The young Jedi in your house will be obsessed with the turquoise onions.
Some movie foods look delicious immediately. Butterbeer? Easy sell. The grilled cheese from Chef? Obviously. But the “flat meat fry” from The Mandalorian and Grogu, with its turquoise onions, Spam and lava-flow quantity of queso? For someone who loves movies as much as I do, it’s exactly the sort of cinematic absurdity I will drop everything for to recreate in my kitchen.
I’m an enormous Star Wars fan. I’m a sucker for sprawling stories about scrappy resistance fighters challenging impossible systems—whether that’s the Rebel Alliance, the kids in The Hunger Games, or half the population of Middle-earth. So naturally, the second an impossibly cute little alien orders a glowing sandwich from a space food cart, I’m already emotionally invested.
What is the flat meat fry sandwich from ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’?
The sandwich comes from a new behind-the-scenes video featuring chef Roy Choi and director Jon Favreau, who created the snack for the upcoming film. In the movie, the flat meat fry (aka “Force Meat Sandwich”) is apparently a favorite of Grogu’s.
It is, objectively, an absurd sandwich. It’s also very fun.
It’s served on ciabatta and stuffed with pan-fried Spam, queso sauce and strange blue onions. The onions are, admittedly, a little jarring psychologically. I’ve made caramelized onions hundreds of times in my life, but this was my first experience tinting them electric blue beforehand. Somehow, though, once they hit the pan, they magically stopped looking like craft supplies and started looking like something you’d overpay for at a night market on Coruscant.
How to Make the Flat Meat Fry
Ingredients
- 1 ciabatta roll
- 2 slices of Spam
- 1 small onion, thinly sliced
- Blue food coloring
- Oil
- Prepared queso dip, melted Velveeta-style cheese or nacho cheese sauce
- Salt
Directions
Step 1: Tint and caramelize the onions
Slice the onions and toss them with blue food coloring until they’re evenly coated. (Learn from my mistake. Use tongs. I am typing this with the faintly blue hands of an alien from a galaxy far, far away.)
Season the onions generously with salt, and cook them low and slow in a bit of oil until they’re softened and caramelized.
Step 2: Fry the Spam
Slice the Spam into 1/4-inch-thin pieces, and pan-fry them until they’re browned and crisp. You can heat the queso during this stage too.
Step 3: Build the sandwich
Slice and lightly toast the ciabatta. Layer on the Spam, followed by the blue onions.
Finish off the fillings with a generous spoonful of queso.
Step 4: (Optional) Press the sandwich
In the movie version, the sandwich is served between two taiyaki-style waffles. But the version that Choi makes in the video is served on ciabatta, and it gets pressed like a panini. If you want that effect, press the sandwich in a panini maker until it’s crisp and compressed.
How does the flat meat fry taste?
Against all odds, it tastes pretty good.
The closest comparison is probably a Cubano, which is what Jon Favreau said after trying it. The Spam gets crispy and salty, the queso turns everything rich and messy, and the onions add sweetness underneath all the sci-fi chaos.
The visual experience does require some mental adjustment. Bright blue onions trigger a very immediate response in the human brain, which screams, “this should not be edible.” But that’s part of giving into movie magic. Once you accept tiny green aliens and hyperspace travel, blue onions don’t feel like that much of a leap.
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