Mac-and-Cheese-Chili Pizza on a Bun. [Photograph: Nick Kindelsperger]
I'm not in the habit of picking up dinner ideas from sitcoms, but once I heard about the Sloppy Jessica on a recent episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, I couldn't think of anything else. What is it? It's a gloriously greasy starch-on-starch beast: mac-and-cheese-chili pizza on a bun. (We can all thank Gina Linetti, the show's character who ordered one after attempting a quitting a ridiculously restrictive diet.) Whether hungry or tipsy, I immediately decided that I had to have one.
Thing is, I'm pretty sure the Sloppy Jessica is completely made-up, which meant that I had to fashion my own version from the ground up. First, I had to decide how to interpret "mac-and-cheese-chili pizza on a bun." Since I didn't feel like making a whole pizza from scratch only to stuff it inside a bun, I decided instead to treat the bun as the pizza itself by melting mozzarella on top of it, sort of like a French bread pizza. Then all I had to do was bang out the mac-and-cheese chili by whipping up a batch of Kenji's amazing chili mac recipe. I opted to leave the beans out of my version and, more importantly, I omitted the cheese because I already had the melted mozzarella on the bread.
And you know what? The Sloppy Jessica is kind of awesome. Greasy, messy, and overbearing? Sure. But if you're looking for a gut-bomb with a good sense of humor, give the Sloppy Jessica a try.
About the author:Nick Kindelsperger is the editor of Serious Eats: Chicago. He loves tacos and spicy food. You can follow him as @nickdk on Twitter.
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