I could, you know we should should we predict all the complaints? Because I can tell you what they're going to be. She's cooking with her ring. Why is she cooking with that shirt? Her pants are weird. I hate her voice. My name is Alison Roman and I am going to be making meatballs. And this recipe comes from A Newsletter. Which is also my newsletter. I don't always start from being inspired by something great. I'm often inspired by something bad. Such is the case with these meatballs. Um okay right eggs. Also. Wow! Oh man, handsome! Handsome as advertised. Here's the deal. A lot of meatball recipes will have you take old bread or fresh bread like white bread ciabatta a baguette, soak it in milk and that becomes a part of your meatball mixture. I don't want to do that. But what I do like to do is use panko bread crumbs which I always have on hand. The texture of panko is so coarse and dry. They're like you know toasty little croutons already. They need to be soaked in liquid and the liquid that I'm going to use is not milk but ricotta. Which is even richer than milk and will give you a more flavorful sort of like, just richer meatball. I want my meatball to be extremely rich. I am going to start by cutting my onions and my garlic. I rarely will ask you to finely chop an onion because I find it to be a very annoying task, but, meatball you really do want the onion to be pretty small, because you don't want to ever bite into a piece of it. It should just sort of melt into the texture. Someone would fire me for that. That was not a very good job. Bad Alison. Some people might ask why wouldn't you do this in a food processor and that's because I, I'm not gonna do that. Finely chopping garlic is annoying but finely grating it on a microplane is not, and I like a lot of garlic. I'm adding a little bit more. A meatball is a personal experience that you should honor your taste preferences. They're your meatballs. There are many meatballs, but only these ones are your meatballs. I am a poet. Thank you for noticing. So this is a quarter cup. So it calls for a third of a cup, so I'm just doing like a heaping. A quarter cup is uh... One tablespoon less than whatever, all right, that's about a third of a cup. And then ricotta cheese. This is a 16 ounce container, there's eight ounces in a cup, so I'm just gonna add half of this container. instead of dirtying another measuring cup, I can use more dairy in the mixture when I'm using ricotta because it's not liquid. It is sort of I don't know. Could you travel with ricotta? Is it a liquid? Who could say. Let's put that to the test. Let's go to the airport. Right now and we're gonna mix this. We'll add our eggs. So I'm just gonna let this sit for a second when I chop the parsley and grate the cheese just to kind of give it like a head start. It's still just like a bowl of raw cheese and onion. Gross. I like a lot of parsley in my meatballs. I like them to be very, very herby. That is gonna also be a choice. I feel like, I don't know meatballs feel like a boring food, but to me they are like, kind of special occasion. They're not an insignificant amount of work. Normally I leave things like very leafy, spriggy, coarse. This I want fine finely chopped and then I'm gonna grate my cheese in there too. I'm gonna eyeball this. I don't know like you can overdo it with parmesan and salt and pepper. Okay so here's an important message when you're dealing with raw meat. Especially things like ground beef. You really want to work within a teaspoon of kosher salt per pound of meat. This is two pounds of meat and so I'm gonna do two teaspoons of salt. And I use non-sponsored diamond crystal kosher salt. To me this is the perfect texture kosher salt. You can find it at a lot of grocery stores, you can find it on the internet. To me it's the most consistent. And the texture of it is sort of perfect. You can see that it's like a little uneven which I really like, and then pepper is just I like a lot of pepper. This is going to sit for a few more minutes and we just really want those bread crumbs to soften completely. They're soaking up the egg. They're soaking up the ricotta. They're softening in there so then when we have our meatball mixture there's no dry bits of bread left. And we clean as we go in this house. The time is now. We're going to add our meat to this mixture I'm going to warn you I mix this meat with my hands. I don't take my ring off. I never do. I haven't for years. I've touched a lot of raw stuff and I am very careful to thoroughly wash everything as needed. I just don't trust myself. I would lose it if I took it off ever. So I don't. Ground pork ground beef, yum delish. Look at that meat. I've done it with all pork but they're almost too rich and you can just kind of like plop it in. You can use a spoon if you want. I try to do that and I get annoyed and frustrated almost immediately and decide that I'm just gonna use my hands. I'm sorry that you have to see this, but I'm not, because this is how I really cook. And, uh if you want to come over and have dinner, you can. Just know that this is what's happening before you get there. Basically you just want to make sure that the mixture is uniform. There's no like visible elements of anything and I just kind of folded it onto itself a few times. And if you're ever unsure, give it a few more mixes. But I feel very sure. Let's test our meatball for seasoning. What pot do I want to use? Sorry. I look like I'm really struggling. I feel like I am. I'm gonna cook them in this. This is just a heavy bottom stock pot. The reason being is I'm going to be building the sauce in here, so I want something that's large enough to hold all the sauce, and all the meatballs and then potentially even some of the pasta later. We don't have to make an actual meatball for this. A test meatball is only a meatball in name. So just a thin layer of olive oil and all you're looking to do there is really just brown it on both sides. So it's happening we have like a little sausage patty I call this a chef's treat. No we don't call it that. I don't call it that. I'm gonna add a little bit more salt. Just a little bit more salt and a little bit more pepper. Good thing I made that test meatball, am I right? What a relief. I also feel like uh my mouth is broken and I like my food really salty. But we're gonna table this for now because I'm gonna get a move on with this sauce. Which is very basic. We don't want to upstage the meatball. Onion's gonna be chopped so for this I'm not gonna chop it as finely as I would for the meatball because I don't mind a little bit of you know onion. And the tomato sauce, it's in there I wanna know that it's in there. And the garlic I'm just gonna slice, I'm not gonna microplane it. I microplane it, then you risk burning the garlic and if I chop it then you risk burning the garlic. But I really like nice thin slices of the garlic because not only can you see them in the sauce floating about but I just genuinely think that they cook more evenly than chopped garlic. Okay game time. Meatballs, meatballs ahoy. I'm gonna set down a piece of parchment. Just for easier clean up. And let the journey begin. We have our mixture. Yum I don't want mine super tiny because that to me is like for a soup if you're eating meatballs and pasta you want to like taste the meatball. Maybe these are a little big. You don't want to pack these super tight. You want to like keep it very light. Like we're not making sand castles we're making meatballs. When's the last time I made a sand castle? Like 28 years ago. I gotta have more fun. I gotta, I gotta get back out there. These meatballs are uh such a story. I was dating this person for a while and uh, my friends invited us over for dinner and they're like we're having meatballs. Very exciting. Who doesn't love to hear that. And my friend like just shouts at me from across the room. He's like the meatballs are bad. We sat down with the meatballs and they were in fact awful. They were truly bad. That like all of us started just laughing being like wow these really are bad. We went home, laughed about the meatballs. How bad they were. Um and then the next day um sort of out of nowhere, I got dumped and we broke up. Which is fine. I'm over it. But I had to tell my friends because they're like "Oh, do you guys want to come over again?" And I was like, well, we actually, I, we broke up. I -- and they asked what happened and like without missing a beat, they were like "Was it the meatballs?" This is essentially therapy. I did skip last week. I mean is the breakup really ever out of nowhere? I was ignoring the signs. Um, we had been distant for months. And the reality is is that I should have broken up with him. Because I knew. And instead of being the adult, and breaking up with him, I probably got a little insecure and smothery and pushed him away even further. So take responsibility for your feelings and when it's time to break up know when to break up and end it first. Because you don't want to get dumped. He shall remain nameless. He's honestly not even important enough, uh for me to mention ever again. It's just part of this funny story. His family's great though, if you guys are watching. I miss you guys. I talk about that story a lot and I think people are going to think that I'm not over it, but I am. I'm over it. I really am okay. Yeah we're going to need a cut for crying. Let's rewrite our own narratives. Let's make meatballs so delicious that nobody could ever possibly break up with me ever again. Oh see this is the worst when you roll all the balls and you have this. Then you pick the smallest one and you give them a little love. I say you get 24. We got 22. They're a little big side. But you know what, that's just how I was feeling today. So we essentially have everything we need to just start cooking now and I feel like this is all part of your prep work, and then we can just kind of swing into execution. Which to me like I don't love the back and forth. I don't love to like sear the meatballs, take them out, then chop my things again, and then do the thing. Like I want to just kind of move seamlessly. So I have everything that I need. So we're going to sear these on medium high that essentially just means that you're not going to get this ripping hot because you will burn them before they're properly seared. You're looking for like a nice golden brown all around. It's really hard to sear something on all sides when it is a circle. Sear them on like three-ish sides, but when they're in the pot, and we eat them they're going to look brown all over, you're not going to notice. If they look a little lopsided that's fine, that's a meatball. That's amore. All right, I'm going to add a little bit more olive, nope, I'm going to add a little bit more olive oil. If they're not sizzling as soon as the meatball hits the pot you know that your pot is definitely not hot enough, so let's contact clue, listen for it. She's hot. So you want to make sure that they're not too crowded in the pot for a few reasons. One you want to make sure that they have enough room to brown without steaming and secondly when they are brown on one side you want to be able to flip them over to the other side without having to stick your whole arm in there because that doesn't end well for anybody. So it's like about three-ish minutes on each side and you just kind of like rotate them occasionally. See how that olive oil is like getting enriched with pork fat and like onion bits and it looks delicious, we're gonna eat all that. And I want to. I want to eat all that. Ooo. It turns out we're ready to put the meatballs because we put them all in at separate times and the pot has different hot spots. They might not all brown at the same time and that's okay, but these are looking really nice. All of them. So we're just going to kind of continue to rotate them, let them brown. Our first batch of little meatballs are ready to come out of the pot and I can tell you that they're ready because they're evenly browned on all sides. Trying to do this elegantly is really something. They're they're ball in spirit. They're spherical-ish. They're you know, they're they're good. and now into this pot where all of the bits are I'm gonna add my onions and my garlic. And immediately you can see why I like doing these in the pot because all of those meaty bits are now already incorporating into my sauce and that's where a lot of your flavor is. I'm gonna season this with salt and pepper. Okay I'm looking for these to be just kind of soft, translucent. I am going to take this moment to add a little bit of crushed red pepper flakes because I enjoy that in my tomato sauce and I like to add them at this stage because you're toasting the spice in the fat. So I'm gonna add tomato paste, two to three tablespoons. Two to three tablespoons. You wanna cook this tomato paste first and that's like a few minutes, two to three ish minutes. So I'm gonna add my tomato puree. A pretty uneventful sizzle. See how thick it is in here? You coated a meatball on that it would feel like very heavy. I want it to feel a little bit lighter, brothier, fresher. So I'm gonna add a little bit of water to this and that rinses out all the bits in the can and adds water to the pot. These also uh, hold the tomatoes back, just kind of drain them into the pot. And then a little recklessly, some might say, I just hold each tomato. Spend some time within the pot and crush it just with my hand. You could do this in a bowl or in a sink or whatever, but I like to just do it now. This is fun. I'm having fun. This sauce is going to cook like another 10-15. I'm just going to bring it up to a simmer and then I'm going to add the meatballs and we're going to simmer those for another 20 to 30 minutes. In the meantime while I'm waiting for all this to happen, I'm just gonna put a pot of water on to boil so I can cook my pasta so I'm not waiting for anything because I hate to wait. Our sauce has been going for like 15 to 20 minutes. It's slightly thicker. Uh, it tastes more like adult, it's a mature sauce now. Before it was a baby sauce. And now we're going to add our meatballs. Everybody in the pool. Nestled them in there make sure they're all submerged. You can see them all in there, or you, or can you? Uou actually can't see them in there at all. You're gonna notice the bubbles in the sauce come up. It's like a gentle simmer. We're not trying to boil the meatballs. I'm at about a medium low right now. Basically while we wait for our water to come up to a boil these are going to finish cooking in the pot and then we're going to add our pasta, and then everything will be ready at the same time. What a mitzvah. Now I'm going to select my pasta shape. Spaghetti and meatballs -- obviously classic. It's not the shape that I prefer. I feel like it's, you have like the big meatball then you have the thin strands of pasta, and I'm not knocking what is obviously like the most classic food pairing of all time, but I just prefer like a short tubey pasta to eat with my meatballs so. We have a tube shape. This is basically like a rigatoni but without the ridges. This is going in. Our meatballs are looking really nice. The sauce is thickened. They're poking out a little bit. You can see like some of the fat starting to come out of them and it's like just looks like they've spent a lot of time in this bath. Our pasta is ready. I like to just spoon a little bit of the sauce to kind of prevent the noodles from sticking together. Just the sauce. No balls in there. Just the sauce. Dramatique. Some of my tubes broke and you know what, that's gonna have to be okay. There's too much to worry about in this life for me to freak out about a broken piece of pasta. And then to serve it, if i were just having, if I were having you over, which I'm not, I would probably just like bring this whole pot to the table and then I would set out cheese with a microplane. And you can do it yourself -- because I'm not your mom, and then more parsley, and I would just do like my plate of noodles and then meatballs on the side with a little extra sauce. Some cheese and then maybe more pepper and if you really wanted to go for it which of course I do I would just like a little bit of olive oil and yeah, those are meatballs. Those are goodbye meatballs. Now I'm gonna eat these. That's a really good meatball. They're just, they're so well seasoned and so tender and not dry and I don't know, these noodles are an absolute blast to eat. I could not be happier with this bowl of food right now. This is brand new. I probably have like a bunch of stuff in my teeth. Whatever it's real. I'm going to attempt to eat the rest of this meatball and pasta situation without spilling it all over my shirt. I should probably have not worn this top. Lesson learned. Thank you for that, joining me on that journey. Part of the reason I love cooking is I like those boring tasks I like those like weird meditative things that you only do when you're cooking and that take a little bit of time and it feels nice. And then I got dumped. No I'm just kidding.
Tbh I find her affect kind of irritating but she’s got good recipes that are easy to execute without an excessive amount of time or energy so I’ll be subbing.
i really enjoy her recipes and she is entertaining to watch. i subscribed to her newsletter, which is titled.. a newsletter, and the recipes from it have been awesome so far, especially the potato leek soup! it's free if anyone is interested, i'm going to make the sticky maple cinnamon rolls next!
I know it’s unpopular, but I enjoy her videos because she reminds me of a friend.
I really enjoy her videos and the most important component is that she’s making everything in her own kitchen. I did love BAs stuff too but I don’t have a professional test kitchen. Alisons videos gave me confidence in my own tiny kitchen.
Happy to see. Her recipes are classic BA -- meaning, easy, accessible and I'd actually make them. Not just for special occasions.
Looks like she plans on uploading videos every Tuesday. The editing style reminds me of Hunzi's (no idea if he's involved or not).
I don't think I've ever seen her on BA's YouTube channel. Is she from a few years back?
Absolutely LOVE Alison Roman
I never seen her in the old BATK but I liked the video and subscribed.