Alton Brown Makes His Good Eats Meatloaf | Food Network

great meatloaf is always juicy but it never falls apart it is neither bland nor so heavily seasoned that it loses its meaty soul a great meatloaf is in fact a lot like a great hamburger only uh turned inside out step one oven set to 325 degrees it all starts with six ounces by weight of garlic flavored croutons then we follow that with a half teaspoon of two peppers both black and cayenne right in on top of the croutons a teaspoon of chili powder and a teaspoon of dried thyme now just spin this up until the croutons basically don't look like croutons anymore there that looks pretty good one half of an onion i've just kind of cut this up into quarters and it fell apart the rest of the way into the processor one carrot just peeled and snapped into pieces and to tell you the truth if you wash the carrots you can skip the peeling part three cloves of garlic no paper please and about half of a red pepper just torn into chunks that looks about right now just and get your finger underneath and hold the blade in you can drop everything in at once now the meat is the same breakdown as we used before 18 ounces of each one two nine ten okay that goes on top now i'm also going to go ahead and add a little bit of salt not a whole lot because those croutons i admit i bought in a store okay i'm a little lazy they have a lot of sodium on there but they're going to need just a little bit more because there's a lot of meat in here so i'm going to put about a teaspoon and a half of salt right on top of the meat i'm going to go ahead and mix this up before we add the final ingredient it only takes one if you put two eggs into a meatloaf some really nasty things can happen it's got to do with proteins and fats let's just say don't use more than one because once enough so one egg right into the middle these are clean and they're perfectly usable what you don't want to do is work the meatloaf like this you don't want to squeeze it that's just going to mess up the wonderful texture that we've got working in the meat so just toss this time to pan up now the loaf pan is not here for what you think just kind of pack this straight into the loaf pan and once it's all in just kind of push it out so that it fills the corners this is strictly going to be a mold there now just turn this out right in the middle of the pan or as close to the middle as you can get and it will come out like that the most important thing about cooking meatloaf is temperature management if this overcooks or it cooks too fast you're going to get a grainy texture because all the little proteins are going to ball up and they'll just squeeze out all of the other ingredients it'll crumble on the plate very unsatisfying so the best thing to do is to stick with a low oven and use a probe thermometer just insert the probe at a 45 degree angle right into the top of the loaf like that you don't want to overshoot the middle of the loaf you might hit the bottom of the pan and that will give you a false reading so that's pretty secure this is going to go straight into that 325 degree oven it's a relatively low oven now all you have to do is plug in your probe and wait until she chirps the glaze and it's pretty complicated so you better hold on to your britches all starts with a half cup of ketchup any brand will do now the sugar in the ketchup is going to help to to create the hardened surface of the glaze you need a little bit of sugar for that otherwise it's just going to be red frosting next a tablespoon of cumin hopefully freshly toasted and ground would be best you're going to toss in a shot of worcestershire sauce and a shot of your favorite hot sauce there you go and just to make sure that this really does become a glaze something that's got a shiny crunch on the outside i give a couple of squeezes of honey not a lot don't want to overwhelm it with sweetness of course oven opening is evil as we all know so work quickly when it sets this glaze will create a darned tasty crust crust being another thing you can't get if you use a loaf pan now before you slice that up into luscious slabs and park it alongside mashed potatoes or build any incredibly high meatloaf sandwiches which is what i intend to do give this a rest after all it is meat and it needs a few minutes just to kind of get its juices back together

Channel: Food Network

Views: 1,632,394

Keywords: Good Eats, Food Network, Alton Brown, cooking techniques, how to, meatloaf, meatloaf recipes, how to make meat loaf, food network recipes, dinner, comfort food, ground beef, alton brown recipes

Id: tsyXL8zKTrM

Length: 4min 47sec (287 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 17 2010