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.