Greek Style Meatballs Saganaki: Keftedes Saganaki

[Music] hi guys welcome to dimitra's dishes so today I'm gonna be teaching you how to make gifted the saganaki it's Greek it's not traditional it's not a classic but it's my version of a Greek style meatballs with the tomato sauce serve it with spaghetti serve it with bread serve it up with a side of mashed potatoes anyway you're gonna serve it this is delicious because the sauce is a tomato and feta sauce that's homemade and comes together in no time we're gonna begin but with the tomato sauce ingredients and get that going and then we're gonna move on to the meatballs so in the tomato sauce we're gonna begin with and a small onion that I finely chopped with three whole cloves the garlic you can chop them too but they really melt with the onions once they begin to cook in the oil and now I'll add oil to that in a few seconds then we're gonna have some oregano and crushed red pepper flakes a little bit of sugar lots of feta cheese I get I cubed it and then I'm gonna crumble it on top we need some salt pepper and I have a small can of tomatoes in here so if you find if you have crushed Tomatoes go ahead and use those but because I didn't have crushed tomatoes on hand I had diced tomatoes I'm just gonna puree it in the blender now I like my sauce to be really nice and smooth if you like it more chunky and rustic then you can go ahead and use the diced tomatoes as is I'm going to put this over the stove top on high heat with about 1/4 cup of olive oil and I'm gonna cook it and I'm also gonna put a little bit of salt because salt kind of softens the onions too and helps them cook a little faster just a little bit just a pinch so I'm gonna put it over high heat then I'm going to reduce the heat to like a medium low and I'm gonna allow the onion and the garlic with the oil to cook for about 10 to 15 minutes until it's nice and golden and soft and at that point I can start kind of smashing the garlic in but in the meantime I'm gonna put that on there and then we're going to get to making the gift ëthis which are the meatballs so for the meatballs they're very easy to make I've made the gift of this recipe with your meatballs on this channel way back a few years ago when I first started making videos we're gonna use the same recipe pretty much and let's go over the ingredients because they're so simple to make we have a pound of lean ground beef you can use ground chicken if you wanted to or even lamb or combination of lamb and beef if that's what we really like I have a whole garlic clove and onion some whole milk red pepper flakes salt pepper dried oregano some bread crumbs I have panko but you could use regular breadcrumbs if you wanted to some shredded Parmesan cheese that's completely optional and one whole egg that's it the only difference between this recipe and the older one is in the older one there is also a bell pepper and that is delicious I just didn't have one today so I'm kind of skipping it in my food processor this is so easy to make in a sleep processor so I'm just gonna go ahead and use it I'm gonna chop up my onion with my garlic I'll get the garlic going first because big huge chunks of garlic and meatballs is not really desirable let's put it in here and chop it chop it up really really nice and small just like that and then we're gonna chop up the onion and while the onion is chopping up I'm going to take out the parsley because that's a very important ingredient that you don't want to leave out fresh parsley so I have curly parsley here but you can use flat leaf parsley if you're a fan of cilantro go ahead and use that really whatever fresh greens you want you can put in here you can put a little bit of rosemary maybe about like 1/4 teaspoon of that in here some mint mint goes mint is nice and fresh too dill is nice too whatever herbs you like make sure you add them in there but the parsley is just foolproof it's gonna taste delicious even though it's going in there I'm just gonna just loosely chop it up just a little bit since my knife and my cutting board are out I'm gonna put it in here and then I'm gonna puree it until everything is really finely chopped then we're gonna move on to the next step so this is what you want it to look like you want it to be really finely minced and then our this mixture is ready now we're just going to put everything in a big mixing bowl I'm gonna put my beef my ground meat in here let's put this on this side I'm gonna put our bread crumb Parmesan cheese about a teaspoon or so of dried oregano I love it a pinch of red pepper flakes if you don't like them you can leave them out if you don't like any of these ingredients you can leave them out I know I get comments down below like how dare you put this or that in here that's not Greek it doesn't have to be if you like a certain spice that's not you know very traditional but it tastes good to you that's the best part of cooking at home just go ahead and add it in there and if you really don't like something that's part of a recipe just leave it out no big deal then we're going to put some salt about a teaspoon and we're just going to mix up this egg with the milk so that way it blends easily just like and in they go and then last but not least we're just gonna add all of these herbs and onion and garlic not all of them there's just parsley in here so we're adding the parsley the onion and the garlic in here and then I'm just gonna mix it all up until everything is all combined and then we're gonna fry these so we'll talk about that as soon as you get to that step recipe makes between 22 to 25 small meatballs but I like to make this four this is not an appetizer I'm making this as a main course I'm gonna make them a little bigger and we're gonna get at least twelve out of this so you can portion the meat out if you wanted to to be more precise beforehand but basically you get like a golf ball size is that a golf ball size whatever that is and you make a nice sized meatball just like this and you leave it on the plate and you keep going until all your meat filling is ready so this recipe made 17 pretty decent-sized meatballs I'm gonna heat up olive oil in in a frying pan so that way I can fry these up if you didn't want to fry them up you can grill them on your grill or roast them in the oven personally we prefer them fried in our house but again make them however you want let's head over to the stove so we can get these cooking so once the onion and garlic gets nice and golden and soft you want to go in there with a wooden spatula and just smash up the garlic which should happen really effortlessly easily and then at this point let's reduce the heat because we're gonna have a lot of splatter once we add the tomato sauce let's add all of our canned tomatoes oregano and red pepper flakes I'll just add a half a teaspoon of sugar because it usually always needs that canned tomatoes are a little bit acidic somebody did give me a an idea about cooking celery in here and that kind of does which what sugar does but I haven't tried it yet if you guys tried it let me know I'm gonna season this with salt and some black pepper and then I'm gonna bring it to a boil over high heat and once it boils and I'm just gonna reduce it to a medium and then I'm going to let this cook for about 15 minutes until it thickens and everything comes together and that in the meanwhile we're gonna fry up our meatballs and then we'll have a meal oh that close to being ready so now we're gonna fry our meatballs so you want to make sure that the fire or the heat underneath the frying pan with the oil is on medium to medium-high not too high because you don't want them to burn and you'll know it's ready when you put some wooden spoon or wooden skewer and then the bubbles start rising up just like that that's how you know it's done if you don't have a skew or anything like that I just put in a meatball if it starts to sizzle like that you know it's ready don't overcrowd the pan just put in as many as fit easily so let's see how many fit in here so we have about six in here I'm not gonna put any more they're gonna take about five to six minutes to cook now you don't have to cook them fully through because they are gonna continue to cook in the sauce what you're looking for is for them to be golden brown all around and I'll show you when they're ready what they're supposed to look like so our chef deserts are pretty much done frying when they're nice and golden all around like that they're ready so while we're taking these out of the frying pan out of the oil you want to put them in a plate that's lined with paper towels to absorb the excess oil and then you can pre-heat your oven to the broil setting because the frying pan is gonna go in there and you'll see why it's gonna melt affect the cheese that we're going to add to the sauce and it's just gonna be perfection and let me show you what the sauce it's like it has reduced look at that now you could also add double the amount of canned tomatoes to this and I have done that many times to put to make sure that there's lots of sauce plenty of sauce for the meatballs because I do like planning of sauce I just made it like this for you so you can see kind of like the base recipe with needed but if you're gonna put another can in there then you're gonna have to make this in a pot just to keep that in mind let's put the meatballs in here we're not putting them all because they don't all fit we're just gonna put as many as we can but if you are putting extra tomatoes in there canned tomatoes you don't have to increase anything else you don't have to increase any more oregano or any more onion or any more garlic the amount that's in here is enough from one can or for two cans and the exact weight measurements are gonna be in the recipe I think that's good let's turn the heat on so you can just cook them through just a little bit then we're gonna add the feta cheese so at this point you can crumble it in or you could leave the chunks in like that whatever you prefer and then this is gonna go underneath the broiler the the oven rack should be more towards the middle so it doesn't burn these let me turn the heat off because that's good enough the sauce is thick enough so we're gonna put this under the broiler for about three to five minutes until the cheese so sort of melt and chars and the sauce gets a little bit caramelized and then it's gonna be ready to serve and I'll show you what that looks like okay so our gift of the saganaki are completely done all they took is about three minutes under the broiler just be careful keep an eye on them because some of them got a little bit darker than I wanted them to they'll still be yummy and delicious just don't let them burn definitely don't want that to happen now you can garnish these with either some finely chopped scallions finely chopped parsley whatever you like I really love the taste of scallions so I'm just gonna drizzle them on top or drop them on top like that and let them sort of from the heat let them release their flavor onto their it's gift eva's are so moist and so delicious and that comes from the bread crumbs and the milk and the egg in there they do it does make all the difference in grease sometimes they tend to go a little heavier on the bread crumbs it tastes they're super moist that's what keeps them really nice and soft but they do tend to taste more like bread than than beef or meat and I like to taste them like a meat after all I like them to taste like meat not like I mean after all because they are a meatball I'm gonna taste the meatball because it's so yummy smells so good mmm they're perfect I can taste the herbs in there they're very flavorful very moist and just perfect I forgot to mention that you should have tasted the salt and the seasoning and the sauce before it went in under the broiler make sure you do that just to make sure that everything is perfectly seasoned I'm gonna serve mine with this beautiful rosemary bread that I made earlier today if you don't have the recipe make sure you check it out it's already gonna be up right before this recipe very easy to make you can serve it with pasta some mashed potatoes a nice salad whatever suits your fancy whatever floats your boat just make it like I said before when I was making the sauce I do like to serve it with a little more sauce and they did in this frying pan right here it just would have overflowed and kind of made a mess if you are making a double batch of the sauce keep the onion amount the same the garlic the same just put a double bat a double batch of the canned tomatoes in there and it'll make a really nice beautiful sauce so that way you can have for dipping and eating this meal all together but just put it in a bigger pot you don't want to put it in a in the pan this size I'm gonna serve it to myself on here the feta melted and just smells beautiful let me take some bread let's see let's see what this is made of see if it tastes good let's see if it's worth all the hype it sure is I don't like to toot my own horn but you guys have to trust me that this is so good you're definitely gonna want to make it it's on the website as well as in the description box so the website is www.hs com the description box is underneath this video I keep getting comments when people and people are telling me that they can't find the recipe right underneath this video there's something called description box and the recipes in there as well as a link if you haven't already bought my cookbook go ahead and get it it's a brunch book comment down below what you want to learn how to make next thank you for spending time with me today and I'll see you guys next time bye

Channel: Dimitra's Dishes

Views: 26,066

Rating: 4.9467311 out of 5

Keywords: cooking show, greek food, greek recipes, Dimitra Khan, euro bakery and cafe, easy recipes, greek meatballs, saganaki, tomato sauce, keftedes, feta

Id: 1fXlWfuFxHk

Length: 13min 33sec (813 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 05 2018