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CHOW: Recipes: Nick Tahou’s Meat Sauce
MEMBER RECIPE

Nick Tahou's Meat Sauce Recipe

By Limer
Difficulty: Easy | Total Time: 1 hour 30 minutes | Active Time: | Makes: enough for about 20 hot dogs, hamburgers, or 6 garbage plates

If you’ve ever been to Rochester NY, then you know exactly what this is. This meat sauce is used as the topping for the famous Nick Tahou’s garbage plate. A garbage plate is two hot dogs, hambugers, or cheeseburgers atop a pile of fried cubed potatoes (home fries) with either baked beans or macaroni salad, and then topped off with a heaping portion of this sauce. Seldomly eaten sober, my favorite combination is two cheeseburgers,macaroni salad and home fries. This sauce is equally good on your hot dog or hamburger. Nick Tahou, the man himself, once made me a Western Omelette Garbage Plate at the wee hours of the morning. That led me to believe it was the meat sauce that was important, not the rest. This is ‘hot sauce’ in Rochester.

INGREDIENTS
  • 1 medium onion, chopped
  • 1 teaspoon oil
  • 1 pound ground beef
  • 1 cup water
  • 1/4 cup tomato paste
  • 1 tablespoon brown sugar
  • 1 teaspoon black pepper
  • 1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
  • 1 teaspoon chili powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
  • 1/2 teaspoon allspice
  • 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
  • 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
  • salt to taste
  • 1 clove garlic, diced or pressed through a garlic press
INSTRUCTIONS
  1. In a large skillet, fry onion and garlic in oil until soft. Add meat and spices, stirring constantly with fork to keep the beef broken up. Once the meat browns, add water, tomato paste and brown sugar. Simmer 10 minutes. Go through it with an immersion blender to give it a finer texture similar to triple ground beef. Simmer 1 hour, adding water if necessary to keep it moist but not soupy.
  2. Original recipes call for triple ground beef which is too difficult to obtain and not worth the effort.

Member recipes are not tested by the CHOW food team.

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POST A COMMENT |5 Comments

COMMENT

  • The ingredients list is missing the garlic. Should include: 1 clove garlic, minced

  • @ joeroc14624

    I am looking to create a tribute to Nick's any chance I could get in touch with you?

  • joeroc14624. Again, thanks for your input. I might add, Nick's (downtown) had Tabasco on the table, not Franks Red Hot, and for good reason. A garbage plate and Tabasco work very well together. Not sure why but I could dump 3 tablespoons of Tabasco on my plate and it wouldn't be too hot. I only went to the Lyell joint twice in my life. I live in Penfield so downtown was a lot closer to me....+READ

    joeroc14624. Again, thanks for your input. I might add, Nick's (downtown) had Tabasco on the table, not Franks Red Hot, and for good reason. A garbage plate and Tabasco work very well together. Not sure why but I could dump 3 tablespoons of Tabasco on my plate and it wouldn't be too hot. I only went to the Lyell joint twice in my life. I live in Penfield so downtown was a lot closer to me. Equally as good.-COLLAPSE

  • Thanks for the information. I will do that and appreciate you sharing. I can't stand it when people keep recipes a secret.

  • I must say that it is pretty close. I used to work at nicks on Lyell Ave in the late 80's. I was just comparing it to my old notes. I think the posted recipe may have been purposely different to keep the original a secret.
    If you ditch the cinnamon and cut the allspice and the clove amounts in half you'll be a lot closer.
    when you make this, do it this way:
    Start with a crock pot
    put the oil,...+READ

    I must say that it is pretty close. I used to work at nicks on Lyell Ave in the late 80's. I was just comparing it to my old notes. I think the posted recipe may have been purposely different to keep the original a secret.
    If you ditch the cinnamon and cut the allspice and the clove amounts in half you'll be a lot closer.
    when you make this, do it this way:
    Start with a crock pot
    put the oil, onions and garlic in the crock and turn it on high
    start adding all of the spices, no need to be perfect, we never were at nicks
    mix this up well and add the tomato paste, sometimes we even just dumped ketchup in if we were low on paste. mix it up good. by now everything dhould be warm and the onions are softening.
    add the ground beef raw, yes raw. add water till the beef is almost covered.
    Put the lid on the crock for a bout 10 minutes, now open the crock and stir, stir , stir until the beef looks fine. re cover. leave on high til the water comes to a boil the reduce heat to low. cook for at least 3 hours. keep moist with water, most will cook away. add as needed but dont flood it.
    This flavor should remind you more of the real thing than the other method.-COLLAPSE