of them on hand — potatoes, vegetables, pasta, ground beef, hot dogs or hamburgers, etc. If you don’t have the spices for the meat sauce, it could hurt your wallet a bit. This recipe isn’t cheap, but it isn’t expensive either. Babish’s recipe does make a lot, so you’ll have leftovers if you’re not feeding a family of five (good luck getting your picky ass kids to eat this though).
We recommend putting on your fat pants (or your best leisure suit) and pairing your garbage plate with an equally garbage movie — we chose to watch The Room (how does this movie have a 3.7/10 on IMDb!?) This is a perfectly acceptable way to spend a lazy (and possibly hungover) Sunday afternoon with friends.
Jenna, showing us all how to give no fucks in her velvet leisure suit.
🍷 Mediocre Tip: Please don’t try to pair this thing with a wine. If you absolutely want a recommendation go with a beer. A light beer. Or maybe a can of your favourite pop. Or just a glass of water. Fuck it, do whatever you want, you just made a garbage plate, you clearly don’t give a shit about wine pairings, fine dining, or your health.
Are you ready to jump in headfirst and try the garbage plate? Follow along with Binging With Babish or watch Julien make a vegan garbage plate for Jenna Marbles below:
Have you tried to make the garbage plate? Or maybe you had it in Rochester, NY? Let us know in the comments below!