Homemade Meatloaf Recipe - Best Meatloaf Ever!

today I'm going to share with you how to make an easy meatloaf and I've got a few tips and tricks to share with you so that this homemade meatloaf recipe will come out perfect it'll be tasty and juicy and when you go to slice it it'll stay together it will not be a dry crumbly mess hi sweet friends I'm Mary and welcome to Mary's Nest where I teach traditional cooking skills from making nutrient-dense foods like bone broth ferments sourdough and more so if you are learning about those things consider subscribing to my channel and don't forget to click on the little notification bell below that'll let you know every time I upload a new video when it comes to making meatloaf the first thing that you need to decide on is what kind of meat you're going to use now what I've got here is one pound of Chuck this is beef and it's one pound of Chuck and over here I've got one pound of pork and these are both clearly as you can see ground meats so I've got ground chuck and ground pork now my Chuck has an 85/15 ratio meaning that it has 15% fat to it now sometimes at your grocery store you may see something sold that's referred to as meatloaf mix and that's usually one-third ground chuck one-third ground pork and then one-third ground veal but veal is not that common anymore a lot of people don't eat veal so you may not see a traditional meatloaf mix at your grocery store anymore but all of that aside I really like to do half and half half chuck and half pork and no veal now what if you want to make this meatloaf with a different combination of meats maybe you want yours to be a little lower in fat you can do that and we'll go over some of the combinations however if you make a combination that's lower in fat we're going to talk about some additional ingredients that you're going to want to add so that your meatloaf is not dry and we'll do that in a minute but what we want to first talk about is the options of different meats now if you decide you want to do the Chuck and not the pork you can instead use a pound of ground sirloin that's a leaner type of ground beef and that would make this an all beef meatloaf you can also do a ground turkey substitution instead you could still have your Chuck for some of the fat that's in this and then you could replace the pork with some ground turkey or ground chicken now if you do that you want to make sure that the turkey and chicken that you're picking is the from the dark meat because you still are going to want to have a little bit of fat versus a ground ground white meat and if you want to do an all turkey and all ground turkey meatloaf or you want to do an all ground chicken meatloaf and not have any beef no Chuck no sirloin mixed in with it nothing like that then you're going to want to make sure that you definitely use the ground dark meat which is going to have some fat to help with the binding of the end product so the combinations of ground meat that you can use to make a meatloaf really can start to become endless you can have the Chuck and the pork chuck and sirloin chuck and some ground poultry or all ground poultry what matters in the end are the other ingredients that you're going to add to replace any fat that you've removed by using a lower fat meat and finally because I do get this question sometimes can you just make a fat free meatloaf and yes you can if you wanted to say you're grinding your own meat or it's something you can get from your butcher and you wanted to use ground breast meat from the turkey or from the chicken yes you can use those to make a meatloaf but you'll want to make sure that you get a a rather coarse ground meat that helps whenever you're making a meatloaf if you can have the butcher give you a coarse ground but if not if you're just buying packaged meat it's not as important when you've got nice fat content however if you can get a coarse ground white meat and then make some additions to add in things that can substitute for the fat and the moisture which we'll go over you can get a more or less fat-free meatloaf the only drawback is you have to be very careful to not overwork the meat because you don't want to create something that's almost going to look like a pate as opposed to a meatloaf so when it comes to meatloaf if you don't make it too often like we don't you just want a nice homemade family-style meatloaf I like to go with a pound of Chuck and a pound of pork well now I'm gonna go pop these in the fridge to keep them cold while we go over the rest of the ingredients and that's something that I want to share with you when you go to make your meatloaf make sure that you're working with meat that's cold and I'll show you a trick when we get to mix it to how to keep it cold because you want the fat to stay in its solid form while you're mixing it and forming it and you want it to melt once it gets into into the oven and then disseminates nicely through all the meat you don't want it to melt and become sort of a mess when you're in the forming stage of making your meatloaf now the next thing that you're gonna need is one cup of fresh breadcrumbs and if you were with us in a previous video where I showed you how to make fresh breadcrumbs as well as toasted bread crumbs I'll link to that in the I cards and I may mention a lot of videos throughout this and if I run out of buy cards don't worry I'll put everything in the description below and then you're gonna need 1/3 of a cup of whole milk I find whole milk works well because again we're adding in some fat but if you are trying to do one of those fat-free or lower fat versions yes you can use a lower fat milk but I'm also going to tell you what to use instead of milk for a better result but right now all we're gonna do is take this third cup of milk and saturate our cup of breadcrumbs we'll just give this a little twizzle around and then we'll set this aside now what if you decide that you don't want to use the pork and in place of the pork the ground pork you want to use ground sirloin with your Chuck or you want to use all ground sir or you want to have turkey or whatever the case may be any one of the combinations that we talked about at this point instead of adding in the third cup of milk you're going to want to add in 1/2 a cup of bone broth now if you've been with me a while you know I make a lot of bone broth and I've got a lot of videos on making bone broth and all different kinds of bone broth so I'll link to that in the I cards or in the description below and in the description below but if you've got bone broth and it can be beef bone broth it can be chicken bone broth turkey bone broth it doesn't matter the flavor won't have a significant impact on the end product but you'll want to add in 1/2 a cup of bone broth and why bone broth the reason is that bone broth is rich in gelatin bones are rich in collagen and when you turn them into bone broth the cooked collagen becomes gelatin and then that gelatin that you're going to add in with your breadcrumbs here is going to serve as a binding agent to help keep your meatloaf together and it's also adding moisture again to keep your meatloaf juicy now what if you don't have bone broth you don't make bone broth you don't want to buy bond broth no problem most grocery stores will sell unflavored gelatin and that's what you'll want to look for sometimes it's sold in a little packet by itself sometimes it's sold in a couple of packets in a box but you want to look for unflavored gelatin and if you can find unflavored gelatin that's from cattle that maybe was organic or was raised on grass all the better then what you're gonna do is you're going to take a half a teaspoon of your gelatin powder you're going to put it into a half a cup of hot water make sure it dissolves completely and then you're going to pour that over your breadcrumbs now in the case of gelatin when making a meatloaf more is not better don't go overboard with the gelatin because what can happen is the powdered gelatin because what can happen is your meatloaf can come out a little dense it can come out more like a pate as opposed to a nice moist juicy meatloaf so just use that if you're using the powdered gelatin just use half a teaspoon in a half a cup of water hot water let it dissolve and you'll be all set now I also want to mention one thing about the breadcrumbs we're using fresh breadcrumbs and basically to get fresh breadcrumbs if you don't have them already made you're going to take 3 slices of bread and I'm really comfortable with you using any type of bread I think that any type of bread works for this if you want to use a sourdough if you want to use a whole grain or if you want to just use a plain country white anything will work you're gonna need about three slices and having some kind of food processor or a high speed blender or even a regular blender can work too just you want to make sure that you're always checking it and scraping down the sides so that you don't get something that's mushy but any type of bread will do about three slices you basically want a cup of fresh bread crumbs and the reason is that you want fresh bread crumbs is they're very good at absorbing the milk or the bone broth whatever you're using or the gelatin powder mixed in water as opposed to dry breadcrumbs that are very dry and would take even more moisture to basically reconstitute if that's the proper terminology when working with bread crumbs that will almost add too much moisture and you don't want too much moisture because you do want your meatloaf to stay together there's the dry crumbly type that can fall apart on you but too much moisture can also make kind of a mushy meatloaf so avoid using the dry breadcrumbs that you see at the grocery store use the fresh or even or just make the fresh right at the time you make the meatloaf by grinding up three slices of bread all righty now we'll put our breadcrumbs aside and let them absorb the milk and we'll move on to the rest of the ingredients what I've got here is cut up onion this is just a plain yellow onion just one onion and I've got two close cloves of garlic and again these are just smashed I've not chopped anything up because I'm gonna go ahead and put everything into the food processor I don't worry if you don't have a food processor you can also do this in a high speed blender or even a regular blender we're just going to want to chop these very finely and just like with the food processor if you do use a blender either type high-speed or regular just stop it periodically and make sure that you scrape down the sides and incorporate everything so that you don't have some pieces that are finely chopped and others that aren't and then if you don't have any of that no problem just an old-fashioned hand grater works great and if you're feeling very enthusiastic if you want to grade it on the small grater all the better but you can certainly use the large grater too the reason I like to take this step is that this eliminates the need to have to saute your onions and garlic and cook everything up and then let it cool before adding it to your meatloaf mix when it's finely grated or chopped it will cook while the meatloaf is cooking and it'll be fine you're not going to get any raw taste at all whereas if they're in larger pieces then yes you should sautee them up and maybe a little olive oil or something like that and then let them cool before adding them to your meatloaf mix but I recommend trying this grading method I think you'll be very pleased with the results what I like to do is just start with the garlic I'm just going to go ahead and put all of this two cloves the two smashed cloves and I'm gonna go ahead and give this a little whirl to chop it up as finely as I can that really just took a couple of seconds and now we'll go ahead and add in this one yellow onion and we'll give that a whirl now that just took seconds a couple of seconds I stopped it I scraped down the side ran it for a few more seconds and so now I've got some really nice finely chopped onion basically a mince and I will overlay a picture so you can see what that looks like next what I've got here is a teaspoon of fine ground sea salt and then a half a teaspoon of freshly ground black pepper you can add extra pepper if you want you can add red pepper flakes depending on the level of spice that you like you can add a little less salt if you're watching salt you can add a little more salt if you tend to like things more on the saltier side but I have found that just a teaspoon of salt and a half a teaspoon of black pepper works perfectly so we're gonna go ahead and just add that right in with our onion and then next what I've got here is a quarter cup of ketchup and although I've showed you how to make fermented ketchup which I'll link to if that's something you're interested to interested in making a link to in the I cards and put in the description below the link as well but you don't need fermented ketchup for this recipe because we're going to be cooking it and you generally don't want to cook fermented foods so if you're using you certainly can use your fermented ketchup but if what you have a store-bought ketchup that's fine too try to find one maybe that is organic or at least one that's sweetened with sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup if you can find that but you're just going to need a quarter cup of ketchup now I want to talk about the onion that we put in here if you want to use less onion you certainly can you can do half onion and then you can have a variety of vegetables if you want to use carrots if you want to use celery if you want to use red peppers the sweet red bell peppers you can do that if you don't have those fresh and in season pimentos can work very well too that moisture is what you're looking for so you want to make sure that you have about a cup or even a scotch more about a cup of some mixture of vegetables whether it's onion and by itself or onion and something else but you want to make sure you have about a cup and this is very important if you're using something other than just the Chuck and pork mixture if you're trying to go less fat you want to make sure you have at least a cup of vegetables that are going to bring in the much-needed moisture that you need to replace any fat that you've removed now this is your basic seasoning you can stop right here and it's going to be very tasty but what I like to do is I like to add in about a tablespoon of fresh chopped parsley it gives some nice color it kind of breaks up the meat a bit because the onion being grated and and just white in color really takes on the color of the meat and you don't notice it as much but having some little flecks of the green looks very lovely makes it look very fresh now if you don't have fresh parsley you can use about a teaspoon of dried parsley or if you've mixed in a lot of vegetables like the red peppers or the pimentos and the carrots that are already going to bring in little specks of color you can completely leave this out this is 100% optional and I want to mention as we're going through these steps I like to mix everything all of the ingredients other than the meat that are going into the meatloaf I like to mix them all up very well before I even put them on to the meat because you don't want to overwork the meat that is what will we will create like a tough meatloaf and you really want to avoid that so that's why we're just adding everything in a little by little whether you're doing it by hand or in a blender or in a food processor get everything mixed right in the beginning before you even get ready to work with your meat next I like to add in a teaspoon of dried thyme I find the time works beautifully with ground meat no matter what ground meat you're using to make your meatloaf I think it's just anything baked in the oven that is meat based the ground thyme can really add a nice level of flavor but again you can leave it out and if you want to it in any seasoning blend that you like like on herbs de Provence or an Italian seasoning whatever the case may be all the different seasoning blends that we made when link in the iCard is in the description below that we made together the ten seasoning blends any seasoning blend that you like you can put in at this point and I recommend whatever you use just go with about a teaspoon because dried herbs you know can be a little strong so I'm just gonna go ahead and sprinkle this time in and then at this point yes we are gonna be adding an egg but I don't want to over beat that egg so we're just going to go ahead and mix all of this first and then we'll add in our egg well I just world that for a few seconds it's beautifully mixed and now I'm going to go ahead and add in one egg this is a large egg and that's all you need and again just like with the gelatin don't overdo with the eggs you just need for two pounds of meat you just need the one egg it's going to work as a binding agent as well as add moisture but any more than that can have a negative effect on your meatloaf so just the one egg and we'll just send it for a whirl just for a few seconds now we're just going to take our mixture and go ahead and add this to our bread crumbs and now all you want to do is just incorporate the onion mixture with your bread crumbs well we got this all nicely mixed now what I like to do next is because I like to keep everything very cold as we're working with it to keep that fat congealed I like to just take a little ice and just cool off my hands if I feel that they're too warm you don't necessarily have to do this what I like to do that just so my hands are not not too hot from being in the kitchen then I like to take my mixture and just sort of rest it into this bowl that has the ice in it then I'm gonna go ahead and start putting in my meat which I just took out of the fridge that's nice and cold so we'll put in some of the Chuck and then I just like to alternate a little makes it a little easier to mix it so that you don't have just the Chuck on on the bottom and the and the pork on top and this way we also get it nicely mixed to prevent over mixing then what we're gonna do and yes we have to do this where this works best if we do it with our hands nice cold clean hands and you just want to start incorporating the onion and breadcrumb mixture into the pork and and chuck mixture and you want to do this gently you don't want to start squeezing this so that it's like coming through your fingers you basically just want to have a nice open hand like a little claw like if you were making if you make Irish soda bread they always talk about just kind of having a open hand like a little claw to mixture mixture that's kind of the same thing that you want to do with meatloaf and I'll take an overhead shot so that you can see exactly what I'm doing and you just want to keep working with your hand like that until you feel that your mixture looks well distributed that the pork and the chuck is well distributed and that the onion and breadcrumb mix is well distributed and you just want to work you know from the bottom bringing up anything that may have settled on the bottom just go underneath like that with your hand again open hand no squeezing and now we'll get ready to shape it now the next thing you want to do is get a baking sheet and I like to line it with aluminum foil because making a meatloaf can be a bit of a mess and but if you're uncomfortable cooking not directly on aluminum foil you can just put a little piece of parchment down on top now at this point we have a couple of options we can take our meatloaf out of our bowl put it here and shape it with our hands and if you do that you want to make sure that you shape it fair at a fairly good height because once you get it into the oven and the fat starts to melt the meatloaf will lower a little bit it'll it'll spread out a little bit so you just want to make sure that you have a good height before you get it into the oven another option is to get a loaf pan it can be any kind of loaf pan non-stick glass regular whatever and even if it's nonstick I like to take a little paper towel and just give it a little wiping inside you can even just use your hands if you want I've just got a little olive oil on here and what we're gonna do is we're gonna use the loaf pan to shape our meatloaf then once we shape it we're gonna dump it out onto our baking sheet and that's why I'm giving it a little coat just to make sure nothing sticks and I had this in the fridge so it's nice and cold now what about just baking your meatloaf right in this loaf pan that's certainly something that you can do it's the way my mother always made her meatloaf and then she would just put the glaze on top which we'll talk about the glaze in a minute but she just put the glaze on top and bake it right in her loaf pan the only drawback about that is there's no glaze on the sides or the ends the other drawback about baking your meatloaf in a loaf pan as opposed to on a baking sheet is that it's just going to sit in all of the melted fat that may otherwise have drained off when it was on the baking sheet now some of the fat definitely is going to remain when it's here on the baking sheet that's what's going to help keep your meatloaf moist and killed together but extra fat will just sort of melt right off onto the baking sheet in here your meatloaf is more just kind of sitting in any additional fat that melts and isn't necessarily needed by the meatloaf to congeal however if you like the idea of baking in the security of the loaf pan you can certainly do that and as your meatloaf gets close to being ready what you can do is remove it from your oven and then take your baking sheet and just put your allow the meatloaf to come out of your loaf pan and then remove the loaf pan and then coated a lot of the fat will run off to the sides and then coat the whole thing with your glaze and put it back into your oven that'll give you a lovely shaped meatloaf and one that's covered with glaze but what we'll do today is we'll just use this loaf pan to shape our meatloaf and I'll show you what we'll do all you're gonna do is just start piling this right into the loaf pan well Pat it down gently and then we'll remove it onto our baking sheet now I want to mention something about this meatloaf mix if you decide you want to use this to make meatballs it makes wonderful meatballs the only thing that I might suggest is that in place of the time add a little bit of Italian seasoning or just oregano which is one of my favorite dried herbs and then all you want to do is once you get that into the loaf pan is just Pat it down just to get it somewhat even that's it and I'll overlay a little video to show you exactly what I'm doing now we're just going to get our baking sheet and we're going to do this very quickly and tip this loaf pan over boom and there we have our beautiful meatloaf now for the glaze all I'm gonna use is a quarter cup of ketchup and a tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce added to that I really like wish to share sauce it gives a lovely flavor if you want you could add a little bit of sugar to this I feel there's enough sugar in the ketchup so I don't add any sugar but if you want to add some you probably want to go you know with the natural cane juice the dried cane just like the sue can add or some maple sugar a little date sugar might look nice at work nice or if nothing else then if you don't have that as a last resort you can use a little brown sugar light brown sugar now what we're going to do is just put on some of this glaze and we'll use this little brush to kind of paint it all over and then we'll get ready to pop it in the oven well I've got all that glaze on it looks lovely a delicious and now what we'll do is we're gonna put this in a 350 degree oven and this is a two pound meat loaf so it's going to take at least an hour maybe an hour and a half and what we want to do is check the internal temperature with a thermometer a food grade thermometer and make sure that we've reached a hundred and sixty degrees Fahrenheit in internally so I'll go ahead and put this in that preheated 350 degree fahrenheit oven and when it's done we'll take it out we'll let it cool a little bit you always want to let your meat love cool a little bit and then we'll slice it and give it a taste well this meatloaf is all done it took about an hour and 15 minutes to come up to the proper internal temperature of 160 degrees Fahrenheit and now I let it cool a little bit on the baking sheet here and now we'll get ready to transfer it over to the serving platter give it a slice and take a taste and see how it is and basically what I've got here are two spatulas this is a nice wide one it's like I think it's a pancake flipper and I'm just gonna very carefully scooch these under and then we'll move it over to the platter all righty wish me luck mm-hmm boom perfect well this looks glorious I think this is gonna be a wonderful hit at the dinner table now I just want to give you a tip about having your meatloaf on the baking sheet when you take it out of the oven let it cool on your baking sheet for at least about 10 minutes until you attempt to transfer it to your platter that 10 minutes will allow the juices in the meatloaf to redistribute it to cool a little bit so that the fat begins to congeal or the gelatin if you were using bone broth time to congeal to hold your meatloaf together so that's very important definitely let it cool a little bit on your baking sheet well now we'll go ahead and slice into this I think everybody loves the end piece the best because it's got so much of the glaze on it and also if you wind up having any leftover meatloaf makes wonderful sandwiches the next day so that's something to keep in mind all righty well let's go ahead and let's see how this beauty slices up Paula this looks glorious and I'm using a serrated knife if I'm just going to use my fork here to hold this piece I'm using a serrated knife because I find that that works best to get your cleanest cut of meat loaf ah look at this beautifulness okay let me plate this up and and show it to you but look at how glorious that is and I'll take an overhead shot so that you can see that but look at how beautiful that is it's we're going to taste it I'm confident it's going to be moist it's going to be flavorful and it's holding together it's not becoming a crumbling mess now I'm also going to break into this and then take another picture so that you can see how lovely this is even when you break into it moist and delicious well I think it's gonna be delicious it smells delicious but I love this texture what I love about this is that it's so tender and it stays together when you slice it but then when you put your fork to it it's so just just tender I love that now let's take a taste with the glaze on and we'll see how this is mmm that melts in your mouth this is so delicious you have to make this meatloaf you're gonna really love it and if you'd like some more recipes for traditional home cooking meals like this be sure to click on this video over here where I show you how to make a lovely roast chicken and I'll see you over there in my Texas Hill Country kitchen love and God bless

Channel: Mary's Nest

Views: 57,295

Rating: 4.8926792 out of 5

Keywords: Homemade Meatloaf Recipe, Best Meatloaf Ever, How to Make Easy Meatloaf, Meat Loaf, Meatloaf, best meat loaf, best meatloaf, comfort foods, comfort food recipes, best comfort foods, easy meatloaf recipe, best meatloaf recipe, homemade meatloaf, meatloaf recipe, meatloaf recipe easy, how to make meatloaf, recipe for meatloaf, how to make meat loaf, easy meatloaf, meat loaf recipe, the best meatloaf recipe, meatloaf recipes, the best meatloaf ever, marysnest, marys nest

Id: rY1JuFoI0b8

Length: 30min 6sec (1806 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 27 2020