Foodsploit: Slinger

This is my first foodsploit, and the one that gave me the idea of doing this in general. As often happens, many of my good ideas about this have flown my head as I’ve done the setup, but we’ll see what happens.

First things first. If you’re not sure what the hell a foodsploit is, check this out. It should clear it all up.

So, today’s foodsploit is a slinger. The slinger is a St. Louis original that sounds horrific and tastes amazing. Now, if you really want to learn about a slinger, and do it right, you’ve got to go to the Eat-Rite Diner in St. Louis in the wee hours of the morning. Being drunk is optional, but recommended by the true connoisseurs. There, you will be served a steaming morass of “food” that will likely turn your stomach and give you pause…that is until you actually try it. The flavors combine in magical ways to create something that is truly more than the sum of it’s parts. Now, at the eat-rite, you’ll also be regaled by very unfunny jokes told by a man who looks like a troll, but it ends up being a charming experience. I decided to leave out the tasteless jokes, but you’d have to make up your mind about my trollishness.

This isn’t the first time I’ve actually foodsploited the slinger, but it is the first time I took pictures, and it is the first time I can be sure I stuck to food, without using nutrients.

So what is a slinger? It is a layered concoction of mostly breakfast foods: start with two sausage patties, then two eggs (over easy is best), then hash browns or home fries, then smother it all with chili and add handfuls of onions and cheese to the top. Finish it by hitting it with hot sauce to taste.

This weekend I decided to stay in and cook, so I stopped at whole foods on Friday (thank you compressed work schedule!) and bought waaay to many groceries. The idea was to feed myself and my roommates for the weekend, but they already had plans, so I’m going to end up throwing a lot of it out. Sadly.

I bought organic yukon gold potatoes and vegetarian fed cage-free eggs for starters. Given that this was whole foods, I had a little more trouble with the chili and the sausage. For the sausage, I went with whole food’s in house pork chorizo, two links. More on that later. For the chili, I got “Cookwell and company texas two-step chili mix”, which is a 33 ounce jar of all the liquid offerings you need for chili…i.e, the sauce. The cheese ended up being a local monterey jack that I’ve already tossed the label for, and thus cannot let you know the specific type.

Now, if you were cooking for a diner, you’d have all this food more or less prepared, except for cooking the eggs, sausage and hash browns. Doing it individually, you don’t have the option. So, my plan was to get the chili going and leave it simmering on the stove stop, prep the hash-browns, then the sausage, letting both those items stay in the oven at 200 degrees to keep them warm, then do the eggs. This works out perfectly.

So, I started the chili sauce warming whilst I browned the beef, then drained it and dumped it in the chili pot to simmer. I ended up adding about a cup of water to the chili mix, figuring it would boil off in the interim and making sure that I used up all the tasty goodness in the jar.

Chili, coffee, and hash browns underway

Then, I sliced three small potatoes into sort of a very short julienne fry style, chopped a garlic clove. This went onto the stove at high heat with a couple of nice, big patties of butter, over which I ground some pepper and salt. I mostly left this alone to cook while I prepped coffee and grated cheese. I turned it every now and again, but the idea was to get the nice brown crustyness on the outside, while still have it tender on the inside.

Now, ideally, you should have sausage patties. Buy the sausage in a roll, slice it thin and cook as a patty. Whole Foods didn’t give me that option, so I decided to try slicing the links longwise to create something patty-esque. It worked out pretty well, I think, but I do recommend complete removing the casing if you do this, though, because it definitely gets in the way.

Sausage patties...a hack.

Finally, eggs over easy. Cooked ‘em in butter. Olive oil works also, but I really don’t think the olive oil flavor goes with this particular dish.

All ready to load the plate

So there’s the layout. From here, I loaded up and ate.

all ready to eat

Overall, it was delicious. A few minor caveates, though. The chorizo was basically ground pork with all the flavor drained out. To make matters worse, it had a lot of bone left in it, which kind put a damper on the whole meal.

Note to whole foods: when there is this much bone left in two sausage links, it’s too much.

way to much bone

If (when) I do it again, I’ll make sure to make more potatoes. Three of the 3 inch potatoes was not enough for a proper slinger. Again, I would also remove the casings from the sausage because it was too much of a pain to eat.

Last but not least, factors.

My food quotient on this one was very high. The chili had a single non-food ingredient, calcium chloride. I didn’t actually check the hot sauce (which was trader joe’s chili sauce and is delicious, by the way), but I don’t really think sauces of the “sprinkle some on top” variety count. At least I’m not counting it, and this is my post-series, so there. :-D

This particular dish has a fairly low “cost from on hand”…I would count eggs, onions, chili, cheese, hot sauce, and potatoes as being fairly likely to be stocked by people who cook regularly. Maybe not the chili. The sausage seems like a “buy it each time” factor, and for one person, this should only be a dollar or two right then.

The buy it all price is probably a bit higher…around 10-13 bucks, maybe? Of course, you’ll have a fair bit of left-over raw material, like the eggs, so if you actually get around to cooking it up, that reduces your per-meal cost.

The cleanup factor for this ended up being pretty high. I think it’s fairly safe to say that anything you have to do in stages, and have a number of separate items come together right at the end is going to create a high cleanup load for the amount of food that you get, and this is no exception. I reused the frying pan for everything, so that helped, but then I had to get a oven sheet dirty to keep the sausage and hash browns hot. Still, I was in a cooking and cleaning mood, so I did do a complete “pristine state” clean of the kitchen.

I even swept and took the trash out!

The dish rack is even clear

Time, overall, was pretty long. Between multiple individual preps and then the cleanup time, this took about two hours, start to finish, including eating.

Overall, the slingers are a fun meal to cook. It’s better if you can get someone to share it with you though, and that’s kinda hard because people won’t give this delicious mish-mash of “unhealthy” foods a chance.