How to Make the Juiciest, Most Tender and Flavorful Italian-American Meatballs | Serious Eats

my meatballs are better than your grandma oh my god I can't talk to save my life I set out to make the most perfect italian-american meatball I dreamed of meatball but tested meatballs for hours and days and weeks and I ended up with what I think is the most perfect meatball it is juicy it is tender it's so damn flavorful your taste buds are gonna flee your mouth so the meat I have here I have ground beef and I have ground pork a lot of meatball recipes you will also see ground veal you can make this and add ground veal too I didn't do it because veal is a little bit more expensive so I'm just keeping this a little bit more economical try to get your ground meat with a pretty high fat percentage if you can the fat is one of the keys to a juicy meatball if you get really lean ground meat it's just gonna end up dry with meatballs there's almost always some kind of filler which is called the panade and it's typically made from bread that's what the word panade comes from pa and pon bread it isn't just to stretch the meat there's more there's more reason to it than that a good panade will add tenderness and even moisture to your meat mixture some people use dried breadcrumbs I've done tests side-by-side and I really don't like the effect that the dried breadcrumbs have they make a meatball that's much more dense and not nearly as moist as a panade made from fresh bread so how do we do that well first I'll cut the crusts off cut it into cubes in goes our bread for the panada we have to soak the bread in some kind of liquid to soften it and basically turn into like a bread II paste and a lot of recipes will have you do it with just something really basic like milk which is totally fine and you can do that even in my recipe but I try to sneak a little bit of extra flavor in there by using buttermilk instead a very subtle push forward of the flavor with that buttermilk note so squish it around with my hand does that qualify as ASMR that noises gross I'm gonna let it sit though and just let it kind of hydrate I've revealed my secret ingredient number one my buttermilk panade secret ingredient number two and this is really optional they sneak some chicken stock into the meatballs and I do it by gelling it first and I just sprinkle it all over the surface of this chicken stock this is a lot of gelatin for this quantity of liquid and that's on purpose when it chills I want it to solidify into a block something I can mince up it's gotta soak in then there's gonna heat this in the microwave that'll help dissolve the gelatin then I'll chill it when it's cold it'll set like a balk and then I can chop it up I can work it into my meatball mixture and it won't melt until the meatballs are cooked look it's done I have this stock oh god just kidding it's solid it's like psyched you out I kind of wished like they make curtains like this and they would like kind of jiggling the breeze there is one caveat to using the chicken stock in this recipe which is that because it introduces so much juiciness to the meatballs it does impede browning a little bit if getting really really really dark crispy browned meatballs is your goal you might want to leave it out but I want the juiciness that's why I do it recipe calls for a medium onion this is definitely a large onion so this is not the kind of thing a meatball is not the kind of thing where you have to be that precise and extra little bit of onion or a little less here and there is not gonna change things too much I'll mince some garlic it's a healthy amount of garlic because Italian American meatball should have some garlic right right this is one of those recipes where I really just do it by feel what seems to be about right for the quantity of meat that we're working with so I'm eyeballing it and you can too and the flavoring is I'm using these meatballs are really traditional onion garlic parsley very classic Italian American style meatball in terms of the flavors in terms of some of the weird stuff I do like this gelled stock that's not so traditional now I'm just now I'm just chopping cuz it's fun the role of the pancetta here is really to add fat so I want a nice Fatih cut of it if I can so I just want to show you I have a piece of pancetta here that is room temperature it's the fat has some some give to it and if you want to mint something finally that's fatty like this doing it when it's room temperature is really hard having a sharp knife helps a lot but let's just say let's just give this a try I'm going to cut a slice off as I as I cut it more and more it gets harder and harder to work with I don't have us I don't even have a solid base to get my fingers on it's moving around it makes me nervous for my fingers but if you cool it down enough and even almost partially freeze it and that makes it a lot easier to cut and look how nice and clean that is compared to this stuff before that it added uh alright I got everything prepped here it looks a little bit like a mess it is a little bit of a mess but I'm gonna get it cleaned up and we're gonna mix our meatballs together in 1 2 3 I think I'm too greasy I got too much pork fat it's my fingers are just sliding ready everything is prepped at this point it is time to bring it all together so I have my panade here it's been soaking for a while I've got my onion garlic and parsley pancetta goes in four egg yolks one of which has broken but that's totally fine they're all gonna break in a minute anyway cheese all the cheese goes in make it rain there's so much stuff in meatballs it's not me ground fennel in we go dried oregano salt fish guy in the back pepper here we go check the deck the deck good decadent we'll just keep going until we think it's enough that's a lot of pepper that's good so now here we finally are our stand mixer so I'm gonna start off before I add my meat just blending everything together in here I have a very specific texture in mind for my meatballs I want them to be tender and I don't want them to be crumbly but I want them to maintain some level of looseness with the ground meat texture I don't want them tight like a sausage well what does that mean what it means is that if I take all the meat combine it with my seasonings and just work it work at work until it's really well mixed I'm starting to create a sausage texture because I'm binding those meat proteins and fat as I'm mixing it it's a little bit too aggressive you're gonna end up with a meatball that's more springy and bouncy a little bit of that is good but too much for me is a problem so what I do is I added portion of the two meats like a third of each and I mix that in really well just to help distribute the flavorings as best as I possibly can and then I'm gonna take the bowl out of the mixer and I'll incorporate the rest of the meat by hand so that I also maintain some of that ground meat texture so it doesn't become too tight and too emulsified in the mixer time to make some meatballs you can go however big you want I'd make kind of nice I don't know handball size meatballs throw it around it's time to cook the meatballs I like to brown them first I like to broil them because the broiler is easy relatively clean and large meatballs like this are kind of hard to Brown in a pan unless you put a ton of oil and kind of shallow fry them what you could do although with the amount of liquid I've packed into these meatballs it might get explosive into the boiler they go and we're just gonna let them Brown a bit now we wait all right so these meatballs have lightly browned on top I didn't take them too far if I wanted to I could turn them Brown them more but I'm happy with this and then I'm gonna poach as many as I can fit in this little pot of tomato sauce and they'll finish cooking in there these are my meatballs welcome to my meatballs a little more cheese a little more cheese more cheese that's just obscene these meatballs are juicy and tender and I have loaded them with as much flavor as can possibly be packed into just two pounds of ground meat thanks for watching I'm gonna continue to eat meatballs until I fall over

Channel: Serious Eats

Views: 234,799

Keywords: Serious Eats, cooking, food, foodie, recipe, meatballs, spaghetti and meatballs, how to make meatballs, how to, the best meatballs, relaxing food, italian food, daniel gritzer, food science, food hacks, meatball recipe, food techniques

Id: P8__ojVwQcw

Length: 8min 48sec (528 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 22 2019