What's So Different About Mississippi Pot Roast?

Mississippi pot roast is an artifact of the early internet days, a time when recipes were spread by blogs instead of TikTok. Unlike many folk recipes, this dish has a specific creator — a woman named Robin Chapman.  She made her aunt's pot roast recipe tamer by swapping out Italian dressing mix for ranch and using mild, vinegary, whole pepperoncini peppers. These days, some cooks add a little pepperoncini brine for extra tang. Pepperoncini is an underrated pepper that you may only be familiar with from Greek salads or Papa John's pizza, but it doesn't often appear in dishes like this one. If Mississippi pot roast is anything to go by, we all need to become better acquainted with this sleeper ingredient.

Besides pepperoncini, the only other items needed to make Mississippi pot roast are au jus gravy mix, a stick of butter, ranch dressing mix, and a big hunk of beef. In the original recipe, Chapman used the best cut of meat for pot roast — chuck roast. Adding to the recipe's ease is that all the ingredients are added at once to simmer away in a slow cooker. Chapman actually came up with it back in the '90s. At that point, the dish was simply known as "the roast," even though she did live in Mississippi. It was first published in a church cookbook in the early 2000s, and both its simplicity and zingy flavor helped it go viral in the blogosphere once it was shared by a food blogger back in 2010. Still, Mississippi pot roast had to wait for the internet to grow before it could reach the wider audience it deserves.

Mississippi has several signature foods, including fried pickles, Delta tamales, and comeback sauce (which is kind of like a kicked-up Thousand Island dressing), but only a few of these share the state's name. Of course, there's Mississippi pot roast, as well as Mississippi mud pie and Mississippi chicken. While the chocolatey pie is not related to the pot roast, Mississippi chicken is, in fact, a direct spinoff of its beefier sibling.

Mississippi chicken, too, is often made in the slow cooker, though some versions are baked in the oven. While it typically involves boneless, skinless breasts, the other ingredients are identical to those found in the pot roast recipe, right down to the full stick of butter and the pepperoncini. Variations may use thighs or bone-in chicken, and some recipes call for banana peppers instead of pepperoncini. Mississippi chicken is essentially just a lighter (and possibly less pricey) version of Mississippi pot roast, and one that's equally tasty.