Tequesta restaurant's secret meatball recipe

today we're gonna make my family traditional meatballs and that were taught to me about 40 years ago by my grandmother passed on to my mother and then on to me now as a professional chef so I'm going to show you the old-school and professional way combined of making the proper meatball we're going to start with this is one pound of ground all natural beef that we grind in-house all the meats let me just say that ball that meets our ground in-house we have 90 percent whole beef this is Berkshire ground pork and this is grass-fed veal all ground we're going to take a pound of each put them all this is into our mixing bowl the reason why we use three different types of meat beef is the base of most meatballs pork has the most flavor into the meatball and veal neutralizes so the reason why we use all three together it makes a perfect harmony of the butter they a perfect harmony of the perfect meatball so what I'd like to start by doing is I'm just gonna squish all three combine them before we put any seasoning in to make sure that the ratio is perfect just a little bit of love beautiful then what I'm gonna move over to is I'm gonna go light seasoning in the beginning and then we're gonna add as we go in any type of cooking whether it's meatball or not you can always add more to a dish but it's hard to take it away so if you were to put too much salt or too much pecorino romano cheese in right now you're not gonna have such a great meatball this is we're gonna move over to putting the eggs in basically I have five yolks technically the ratio should be one yolk per pound of meat so I'm really just gonna grab approximately three out of the five put it right in there what this does is help moisture and to bind the meat so I'm just gonna rub that in real quick so if you see it's loosening up the actual meets allowing me to start to mix it a little bit better okay now that I have that where I want it I'm gonna start seasoning one of the other secrets I use sweet shallots not onion and this is pureed 50% onion I'm sorry 50% sweet shallots to 50% garlic we're gonna just throw that in there it's roughly about a quarter of a cup according to half depending on how much you like garlic and how much you like shallots then I'm just gonna take a little bit of sea salt I'm gonna sprinkle it around I'm not gonna go too crazy because I am gonna be adding high content salt content cheese so we'll add a little bit at the end if we need to one of the other secrets pecorino romano cheese you go to a lot of restaurants and people say would you like more Parmesan cheese with your pasta or your meatball pecorino romano is made from sheep's milk and it's aged it's sharper and it's saltier this is probably the highest quality Locatelli cheese Locatelli pecorino romano so very high salt content but a lot of flavor so the better the quality of the product you use and the procedure in how you use it means that what you end result will come out what I'm putting in is some day-old bread one of the top secret things here is a little bit of milk everybody wonders what it is why is the meatball so soft why is it so fluffy where everybody else's is rubbery I'm gonna give you it the whole world day-old bread this is what we call chiffonade basil chiffonade is a fancy French word for thinly sliced being brought up in this coming up in this I'm gonna probably give probably a nice tax bite what a nice handful this is fresh Italian flat parsley so you have chiffonade basil and you have a flat Italian parsley chopped roughly fine you don't have to go to fine because it gives a nice a nice fresh herb appeal to the actual meatball itself I'm gonna do the same thing it's four pinches probably about one nice handful now what I'm gonna do I'm gonna add I'm gonna mix this up okay now that I have the seasonings where I want it I have the egg I have the cheese I have the fresh herbs I also have the day-old bread and I have a touch of cream and milk now you can see how it's loosening up so this is where add whenever you using raw product and you end up using bread crumbs or bread that's why this is a little bit loose so I want to mix it properly make sure cuz as you're rolling the meatballs you want each meatball to have the same consistency as the next the only way to do that is pure elbow grease and love what you can see we're doing here it's one of the but when a very important move before you start searing this off before you can start cooking anything what you want to do is you want to see the consistency is it too loose you make a meatball is it flat obviously you can see it is I smell it if I could smell the cheese the aroma of the garlic the aroma of the shallots if it can come through to me raw that means it's gonna translate well into cooking obviously there's a little bit thin what's a one-trick is at the end this is the mistake most people make when they're making meatballs and the reason why they have rubbery results so now I have a loose meatball so this is the mix you want to sprinkle so you don't before like I told you in the procedure you don't want to put too much in in the beginning because it's hard to take out so you want to put a little bit in mix it up as how it sits and then move on from them so what I'm doing is I'm putting just a pinch two pinches of freshly ground Italian breadcrumbs we take Dale up day or two old bread and we grind it down ourselves and then I mix it in to the mixture now remember you have a lot of moisture in the meat and you're adding dry breadcrumbs that is so it binds it together and creates the perfect shape for you it's not doing much for flavor it's really just for binding and shaping the meatball so they all cook perfectly especially once you're gonna put it into your your sauce so you put a little bit in you put it in it's still a little bit light so now I'm gonna go a little heavier with the breadcrumb because I want it to be a perfect shape and I want consistency as you as you go through a few batches of these you'll realize how much you need a recipe is really just a foundation to build upon each cut of meat each bag of cheese everything every ingredient I have no same chicken no sink you know no same steer no same pork so every single batch could be different and that's why you have to put love into it because you need to be able to say it needs a little pepper it needs a little salt which I'm gonna add a little bit too now now we've gotten to a place this is the pretty much the end I let it sit for a second because the moisture that is in the meat the milk the eggs is releasing and it's being absorbed right now by the day-old bread and the bread crumbs so if you were to rush to a pan right now probably wouldn't translate into the perfect shape or consistency so basically you want to wait about five minutes after mixing before you go to cooking because then all of the dry ingredients will absorb the wet okay so now what we're doing I'm actually using I'm using olive oil roughly maybe about an inch of an inch 1/4 inch thick in the pan I don't want to fry the meatballs people say fried meatballs you just want to sear it what we're gonna be doing is actually just searing it by by putting it into hot olive oil medium to medium-high heat you're gonna seal in the moisture of everything that we just did but there's a misconception about frying meatballs it's more about just searing them giving it texture and holding in all of that flavor and all the moisture that we just created I'd hate for that not to I'd hate to lose that roughly this is gonna make about 10 to 12 4 to 5 ounce meatballs you'll get a feel for this as time as you start rolling the first few you'll get a good idea of where you want to be at you just want them to be there to be no creases no holes like that you just want to keep going over that area then just go like this little love like I said no cracks you know want any holes in it since then when this hits the olive oil it'll actually split open just like your skin you know what any cracks are well I want no cracks or skin that's why I look like I'm 22 right it's the meatballs do you put these on your faces I actually I do a meatball mask yeah I think that's good and the meatball mask is you know I walk out and people really enjoy and they ask me where I do what my skincare regimen is and I tell them veal beef and pork right yeah all right so there you go so let's see I don't think oh I have cracks you got cracks any more love any more love not hard just like this yep perfect perfect go try to do on top yep let gravity do the rest okay and then try to just update it that's that now take it and form it into a ball yep it looks pretty good all right it's a pretty good ball yes if it cracks though you know it says here we got one more all right look almost right yeah not bad very good thank you do one more 6:9 actually what did I say 10 to 12 and number 10 Wow I've done this a couple times a few times so now what we have here is what I have back here just you know before we go this it's gonna be a quick process this is marinara sauce I only I import my own Italian products these are San Marzano plum tomatoes from San Marzano Italy they are the best what so I've already made a marinara sauce what we're gonna do and what you should do at home is okay so what we're going to do so the marinara sauce is an all-natural san marzano plum tomato sauce roasted garlic clove fresh onion basil very simple the quality of product stands for itself so the reason why I bring that up is I have one simmering in the back we're going to be searing in hot olive oil of these meatballs we're gonna get them browned okay and once they get brown we're gonna put them in the sauce and let it go really slow okay and that's the way that you keep the meatballs moist tender and you're gonna serve them out of the red sauce okay so you'll see it'll make sense in a second I'm going to do the first one sure go very slow that's a hot olive oil drop it just drop it very slow you see how it's sizzling yeah exactly what you want and that's just keep going so now we're not really frying we're searing right if we were frying we would be dressed up nourishing it into it right so it is fried meatball but it's not really frying it's more like a fried cutlet Turner yeah so we're gonna keep it on each side roughly two minutes I'm gonna flip will flip them will go on the sides and we're gonna caramelize what they call caramelizing the meat on the outside before it goes into the red sauce so basically you always flip one over just to see where you're at yeah so I might need to go let it go a little bit more so basically maybe two three four minutes on each side and you like I said you just want to get this nice brown and then before that then we're gonna going into the marinara sauce what the marinara sauce will do you're gonna go slow for about probably about within an hour and a half to two hours after the searing and entering the marinara these will absorb the sauce keep the it'll keep the texture that we just see heard on the meatball but it'll absorb the sauce and the sauce protects it from drying out so you just go for about an hour and a half to two hours very low low and slow and what you'll have it is look at yes see that if you like I want up guess rushing i wanted to flip it over quick but i know i might ruin it yeah so it's just don't be scared either a lot of lot of cooks are scared oh I don't know what temperature I don't know you know just do it you know just just go at it because all you got to do is just right so literally three minutes later perfect caramelized meatballs I just like to do this a little bit it mixes up the fat content really see from the actual meat right now because you're going into olive oil with fat meat meat fat and what that does it just want to make sure it's almost like blending it that way all the flavor is getting around the edges keep it on this side again two and a half three three minutes it's completely up to you if you have the time look taking your time with you all right like they see the crack yeah just so everybody out there knows that's the crack that's the crack people but what ends up happening I don't want to also want to flatten them right right so that's why honestly one of the reasons why I do this is to get that so I don't want to have to fry the meatballs oh it's absorbing all the oil I want to just get this ear so I will move around the oil to help me with that and these are just tricks of the trade from years of just cooking we could do it any way you want but these are just the tricks of the trade from Maine I'm gonna take yours and sear it a little longer who I like this actually because I want to show people there's no right or wrong it's quality product procedure take your time you can put it on its side you can flip it over you could do whatever you want at the end of the day it's your recipe I know what I do for consistency in restaurant consistency across the board but it's it's your recipe do what you want have fun with it magic cooking is about cooking brings people together it brings families data to a table that during times that they normally wouldn't and actually that's what meatball crazy does national meatball day to me every Thursday every Sunday we had a pot of sauce on we had meatballs we had Brazil so it's actually Americanized that we have meatballs but the truth is it means so much more to an italian-american like myself because the mint family and it meant bringing everybody together at the same time one two three times a week no arguing no fighting everybody got along if the world would actually go by that all the time and heritage and way of thinking who's being a pretty happy place I we're gonna put them on dry ice and send them the DC Nancy's my mother these my grandmother was Nancy and my sisters Nancy it's a means a lot to me my grandmother taught me influenced me to cook and my great-grandmother taught my grandmother my grandmother taught my mother and my mother taught me at a very young age and I mean six years old being underneath the table while she's making homemade pasta meatballs from scratch mama got just traditional you know ho means you don't see them anymore Italian dishes and what it ended up doing was influencing me so much by the time I got to high school my mother was already pushing me to go into the restaurant business she knew I had something I didn't even know I had it myself but it's actually influenced by Nancy and they've all passed on except my sister obviously and uh the story of this restaurant reflects the name Nancy believe it or not I moved to Florida to actually take care of my mother because she was certain she was terminally ill and during the time spending the last few months with her we would talk about how we were going to move to Jupiter and we were going to open up an Italian restaurant where I was gonna cook and she was going to be the nature and she would do the back of house unfortunately she sir came to an illness and it ended up taking her life but I carried on the tradition by opening the restaurant in her honor so the reason why I wear Nancy on my the bottom of my chef jacket is she's always got my back so don't crack through these walls because my mom's watching okay so I've shut this down on heat what I'm gonna do now I have the marinara sauce I'm just gonna shake off a little bit of the excess oil it's got enough flavor from the vo beef and pork nice as you can see that's exactly what we're looking for top and bottom we're gonna go right into a dish like this this is how we do it an EVO you could put it over pasta you can do whatever you want make a meal I'd say make a meal out of it over pasta this is my appetizer here that we do a tivo Italian what I'm gonna do now I accompany this these are parmesan crostinis with fresh herbs and extra virgin olive oil actually we brought I want to hide the meatball what I do next is I put fresh this is fresh whip to regard the cheese from Italy I put just a little dollop of that right there it actually complements it nicely will get a little fancy we'll put a fresh this is a fresh card garden basil which you could actually tear apart or just leave in and eat with itself and then I finish it this is 24 month aged DOP 24 month age yes DOP Ruggiano parmesan this is the king of all cheeses this is the considered one of the greatest artists and cheese's in the world this is what we put on top of all of our pastas and serve at our tables just sprinkle it around a little bit clean up the dish and there you have it Evo Italian authentic and traditional grandma's grandma Nancy's homemade meatballs you

Channel: WPTV News - FL Palm Beaches and Treasure Coast

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Keywords: Tequesta restaurant's secret meatball recipe

Id: DXsrrM9RFyk

Length: 21min 41sec (1301 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 09 2018