How to Make Meatballs with Dan Holzman, co-founder of The Meatball Shop

I guess we're here at the meatball making facility to show you guys how to make meatballs which is um really really simple so I don't think anybody needs to be intimidated we're going to make our beef meatballs today which is our most popular meatball and I guess the whole idea of meatballs is it's the perfect food to to you know start learning how to cook with it's the perfect food to serve for a big party so the the general gist is we have about two pounds of ground beef which is makes that makes enough meatballs for four to six people anytime you start with with two pounds of meat you get about four to six people worth of new balls and we have a magic ratio that we follow for all of our recipes which is basically for every pound of meat we put a teaspoon of salt we put one egg and we put either one slice of bread or one quarter cup of breadcrumbs and then whatever seasoning we want to kind of make it into the flavor profile of the meatballs that we're looking for and we mix them up and we roll them and roast them so with those steps and anybody can kind of make a meatball out of any meat in any flavor profile and for this which is our classic beef meatball it's kind of a medium complicated meatball recipe if that makes sense we have recipes that have only five ingredients and we have some recipes that have 30 or 40 ingredients so I don't think that anybody needs to be intimidated there's something for everybody and that's that awesome so the first and foremost I'm going to I'm going to mix um two pounds of ground beef shoulder clod is what we're using so you know when you go to the supermarket and you see different types of ground meat you have a lot of different choices so at the meatball shop you know we choose to grind our own meat and it works for us we make a lot of meatballs you might have a meat grinder of your house which is awesome in which case you can kind of choose your meat as well and say either Chuck or beef shoulder works really well because it has a lot of flavor it's a well worked muscle and it has a great fat content and fat is really important when it comes to making meatballs because it's what gives that kind of moist appeal when you when you eat it the fat is the moisture but generally in you know in our daily lives we just use kind of pre ground meat and so when when you are shopping for ground beef it's nice to shop for something that has a higher fat content so we see it on the package it'll say like 80% lean or 72% lean or 90 percent lean and that's the ratio of lean to to fat lean meat to fat and so you want to go with a lower ratio so 72% isn't always available but you can go to a butcher shop and get that and usually 80% is so I would I've always go for that and then a way to incorporate a little bit more fat into a meatballs to maybe add cheese a lot of times when we're making a meatball that has an inclusion like the steak bacon cheddar meatball of cheddar cheese and I want the cheddar cheese flavor to be prevalent we'll actually cut the cheese and we'll dice it into large pieces and mix that in and then when it melts it kind of melts into meatball and you taste this kind of bigger cheddar cheese chunks as you're eating through it so that's something to think about in general is you know when I'm making this meatball do I want everything to be the same texture to a lot of different sizes Rubin meatballs it's like a pretty easy one we have a ribbon meatball which means that Rubick sandwich classically has Swiss cheese in it so we were put Swiss cheese in that meatball amour Italian you know classic Italian meatball might have pecorino and parmesan ricotta cheese is an interesting one because it offers a lot of moisture and also gives a really really supple texture to the end of your meatball almost like a spongy quality that only ricotta for some reason gives in my fresh cheese gift so you know fresh versus aged there there are a couple of misconceptions about meatballs in general I guess one of them is you know how firmly and densely to pack your meatball and how that's going to affect the overall texture you want to pack it because you don't want your balls to break apart when you're when you're roasting them but these greetings you put in are the most important so you know for the texture and the culture cheese is a great one to create a really light and fluffy texture and also add a little bit of fat which will add some moisture ricotta from Calabria which I happen to love but and we use at the restaurant but you know any ricotta cheese will work it's not like you want to use the super fancy most expensive ricotta cheese because it's just going to be mixed in so you know this is um something to think about I'm going to put what I would consider to be a healthy dollop of ricotta cheese right in there and then bread or bread crumbs so every single meatball has eggs meat and bread or bread crumbs the bread is plays a really important role because it a it soaks up all the fat as your meatballs are roasting and soaks up all the flavors and your meatballs are roasting and heat keeps them on the inside B the bread actually is what creates a really supple texture so the more bread you put in the more soft your meatballs will be a lot of people you know they think that the more expensive their item is the better it is I mean we equate quality with price and so you think well I'm going to put the most expensive meat in I'm going to put more of the meat and less of the cheap stuff the bread and I'm going to have a better meatball when in fact you'll have a tougher meatball and you might prefer that but if you're looking for what we kind of think is a really great meatball you want to go with something that has a good amount of fillers I would use this much bread a whole hamburger bun or two slices or half hero roll for a two pound meatballs you're grinding your own meat I would definitely suggest going in that direction because you can kind of just cut the bread into some strips drop them right in the grinder with the meat and then I'll make a meatball if you don't have a grinder but you want to use fresh bread what I would say is you know you can just cut them into kind of little dice like so and when you mix your meatballs after you're done roasting you'll kind of find these little tiny pieces left in there that when you bite into them are just so refreshing ly delicious will be the life of your own party poor I could go with bread crumbs at the restaurant we have a lot of leftover bread so we can dry it and grind it up and have our own bread crumbs if you buy your own if you buy bread crumbs soon it's going to get angry at you so I would definitely go with something that doesn't have any seasoning because the last thing you want to do is kind of take the manufacturer seasonings and add it to your meatballs and then who knows whether that meshes with your flavor profile so I go with just you know kind of plain Italian bread crumbs and again the same that ratio of 1/4 cup of bread crumbs for every pound of meat I've got 2 pounds of meat for two quarter cups of bread crumbs when you are cooking anything just like we talked about with cheese you want to spend with the kind of end product and decide where you're going to go backwards and then figure out your flavor profile and then build your spices or your herbs into it the herbs and the spices that you choose are very very important because they're going to create the flavor at the end and you don't want to hazard they just kind of add something like you know we're going with an Italian meatball we're going to go with parsley and oregano garlic white wine and fennel seed maybe curry but you don't want to necessarily be like oh I'm going to go with curry and oregano or I'm going to go with you know basil and sage you might want to go with basil and sage I don't know that song parsley sage rosemary and thyme they all go really well that's for real for our meatballs today we're going with just parsley and oregano and one of my favorite parts about the meatballs I don't have to be too precious about the the stems or anything they taste great in there so I just kind of chop them up stems and all and I like to have them a little bit rough I don't I don't care to have everything too finely chopped because I think a little bit of texture in the end is nice if they're if the oregano has really thick stems you can kind of pick it but certainly at the top of the bunch we just give it a chop and for these I've got about a half a cup of parsley and maybe a quarter cup of fresh oregano you can use dried oregano but I wouldn't use dried parsley I have maybe two teaspoons because I have two pounds of meat that I'm starting with of salt then I prefer kosher salt but that's because these meatballs are awesome so you should prefer kosher salts here which is why you're here the secret to eggs someone told me that if you crack them on a flat surface you never get any shell in there which was amazing it was like a revelation for me I used to crack them on the side of the bowl and I thought I'd look really cool but I would always get shells in the meatballs oh wait and then I thought you know there's probably like one shell 24 meatballs by the time someone eats 1/4 the chance they even know it's a shell crack them flat and you don't even have to think about that so I skip the step although my mom taught me how to get that shell out of the egg using the shell you know about that it's like amazing you just the shell attract shell you know when you go to pick the shell and it just runs away no matter where you go you take a like a little piece of shell and you scoop it out and it's like some sort of animal magnetism and then I'm going to give it a good mix so two pounds of meat 2 teaspoons of salt 1/2 a cup of breadcrumbs 2 eggs quarter cup of parsley 1/4 cup of oregano I think I got that mixed up healthy dollop of ricotta cheese and then I'm going to go to town whenever we're mixing a meatball is like another crazy misconception people are like all you just want to just barely mix it together that's absolutely not the case you can definitely over mix it but you want to give it a really strong and healthy mix because what winds up happening is the protein and the meat starts to stick together and it forms into like a force meet whenever the meatball is a meatloaf or pate are all basically the exact same thing just in different forms so whenever you make any of them you want to really mix them well until the protein starts to stick together but what you don't want is your the heat from your hand to start to melt the fat so you want to mix it vigorously quite quickly in that sense vigorous and quick tomahto when it comes to meatballs these potential eggs got a customer so it's amazing okay look at that I wish you could see this because I wish you could just get your hands in here feel this that's perfect Wow I'm gonna go wash my hands and then we're gonna roll these things up so the deal is you know the tedious part of making a meatball is rolling and we all have these memories maybe you don't but I do of my grandmother I don't really my grandmother never made meatballs but if she did I would have a memory of her slaving over the you know over the table rolling meatballs for hours until they invented the ice cream scoop which is a great multi-purpose tool for both scooping ice cream and scooping meatballs or any other thing you want to portion the one of the more important when it comes to make meatballs things in my opinion is making sure that every meatball is the same size and that's that's important because obviously don't want to be the guy that gets the little tiny balls on dinner together and you also want to make sure that everything cooks at the same time you don't want to be the guy with the really overcooked balls and you know and then someone else has these supple moist perfectly balls across the table from you and you start getting jealous so what we do is we use an ice cream scoop because it makes the perfect meatball the same size every time and they make all different sized meatball ice cream scoop so this is the one with the yellow handle which is 2 ounces by volume but also happens to come out at 2 ounces by weight and for us at the meatball shop that wins at being the perfect size they have a purple handle scoop which makes a 1 ounce meatball which is great for cocktails and you know like you can have a little toothpick in there and have dainty balls but I just kind of fill it with me I flatten it off completely and then I scoop and I dump and there's the next step which is going to be rolling but I'm just going to go ahead and portion them all out and there's a person whose job actually revolves around this eight hours a day five days a week and we're three years in when people have been making meatballs for thousands of years I wonder how many hours were wasted before the ice cream scoop revolution as the meatball like talk about just efficiency and if I was a real master it would be exactly enough but I have some sort of tiny meatball that though and then once I've got them all portioned at school I'm just going to go ahead and give them a little roll to compact them and make them round so that they're not meat oddities but they're meatballs and I am I like to line them up and make them all touch in a grid this is great and helpful because you can see if there's something out of place like maybe one of the meatballs is really small maybe if I had this little tiny ball and I put it over here you go ooh there's something wrong with that one people are always like how do you fry your meatballs first you raise your meatballs you roast your meatballs and and the truth is that you know we cook meatballs in a lot of different ways where a meatball centric restaurants we have 55 different or 56 different types of meatballs and five I think we probably have 56 or 57 different types of meatballs at this point yeah we figured it out there's no wrong way to do it so you know my basic advice is start with the absolute simplest way and if it works stop there and then if you need to do it a little differently you can try so roasting works really really well it's clean and thus easy and it's it's fast so I like to roast the meatballs am I don't look at these things beautiful every single make off I'm not even watching I'm just looking straight ahead and look at look at how these balls are just perfectly round I like to do eight ounces of meatball four balls per person one two three four five and like maybe there's a dainty person coming to dinner so that would be four to six portions you could go this way I have one two three four if there were fat people but you know whichever way you like it we got meatballs for the family and then we're just going to pop them in the oven 425 degrees for 17 minutes we'll make a perfect meatball every single time provided that you followed our instructions and went with 2 ounces you so when you're making meatballs making meatballs it's like baking any time that you are unable to change the finished product after it's cooked that or during the cooking process you want to be really really careful that you get the seasoning right when I'm cooking a sauce or I'm making a stew or something I'm tasting it as I'm going I'm thinking I needs a little more salt I can add a little bit more salt I can wait till the end I can put some salt mix it in with your meatballs you get one choice chance after they're rolled and roasted there's no adding any salt to it or adding any spices so the most important thing you can do is is take your mixed meat make a little hamburger sized patty tiny little patty flatten it out put it in a frying pan with a little bit of olive oil cook it and you taste it and then you say to yourself like Wow all right perfect I'm going to go ahead and roll these and roast them or you said yourself oh my god I completely forgot to add the salt or those are way too salty the last thing you want to do is make all your meatballs rolling roast them have them simmering in the sauce he worked in all day long invite all your friends over pull them out and put them on the table and they're like ooh these would have been awesome if I would have just added another pinch of salt instead they're going to end shitty so don't make shitty meatballs cook off a tester Patty and adjust the seasoning before you roll

Channel: Skillshare

Views: 225,214

Rating: 4.7635975 out of 5

Keywords: meatball, cooking, skillshare, meatballs, learn to cook, cooking class, italian cooking, free class, italian cuisine, the meatball shop, daniel holzman

Id: a5A_nVQYDfc

Length: 17min 17sec (1037 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 29 2013