The World's Best Homemade Meatballs | Cooking Italian with Joe

[Music] hey everybody welcome to my kitchen cooking in town with joe today's a big day we got a meatballs how you doing meatballs i love i love meatballs guys so uh this is my if you will secret recipe everyone's got their own secret recipe and this is the the way i've made meatballs for for many years uh it's got a little bit of a twist to it and i'll show you how to kind of deepen the flavor rich in the flavor of the meatball with a couple little uh like i said little tips um meatballs are go with any american if you will the italian american dish you take a sauce you think of meatballs you think of spaghetti so um but they're great what's great about meatballs you can you can make them that day uh and certainly serve them you can put them in some sauce which is great uh serve them with your dish or dinner or lunch that day what's great is you can store them for a few days so the next day you can uh you know make maybe split them in half you can make a meatball sub uh just have a few meatballs with some sauce and cheese what have you but i just love meatballs they're just a great compliment so that being said uh you'll hear a lot of different versions of of making a meatball what we did here is uh we're gonna use a veal pork and uh and beef so the proportions here and i'm gonna make a lot of meatballs here so we're gonna get about 30 plus meatballs out of this okay so we got two pounds of ground beef and that is 80 20 okay so it's going to have a 20 fat okay and then we've got veal here okay so we got one pound of veal and we've got one pound of pork all right so that's our ratio as far as meat goes and not to confuse you but i just want to kind of go over we're going to use a half of a cup per pound when you're making when you're making meatballs so we've got we've got a little over two cups here of breadcrumbs okay you know those are breadcrumbs homemade breadcrumbs by me and uh what we do there is we're gonna put in your traditional italian seasoning with so you're gonna put a little bit of salt now remember bread's got a little salt in it already you can buy flavored bread crumbs that's fine and then i flavor it with rosemary thyme oregano and basil okay and i put a teaspoon of each in there just to give you a heads up okay we're gonna have one large golden onion is what i did golden onions a little bit of a deeper flavor and uh it's a little sweeter just to give you a heads up we're gonna also add in our half of a pound of pancetta and i'm gonna show you how to prep that all right you're gonna usually use about one egg per pound so one egg per pound one clove of garlic give or take per pound okay and you can use a quarter cup of a uh parmesan and a quarter cup of romano cheese per pound again general rule okay and then you're going to use some salt obviously pepper and uh and olive oil generally the rule is about one teaspoon per pound of meat okay and then you're gonna use maybe an eighth to a quarter a pepper and you're going to use about a half a cup or more of olive oil okay so just to kind of give you that i'm going to certainly list it on the my facebook page i'll list it on the uh ingredients on my on my web page as well okay so that being said what i want to do is kind of get started with the meat but before i do that one of the ways we want to start here is we want to caramelize the onions so rather than in it doesn't make it wrong a lot of times you'll see somebody make a meatball and they meet the ball i love saying that by the way but you see them make meatballs and they'll put the raw onion in there and that's fine but a way to deepen the flavor is to to caramelize your onion and your garlic when you're done with that you're going to put the when they get close you're going to put the pancetta in there so all of those are going to cook together you're going to get a caramelized flavor it's going to deepen it it's going to give it that roasted flavor and you're going to take the oil from the pancetta as well and you're going to put that all in your in your meatball mix okay so those are that's one of my secrets or one of the ways i do it so i'm gonna put the onions in to get them going all right and what i try to do here just to save us time is uh get everything prepped so i've got my onions going going to put my garlic in now remember when we caramelize what you're basically doing is just that like you're bringing the caramel out you're bringing the sugars out so you're going to use a low heat and it's going to take a while you do not want to rush it in any way you want it to basically cook down it's going to get golden brown you want to also make sure your olive oil is low temperature you do not want to use a lot of a lot of heat because you don't want to fry it you're not trying to fry it okay you're caramelized so when i put it in there you a lot of times if you put um onion garlic in a pan and you hear it start to sizzle the heat's too hot okay so just take it off to the side let it cool for a few minutes and then you can bring it right back in so i have in here like i said one large golden onion i've got four to five gold cloves of garlic and i've got in here about a quarter cup of olive oil so i'm going to stir it all up and get everything coated with oil and then guess what you do nothing okay i'm going to turn the heat up on that just a touch so we don't want it to go too long okay and then when we're doing that it's about a little bit more than half done maybe three quarters of the way done then i'm gonna put the pancetta in there and we're just gonna let it go okay so i've got my two pounds of ground beef 80 20 right i'm gonna put one pound of veal oh this is fun isn't this fun already can you just taste meatballs you guys love meatballs hopefully if you're watching this video you love meatballs so i'm gonna just mix that up a little bit all right and just to kind of get it going and one of the things uh kind of fun to do that i remember working on my dad's restaurant we used to make tons of meatballs so they had a huge aluminum bowl and everything was so cold and your hands would get frozen when you mix when you mix it all up one of the uh pieces of advice i always try to give you guys and it's true with baking and cooking as well is try to get everything about room temperature so i lost my regular so we're always going to keep everything going around room temperature so bring everything out about half hour so before you get started and that way all your ingredients mix really well so because they're all the same temperature um again one of my pieces of advice on eggs there's four eggs one egg per pound because i always like to mix the eggs first before i put them in and that just ensures that you have a really good mix it's not a good idea to crack the egg over your food when you put it in there particularly with baking because you know it's white typically flour sugar and you can't see the shells but same thing you don't want to put a bunch of shells in your food if the if the egg doesn't open properly so we're going to get that going and you're just going to mix everything i mean this is not not complicated it is a lot of fun though okay like i said you can use a quarter cup of your cheeses that just smells phenomenal oh yeah that smells good okay and then we want to use some salt we got bread crumbs we got pepper we got olive oil so bread crumbs like i said you can use a half of a cup per pound and i want to give you those ratios not to confuse anybody i know some people uh they're not so great when it comes to uh fractions right um but uh you may not want to make this this larger proportion right so you're going to use about a teaspoon if you remember of salt per pound of meat okay so just to give you a heads up on that all right so there's four teaspoons give or take right we're going to use about a teaspoon of pepper because you're using about a eight pepper not great i'll tell you if you can if you can i know everybody can't but if you can't always do fresh ground pepper i mean it smells it's night and day difference and just gives you that nice smell which is in that flavor you know that's what you're trying to do you're trying to deepen that flavor so that's great now olive oil and quarter cup per oh yeah can never do enough olive oil and about a quarter cup per pound okay and then what we're going to do is we're going to mix that before i do that though i'm going to take my pancetta i'm going to bring it over here and these are going the onions so if you want to come over here real quick just take a peek and see they're starting to go now they're not frying what's happening is they're giving off a lot of moisture and they're going to cook way down can you smell that well that smells good no white onion is going to have a little bit more bite to it yellow onion is always going to the golden onion there's always going to be a little bit sweeter it doesn't have as much bite they're a little little easier to cut too when you're cutting them they're not going to make your eyes bleed if you will so i'm going to let that go i'm going to turn that down just a touch and let's get going on our uh our meat okay so we've got everything in here bread crumbs and cheese and eggs and salt and pepper and this is going to take a few minutes okay so that's why i wanted to turn that down because i'm not going to be able to tend to it for a few minutes so what i'm going to do is get right in there and at first it's going to make a mess and at first as i always say it doesn't look like it's going to turn into anything but it will i mean that smells you know the cheese and the oil you put olive oil and cheese on anything with salt it just tastes great i don't know about you guys but that's certainly what i think now commercially they'd have a big commercial mixer to mix this so today i'm the commercial mixer so and you just want to make sure that everything gets really well incorporated okay and we're going to mix it again because we have to put our caramelized onions in there and our pancetta okay so you're not gonna necessarily make it perfect right now it's meatball day did i tell you guys that already we got our music plan we were missing that on the first segment there sorry about that all right so here we go we've got if you want to come right in here what i've got here are the onions going and they're they're getting close now what starts happening they start to get translucent and they really start to get kind of soft and you'll notice just a little tip if you can't find but i always like to use a white porcelain uh when i when i brown certain things or when i fry only because you can see how dark it is if you use a cast iron pan a lot of times it's tougher to tell how dark it is so with the contrast so these these are starting to get soft so what i'm going to do is i'm going to put my pancetta okay so i got a half pound of pancetta and i'm going to put that in there and what's nice about that now pancetta is essentially called italian bacon it's basically pork belly just like just like regular bacon it's a little bit more of a fatty cut than bacon or traditional american bacon if you can call it that so but what's nice about this is the fat from the pancetta is going to come out and it's going to add to the flavor of the garlic and the onion and it's awesome so that's one of my one of my little tips or secrets so with the pancetta it gives it a a little bit of a different flavor you you don't taste it if you will but it gives it just a little bit of that flavor and then like i said with caramelizing it it gives it a deeper rich flavor that you typically don't get in the meatball which is great and then you put them in some sauce and they're going to work really well okay another tip that we want to use or i want to share with you is this what i've got here is a pan going uh and i've got about a little bit over a quarter of an inch of olive oil now why is that because we're going to fry our meatballs now by that what i mean you're not going to deep fry them so you're going to pan fry them but you want to have a little bit of a bath of the oil why you want to sear the outside of the meatball when you sear it what it does is it keeps the moisture and that's why deep-fried things are always so great because the outside is is crispy right it's brown but the inside always stays moist so that's what you can do with the meatballs so we're gonna make a bunch of meatballs we're gonna put them in the oil and then you gotta be your your full end now you're very attentive to it and you're gonna fry it and then you're gonna rotate them three times you're gonna turn the heat down just a bit and you're to let them fry if you will or pan sear and what that's going to do is it's going to seal in all those juices all that beautiful flavor inside the meatball oh my god they're unbelievable it's going to taste so great these literally are going to be the best meatball you have ever had i'm telling you right now so try the recipe have some fun with it it's not too complicated you're gonna go to the grocery store get a few things first obviously and i'll make sure like i said i'll post the recipe up for you i'll talk to you guys in a few minutes come on right in here now this has been it's going to take about 20 minutes oh my gosh does that look awesome and all this is i had to fight my camera person off here just because she wanted to dive right in there with a spoon no no no no not going to happen but listen it's olive oil pancetta garlic and onion and that has such a deep caramelized flavor and if you look here you see all the bits they get kind of gooey and sticky that's what you want now this is caster and see you can tell and if you can come in real quick you're going to see when it when you know it's starting to get ready you see how the bottom of the porcelain starts to get kind of dark when all those bits start to get on the bottom you want to scrape all that off so this is this is done okay but this is hot so what i'm going to do is just set it aside for a sec okay and i'm going to grab one of my one of my mints here okay [Music] all right i'm just going to take this over to the side and i'm going to put it right on the stone here for a minute [Music] and just let that cool all right guys so what we have is a lot of uh oil so this is cooling down but we've got oil that we're gonna put the meatballs in so today we're not gonna do a sauce because we already have a sauce that we made but that being said if you got a sauce going what you want to do is transfer near the end that you know my advice is always near the end you're going to take the meatballs out and you're going to take some of the oil especially with all those little bits so what i'll usually do is drain off the top of the olive oil and then what you're going to do is left with a thicker part of the oil with some of those bits from frying them you're going to put that all in your sauce and mix it up and it adds that flavor to it i'm not a big fan of putting the meatballs in there and letting them letting them cook because meat if you cook it with the moisture uh typically you know water steam liquid it tends to get a little rubbery and i don't like that so i like to fry them get them nice and crisp it gives a different texture on the outside and then just put them in right near the end and they're great and they won't continue to cook so this is stop sizzling you see that so what i'm going to do now is and i'm going to i'm going to move it quick because i don't want this to cook the meat right so i'm going to put a i'm going to put kind of a little valley this is how i do it anyway okay i'm gonna put a little valley in there right and then what i'm gonna do is take the the pancetta onion garlic roasted right i'll try to do that here right i'm gonna put that right in there that's cool for you know just a few minutes which is fine and then we're going to mix it the meat's still kind of cool right and then what i'm going to do is just start to mix it and i'm going to try to do this without getting it all over my shirt and you just keep mixing it there you go you got a little tony bennett plan always makes it great oh my god it just smells now you got cheese you got salt you got pepper you got caramelized onions caramelized garlic bread crumbs that are flavored oregano rosemary thyme basil oh my god are you serious and then what i'll do is just get it going here hopefully you can just kind of smell that and then just get it going i just had a flashback that was my grandmother because she shaked a wooden spoon she used to she used to mix it vigorously to get it through there you go look at that i'm almost done right at the same time that tony bennett is done you know i think i shared this in one of my videos my father would always play a a little radio he had this like 50 cent radio he put in the corner i mean the speaker was poor quality but you'd always play in the mornings on sunday they'd have uh the italian music on at a station so it was mostly sinatra but periclomo and some people don't like those but that's what i grew up on so okay so now we're going to mix that now we really want to mix it thorough okay so now and you can see it's kind of you still got some oils but now see when you look at the when you look at the onion see it's already it's already cooked your pancetta is already cooked in there it's all caramelized so it's going to add that deep that deep flavor with that richer flavor so you're not going to get like bite into a big raw onion you know and that's going to happen no matter what when you cook a meatball or it's going to be if you will tenderize the onion but but this gives it that nice roast flavor now this you gotta mix you gotta spend a few minutes squeezing it squishing it [Music] you got veal you got pork you got beef and all those flavors marry and i know i said this before but it's all the same temperature so when i put my hand in here it's not like you have something cold something hot it's all the same temperature so it marries very well mixes very well the flavors [Music] get sinatron nothing better making meatballs with sinatra i went to the gym today so my chest and shoulders are a little sore already but you got to go to the gym or work out because when you make some of these meals you know they're not what i would call locale [Music] beautiful so now what i'm going to do is i'm going to start to divide this up into meatballs okay so i'll show you again another little tip i use let me uh organize this over here so one of the tips i'm going to use with you is we're going to shell out ice cream okay here it is here's an ice cream scooper so you basically want to have a unified shape and size why primarily for cooking because you're going to put them all in the pan at one time so you don't want to have something big and small because then they're not all going to cook at the same time okay so just a little tip i'm going to slide this off to the side and we're going to start divvying them up so you're just going to hook it in there and what i'll do on this is just a little bit over the top okay just a little bit over the top and then you're going to make a meatball [Music] look at that perfect is that beautiful all right so there's your perfect size meatball when i was in italy in the northern area of italy they would make a like a beef tartare so they would go get a lean leaner fresh ground freshly killed beef and they would uh basically they would you'd eat a raw like a carpaccio you'd basically have the burger you'd flavor it with salt pepper some olive oil the first thing you'd put in there though is uh is lemon juice and the acid from the lemon essentially cooks the cooks the uh the meat a little bit and oh my god it sounds gross you know when you kind of think about it but boy when you taste it it was great and then you do uh bread sticks or do some red whoops sometimes you get a little hot spot so what i'm going to do here is i'm going to spend the next few minutes i'm making them eat the ball now you have to start saying make it a meatball and see look how beautiful mix everything's just perfect on there and they're beautiful right i'm just going to set them aside so i'll go ahead and make these we'll count them out in a few minutes and then i'm going to show you how to fry them set them aside we're going to plate them hit them with some sauce a little parsley and they're going to be some really good meatballs i'll talk to you guys in a few minutes it's a meatball time meatball the frying time all right so what i did is obviously i mixed all those uh together and i took that ice cream scooper as i showed you and you're gonna see they're all pretty much uniform size okay so it's perfect isn't that beautiful does that not look beautiful just that alone right so guys what you want to do here is just gently slide them in okay that's the trick do not splash them and you want to keep them tight and if if they're not what you want that's fine just slide them over see what i mean it's nice and easy don't panic all right now you want to get them in pretty quick here because you don't want one to start getting way ahead and hooking than the other okay [Music] watch your fingers [Music] and just moving around like a machine all right am i like a meatball making machine and they smell great i mean you've got this beautiful now what's bubbling a lot of that is the moisture from your meat okay if you go too lean on the meat and i hear you know a lot of times your people well i want to go lean on i'm telling you it's not going to give you a good meatball it gets really dense and dry you don't want that okay so trust me you know these aren't what you call healthy meatballs but you know again guys what i always tell you sometimes people go to the store and you buy the meatball mix and i hear you but you know no offense you don't know what the hell is in there and they're gonna mix something in there and uh you don't know what it is and a lot of times you know not not all places by all means but what's gonna happen is they're gonna put some of those waste parts in the meatball mix they're gonna put the cheaper meat in the meatball mix and that's not what you want i'm going to turn the heat up just a little extra because we're losing some heat on the oil which is fine and then what i have to do is a food that's cold or raw if you will like let's say caprese salad or something like that you're always going to want to use the absolute best if you're using something for bread dipping you always want to use something that's the absolute best so these are frying away uh we're probably looking at uh 10 minutes tops and what we're going to do is turn them turn and turn them and then we're going to plate them sauce them and i'll show you what they taste like it's going to be great i'll talk to you guys in a couple minutes happy meatball day all right guys so we're cut up i gotta liven you up just in case you're falling asleep on me all right so here we go they're done now how do you know that they're crispy on both sides okay and you're gonna notice your meatball when the meat gets harder when it gets or i'm sorry when it gets cooking you're going to notice the meatball is going to get harder and meat will do that right when you're checking and i put them on a rack just to drain off any oil okay and then i try to go in the order in which i put them in right so those other ones if it's another minute and notice that nothing is sticking to the pan right how do you know that you want to make sure your oil is nice and hot before you start putting them in there all right this is how you make a great taste in meatball and every you know we talk to a lot of people you know italians and well you'll find different regions of italy they cook things a little differently see now that one's a little bit softer that one's better so if you grab one it's a little spongy just let it stand there an extra minute you know don't worry about it all right that one's perfect and you're just gonna pull them out of that pan the ones on the outside are the ones they did first so and see how they're nice and you're going to get that nice crisp it's got that crisp there see that that's perfect and that's what gives it that flavor that taste because you're essentially caramelizing the meat the meat believe it or not has sugar in it and just like the just like the onions and vegetables and everything okay so that one's a little bit soft so i'm going to pull this one out i just want to keep an eye on them the heat's not going to be dispersed through the pan perfectly so you got to kind of use a heads up yeah that's good and they're still going to cook you got to remember now they're they're hot right now so these puppies are still going to be cooking over here on the tray okay now look at that see there's not a lot of oil in there it looked like there was a lot of oil in there so just heads up depending on how many you put in there right look at that oh all right so they're setting i'm gonna shut the heat off shut the heat off i got my sauce hot and i'm going to let them set for a minute and what i'm going to do is i'm going to get my plate ready we're going to put them in we're going to plate them we're going to taste them they're going to be great all right guys so they've been setting here just for a couple minutes okay what i'm going to do whoops i forgot i knew what i was gonna do i wasn't doing it though so all right so you're just gonna put a little sauce on the bottom of a nice platter right and then what i'm gonna do is pop them in there now a nice idea to garnish these you can throw a little cheese on them like a parmesan if you want while they're hot and it's always nice i tell you when you smell oh my god i mean it's just unbelievable you got the veal you got the pork you got the beef you got the olive oil that you cook them in so you know you're pulling up that you're pulling up the beautiful when you turn blue olive oil flavor and that oil gets hot so that helps cook it from within right there's the valve and the guarantee you see all those little crispies that to me is the favorite part like see this right here that well i guess the only thing oh my god it's got cheese cookies these are just i dare say one of the best meatballs i've ever made that's impossible and then we're going to set them so now obviously we got a nice big meal coming up here all right so what i like to do again because you can't put these all in the amount of sauce that you're making you couldn't put them all in a saucepan right and uh and they're a great garnish to go with or compliment i'm sorry to go with anything right i'm gonna do this just put a little sauce oh my god now there's a little trick i want to show you before everyone comes over here to eat [Music] this is the chef's portion okay so i'm gonna grab one of those right there okay i'm gonna put a little this in there oh homemade sauce there you go okay pop right there what do we got now we got a little [Music] oh are you serious honest to god now before the crew comes over is that awesome look at that and here we go look at that cook perfectly through you see how moist it is it's not uncooked right but it's nice and moist can you see that moist right but the outside has got that nice hard crisp [Music] oh my god [Applause] [Music] that that's the most unbelievable meatball i've ever had [Music] i love that because it's got the the texture you know on the outside and put a little sauce on there one more i just got one more [Music] that's hot no doubt and you've got the the cheeses in there and one of the things i've seen on bread uh on meatballs sometimes people use too many breadcrumbs so this doesn't taste like it's full of breadcrumbs you don't even taste the breadcrumbs so it's got the cheese the breadcrumbs the eggs the roast and remember the key on is the caramelizer roasted onions garlic pancetta put that in and the right proportions of your meat your veal and your pork it's absolutely delicious hope you guys enjoyed one of my favorite meals one of my favorite dishes and i certainly enjoyed sharing it with you guys bon appetit remember family's the solo life you can be assured my family is going to enjoy that plate right there have a wonderful day guys i'll talk to you in our next video don't forget to subscribe to our youtube channel and like our facebook i'll talk to you guys soon

Channel: Cooking Italian with Joe

Views: 1,431,295

Rating: 4.7770348 out of 5

Keywords: Meatball (Dish), Italian Food (Cuisine), Italy (Country), How-to (Media Genre), Recipe, Spaghetti (Ingredient), Sauces (Type Of Dish), Gnocchi (Dish), Lasagne (Dish), Pasta (Ingredient), dinner, lunch, Mario Batali (Author), Pizza (Cuisine), Joe Borio, Italian Food (Industry), cooking italian with joe, Vito and Joe's Extra Virgin Italian Olive Oil, Pasta (Food), Linguine (Food), meatball sub, How to Make The Worlds Best Homemade Meatballs Cooking Italian with Joe

Id: 4ahTS8Iua2E

Length: 30min 53sec (1853 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 27 2014