I’ve Been Eating Spaghetti and Meatballs Wrong My Entire Life

these super tiny meatballs were the precursor to what we in America now know as the tradition of spaghetti and meatballs but these tiny meatballs were born in a brutzo and Tiny meatballs are just better instead of one big meatball you get tons of tiny meatball throughout every bite of pasta they're so small you can fit multiple meatballs on just one fork it's a beautiful thing and today we're going to make them I want to thank Harry's for sponsoring this video but more in them later for now let's just jump right into it so here's a Roundup of the ingredients we're going to be using we're going to be using a little bit of regotta some parsley and eggs some garlic some bread crumbs some pecorino Romano cheese and about a pound of meat and we're gonna go with a half pound of ground chuck 80 20 fat to lean ratio if you can find it and then a half pound of ground veal you could use one or the other or both but I find beef is the heart of the flavor of a meatball and the veal adds a better texture now traditionally the recipe to these meatballs is fairly simple served in a rich meat Sugo or tomato sauce that's been cooked with lots of meats till they fall apart so you get like a rich tomato sauce these traditional tiny meatballs had some meat in them maybe some egg a little bit of cheese a little bit of salt some pepper maybe some oil and that's it much simpler than the style meatball that you might see on this channel I referenced some traditional recipes like you're seeing in this new pasta Granny's cookbook that I just got I tried them the traditional way and then I tried them in a a way more similar to how I would make my meatballs and not surprisingly I liked the more seasoned version so we're sort of gonna make a riff on my meatballs but in the style of these Abruzzo style tiny meatballs that are the OG meatballs so to get these started I'm gonna get a big bowl and I'm gonna crack the egg into that bowl first and with my hands I'm just gonna beat it up so it just kind of broken up and looser and it's gonna coat the meat a little bit better then you want to toss the meat in there and with your fingertips just break it up a little bit to get the egg coated on every little piece of ground meat and then just work the egg in throughout so that it's even only distributed so you have maximum binding power next in a smaller Bowl off to the side we're going to mix up our seasoning slushie to make that we're just going to add about a quarter cup of regotta about a third cup of pecorino Romano cheese about a third cup of bread crumbs I'm going to take a big clove of garlic and I'm just gonna microplane that directly in I'm gonna chop up some fresh parsley roughly chop that and then get that into the mix hit it with a little bit of salt and usually I add a little bit of tomato sauce but I haven't made that yet I'm making this all in one pot so I'm just going to add a little bit of olive oil for some moisture and I'm going to take my hand and just sort of bind that all together until it can form almost like a ball then you want to take that and break that up into the beef season the beef and then with your hands you just want to squeeze and work that mixture into the beef so that it's evenly distributed across the entire piece of meat you want it to bind to itself you want it to go from those strands of ground meat into some sort of a homogeneous ball that holds together and for me the smell L is an indication that it's properly seasoned you should get here with the garlic The Parsley the cheese and if you can smell those you're good no we have here is a large meatball that we're gonna turn into a ton of tiny meatballs now when we say small when we're talking about these meatballs we mean Super Duper tiny so tiny that it's gonna be annoying if you try and measure it out by your hand and just pinching tiny balls they'll be all over the place so we're going to use the smallest of measuring devices on the large end the half teaspoon and if you want to go really really small the quarter teaspoon I'm more of a fan of the half teaspoon because it just allows the fork to access the ball a little easier although the quarter teaspoon will get more caught up in the spaghetti so it's up to you I'm going with half now if there's one downside about this recipe it's gonna be this part we're gonna take out a little measuring spoon we're gonna grab some of that meat in it and clean up the excess on the side and compress it into the measuring spoon clean up the sides again and just use your thumb to sort of roll it it out of the spoon and you got yourself these perfect little balls not that complicated however it feels like it takes a year to get through them it's a great opportunity to get some help get the kids involved otherwise you gotta find a fast way of doing it I grabbed some in my palm I scoop with the measuring spoon clean it up and then after I got my technique I just sort of try and settle into this meditative zen-like state I'm swaying back and forth I'm almost robotic at it not really thinking of what I'm doing maybe I got some music playing and before you know it you got all the balls measured out there are many kitchen tasks that require that ability and this is one of them then you gotta go through and roll them into nice little balls now they should be compact so you don't have to worry about that you kind of just have to go through and roll them up and again it just takes a bit of time and this is a recipe that's only for two if you want to make four it's gonna take even more time and you might ask yourself this seems like a lot why would I ever do this but to me this is the ultimate expression of love having a ton of meatballs in each bite I don't like only one one meatball when I have spaghetti and meatballs I want more meatballs but big meatballs fill me up these little meatballs you get a little bit of Meatball in every bite but it feels a little bit lighter in Italy you spent about 75 of your paycheck on food and meat was super expensive so you didn't eat much of it and when you did you probably served smaller portions of it hence the smaller meatballs but when immigrants from Sicily Calabria Abruzzo Naples immigrants from all over Ridley come to America and now food's cheaper the cost of food's about 25 percent of their bill instead of 75 they have more money to spend they have ingredients that they never had before and so they just adopted their Traditions to the experiences around them and evolved what they might have been used to based on what's available here that's how you get large meatballs it's how you go from eggplant Parmesan to chicken parmesan the way Italian-American food evolved was a direct consequence of their environment just like any Regional cuisine in Italy was Italian-American Cuisine is a bit of a Melting Pot of all Italian Cuisines all all of those merged together in America and that's why Traditions here might seem very strange to an Italian but they should realize there is a direct line to their Tradition now before we move on to the recipe I got to make sure you're properly groomed thanks to our sponsor today harrys.com Harry's offers premium blades that are manufactured in their own factories in Germany and they give a comfortable close and smooth shave just like all the other razors you've been comfortable using in your life except they don't bang you over the head of price the blades come in a new two-tone handle design I got the color ocean because I love blue they've got much deeper handle groups for an improved grip and 50 of the plastic in their handle is recycled and just like all those high-end blades out there these come complete with a Precision trimmer and a flex hinge and of course they offer a foaming shave gel that is suitable for sensitive skin just like mine is with skin loving ingredients like aloe and hyaluronic acid the best of all is that the blades don't come with an outrageous price tag just a premium quality blade at an affordable terrible price and they offer a starter set with everything you need to get started including a five blade razor with the weighted handle a blade cover and of course their foaming shave gel and if you want to give this stuff a try Harry's just giving you an opportunity to get your hands on this starter set for just three dollars when you go and visit my link down in the description harrys.com backslash not another cooking show so head on down to the link and let's just get back into the recipe so now these OG meatballs are from Abruzzo and the Italian name for this dish is spaghetti con palutine and they're served with a homemade squared spaghetti called spaghetti a la chitada which is just a reference to the tool that is used to make it which looks like a guitar but my chitada seems to have not have made it in the mail yet so we're gonna have to cover that another time but luckily for now stores have them available these are two pasta brands that I like Rustica makes the Abruzzo style a la chitada dried and the checko does as well in a something called a squared spaghetti which is much more are widely available than the smaller producer from Abruzzo this squared spaghetti happens to be my favorite it's going to go perfectly in this dish so that's what we're going to use we're going to set this off to a side we're going to use about half of that box because we're going to make this recipe for two and usually one can of tomatoes would be fine for this recipe but since we're making it with meatballs meatballs are sort of like a sponge so they will absorb a lot of this sauce as well so whenever I do meatballs one can of tomato is going to work for two people if you're gonna do four people you're going to want to double the sauce A good rule of thumb though is whenever you make meatballs is to just make more sauce than you really need but for this recipe I try to keep things tight and we're just gonna go with one can and we can adjust if we need later so I'm just going to run my can of whole peeled organic tomatoes from Bianco DiNapoli shout out to Chris Bianco one of the creators of this Tomatoes go check them out right now on Chef's Table Pizza on Netflix now usually I don't add water to a tomato sauce in fact I reduce any water in the tomatoes in a pan that's the whole idea for this since I'm cooking meatballs and I need them to cook for a little bit I'm going to add a half a can of water to it so that those meatballs can be done cooking at the same time the sauce is perfectly reduced make sure you scrape all the pulp off the bottom of the food mill and then we can slice up some garlic very thin and then I'm gonna pick some basil leaves off of the stem and I'll use that stem to cook with the garlic to infuse that basil flavor with the garlic into the olive oil then we're going to get a saute pan with a high Rim we're gonna coat the bottom of the pan with olive oil and once it's hot we're going to add about half the meatballs into the pan and we're going to allow them to Brown let them sit on one side undisturbed for a few minutes to develop good color on at least one side of the Meatballs they are small so it's going to be harder to get like a perfect round on every meatball so don't kill yourself there but once you've got the meatballs nicely browned then use a slotted spoon and remove them from the pan bring the temperature of the pan back up and then add the next batch of the meatballs and now the pan might be a little cooler so some might stick so what you want to do is give it some time shake the pan a little bit every now and then to see if any will loosen up from the bottom of the pan and don't worry if they stick as they develop some Browning on that one side they will eventually release from the pan when you give them a shake if you want to help a few along with the spoon go ahead but once you've got that second batch of Meatballs pretty well browned then we're going to toss in the garlic and the basil stem let those cook soften up become aromatic and once there's a little bit of brown developed on the garlic add that first batch of Meatballs back to the pot lower the heat a little bit hit the meatballs with a bit more salt if you want you could deglaze with a little wine but if you don't have you can still use the tomatoes we're going to add the tomatoes at this point and use a spoon to scrape up and deglaze the bottom of the pan we're going to hit it with a little bit of salt and then bring that mixture up to a simmer now we're going to start to cook the meatballs and reduce this sauce you can see it's pretty watery at this stage we're just gonna let it go I'm going to manage the heat the tomatoes are spitting I'm just going to lower the heat down to calm down the action but I do want reduction to happen then I'm just going to check the consistency I'm going to check the smell the smell should be intoxicating and once the consistency of that sauce starts to thicken up a bit then we can start to cook the pasta like I said I'm only going to cook about a half pound of this pasta and for our Dente it says 11 minutes so I'm just going to add that pasta into some salted water I'm going to set a timer for 10 minutes and I'm gonna allow the pasta And the sauce to cook in those 10 minutes the sauce is going to continue to reduce you could visibly see it thickening and coating the meatballs better than it was when we started this process the sauce is almost done we're going to remove that basil stem I'm just going to let it go until it's the perfect consistency and at that point we should be a few minutes away from the pasta being done I'm gonna get another finishing pot out so we can take some of that sauce into that pot and finish the pasta there and you want to get some of that sauce some of the meatballs in the pot but you also want to save some for on top so you can get a nice Saucy meatball garnish at the end after that 10 minutes we can drain the pasta add it to the sauce we're gonna add a tablespoon of butter some fresh basil and then we're just going to toss the pasta into the sauce into the meatballs the meatballs are going to get tangled up in all those strands of pasta and we're just going to finish cooking until the pasta is Al Dente if you need more sauce add more sauce to the pasta at this point I can see the sauce is a little bit over reduced and this is a rare time in which I might take some extra pasta water and add that to a tomato sauce I'm just going to go a little bit at a time until that tomato sauce thins out a bit and becomes more of a Saucier consistency that I could spoon on top of the pasta once I played it finish with some pecorino Romano cheese or Parmigiano-Reggiano if you have and then we can head on over to plating I'm going to do more of a rustic style plating just kind of fill the edge of the bowl not in a mound but just sort of laid out flat in the bowl and then I'm going to spoon over the sauce and the meatballs all over the spaghetti you're gonna get like 40 meatballs in your plate of pasta every bite is gonna have a meatball those meatballs are gonna fit for perfectly at the edge of the fork you're going to throw a little bit of Basil on top and then again we're just going to finish with a little bit more cheese and we're going to finish with a little bit of olive oil and there you have what might be my ideal plate of spaghetti and meatballs you're gonna love it your kids are gonna love it this is a hit once you realize you can get a meatball in every bite you start to ask yourself why was I ever making big meatballs might take a minute but if you got some help around the house or you've got some thyme mini meatballs are the way to go I want you to give them a try recipe is going to be down in the description that's all that I have today I'll see you next time until then take care of yourself and go feed yourself foreign [Music] if you need another Comfort classic I just posted the three cheese grilled cheese with tomato soup that launched my food career it's a must-see if you follow the channel so a link is going to be on the screen right now along with a few others if you're interested otherwise thanks for watching

Channel: NOT ANOTHER COOKING SHOW

Views: 702,667

Keywords: spaghetti and meatballs, spaghetti and meatballs recipe, pasta, abruzzo spahgetti, super tiny meatballs, the food freak, not another cooking show, stephen cusato, how to make, how to make italian meatballs for spaghetti, how to make homemade italian meatballs

Id: SLMH8bANH84

Length: 13min 45sec (825 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 14 2022