Amish Hamburger Sandwich Casserole

Jump to Recipe

This Amish hamburger sandwich casserole is a classic. What it is is really a deconstructed submarine sandwich that is baked. It just checks a lot of the boxes in terms of classic Amish farmhouse style meals.

A lot of Amish homemakers will make their own homemade pizza or spaghetti sauce. They start out with a bunch of their homegrown tomatoes, press them through a special strainer, and then process the juice, add seasonings, and store it for future use.

Jump to:

🙋 FAQ
🍲 Hamburger Sandwich Casserole Ingredients
📋 Instructions
🍲 More Hearty Casseroles
🖨️ Full Recipe

My grandmother made homemade spaghetti sauce, and I loved it, but she did have a “head start" by using canned tomatoes and tomato paste. Again, it was still amazing sauce, but not quite the scratch-made sauces that you’ll find an Amish kitchens.

Many Amish grow their own onions, and this recipe features one third of a cup of a chopped onion. Big yellow onions are favorites. But you can use any kind.

The original recipe called for 12 slices of bread, we just couldn’t make that work in a 9 x 13 baking dish. Now, you could double layer the bread and it would give you a thicker “base" but that’s an awful a lot of bread if you’re trying to count calories or watch how much you eat. It works fine with just one layer of bread, so that’s the way I’ll keep. And, geez, for an Amish homemaker this casserole would be more labor-intensive because they'd likely use homemade bread. Most of the rest of the world reading this will just grab a bag of pre-sliced bread and throw in the slices. Homemade bread, of course, would be the ultimate best!

🙋 FAQ

Do the Amish ever buy store-bought bread?

Yes. While it is true that the Amish, in general, make their own homemade bread most of the time, sometimes they hold gatherings for hundreds of people (funerals or church gatherings) and it just wouldn't be practical to bake 200 loaves of bread. So in cases like that it is not uncommon for an Amish to go to an Aldi or a thrift store to buy a dozens and dozens and dozens of loaves of bread.

We always come back to hamburger in recipes like this, most Amish will butcher their own meat. And there’s just an incredible difference, I think, between the taste of home butchered ground beef and store-bought ground beef. It’s difficult to describe the difference, but it’s definitely discernible if you’ve tasted both.

Kind of looks funky, but the above photo is the really "good stuff", the mix of mayo, cream cheese and Italian seasoning and spread over bread.

Top it all with cheese. Wow, cheese on top of cream cheese, this is my kind of casserole!

Topped with cheese and hamburger and baked, this is some good stuff!

🍲 Hamburger Sandwich Casserole Ingredients

12 slices of bread
1 /2 cup mayo
8 ounces of cream cheese
1 teaspoon Italian seasoning
2 cups shredded cheese of your choice, divided
1 pound of hamburger
1 quart pizza or spaghetti sauce
1 cup water
1 /3 cup chopped onion

📋 Instructions

Layer bread in a 9 X 13 inch baking dish.
Mix mayo, cream cheese and Italian seasoning and spread over bread.
Sprinkle with one cup of cheese.
Fry hamburger with onion.
Season to taste then add sauce and water.
Stir and spread over cheese.
op with an additional 1 cup shredded cheese.
Bake at 350 for 30 minutes.

🍲 More Hearty Casseroles

Three-Layer Beef Casserole

Ham Casserole

Amish Country Casserole

Six-Ingredient Country Casserole

🖨️ Full Recipe