An Encouragement to Make the Homemade Version, If You Can Do So

photo credit: Jim Simons

The picture (taken by my husband, so it’s much better than the ones I take, even though he was dealing with the lighting in our kitchen) is of a Costco frozen Italian meatball and one of the homemade ones I made using my own version of Alison Roman’s “Good-bye Meatballs” from her new “Home Cooking” video series. (Be sure to subscribe; she’s doing a new one every Tuesday. They’re short and funny. I love her because she’s so completely opinionated. Not that I could be described that way or anything!)

Anyway, as you could probably figure out, if I had a Costco meatball to photograph that must mean that I have them on hand. They come in this enormous 6-lb. bag, individually frozen, and you just take out what you need for any given meal. It’s always a relief to think, ‘Oh, we can just have spaghetti and meatballs for dinner tonight.” And that is perfectly fine. Some Costco meatballs, some jarred pasta sauce, some kind of pasta (I like to use penne or bowties or fusilli, whole wheat, of course), and some grated Parmesan (but here I draw the line about not using the pre-grated stuff), and you have dinner. Throw in some salad and put some croutons on top (so no need for bread) and even a teenage boy will consider that a meal.

But no one’s gong to say that those meatballs are any kind of gourmet experience. They’re kind of dry and mealy. So it’s nice to make your own if you can. I watched Alison’s video and thought hers looked really good, and also her technique for making the sauce, which uses the nice brown bits and fat from frying the meatballs to incorporate into it. I was especially intrigued with her use of ricotta as a binder and flavoring agent. The meatballs are very tender and moist using that ingredient. She also has you use panko breadcrumbs, which I always have on hand myself. The end result was really, really good. I made a double batch and froze half of them, spreading them out on a pan to freeze individually and then bagging them up. So I now have the makings for another great meal.

Below I’m giving you my version of her recipe. Let me tell you, as briefly as I can, what changes I made and/or comments I have, so you don’t have to wade through all this in the recipe itself:

  • I don’t use whole canned tomatoes. Cooking websites and shows everywhere will tell you to use this product and not diced/crushed/pureed. Alison crushes up the whole tomatoes in the can with her hand; so does Lidia Bastianich on her TV show, as well as any number of other chefs. To me, that looks very hazardous. (And messy.) Plus, and here’s my real point: my mom always said that you should cut out the core of canned tomatoes. The manufacturers peel them, but they don’t core them. I can’t bring myself to leave the core in, so I have to fish them out and operate on them before use. That’s a pain. I always buy “crushed” tomatoes if I can find them, as they’re a little coarser than “pureed.” I wouldn’t buy tomato sauce, as it’s too smooth, and I wouldn’t buy diced tomatoes since they’re typically treated with calcium chloride to make them stay firm and they therefore won’t cook down well into your sauce.
  • I don’t brown the meatballs (or indeed any meat for a stew or sauce) in the same pan that I’m going to use for making the finished dish. Alison says to do this, and I tried it her way when I made this recipe, but what always happens to me happened this time: the brown bits (officially called the “fond”) started burning by the time I got to the second batch of meatballs. She wants you to cook the onions in the fond, which is a great idea, but I was sure the whole thing was going to have a burned taste, so I had to wash out the pot before proceeding. You’ll see below that I still have you use the fond but tell you to do the browning in another pan. Yes, then you have another pan to wash. But you’ll thank me!
  • I don’t use her piddly “2-3 tablespoons” measurement for the tomato paste, because that’s only part of a can. For my first version I just went ahead and used a whole 6-ounce can, which would be 12 tablespoons, because that’s what I had. The results were fine but perhaps a little overpowering on the tomato front. I’m going to look for 3-ounce cans at the regular grocery store on my next trip. I cannot stand recipes that have you just use part of a can, of anything. They always tell you to buy tomato paste in a tube, but that’s just not going to happen. Tubed tomato paste is ridiculously expensive, and there’s no guarantee that you’re going to use it up before it gets moldy (although it does last better than the canned stuff). If you use up only part of a can of tomato paste you’re supposed to freeze the rest of it in little blobs, and I’ve done that, but what a pain. What I will probably do, if indeed the tiny little 3-ounce cans are no more (I don’t see any cans that size online) is to use half the 6-ounce can and then freeze the other half in one ziploc bag. I think I can just barely bring myself to do that. Sigh.
  • Why oh why do these cooking people refuse to use a garlic press? Alison uses a microplane grater, and I’ve seen this with other big-time cooks, including Ina Garten and at least one person (I’m lookin’ at you, Julia) at America’s Test Kitchen. If you want to smash and mince the garlic with a knife, great. But otherwise use a press, please! The microplane is going to be ridiculously wasteful and messy, since the garlic clove is so small. You’ll have to retain a nubbin in order to have something to hold onto as you grate, it will be hard not to grate your fingers, and your microplane will be covered in garlic. Use a garlic press! That’s what they’re for!
  • I will, from now on, do what Alison says about frying a “sacrificial meatball” in order to test for seasoning. You shouldn’t eat raw ground meat, of course, and it won’t taste the same as the cooked version anyway, so you need to take a small dab of your mixture to cook and then taste before making the whole batch into meatballs. I’m realizing more and more that I don’t season enough, and indeed the one flaw in my meatballs was that they weren’t salty enough. I recently heard a professional chef say that you should season with salt as you go along, at the various stages of the recipe, and if you do that your dish will not be obviously salty the way it would be if you just added the salt at the end. Remember, Americans tend to eat too much salt because we eat too much processed food, which is w-a-a-a-y oversalted. But home cooking isn’t ever going to be that salty. (I have the great Christopher Kimball on my side for this issue.) So don’t think you’re being “healthy” by undersalting. It’s not necessary to do that. (But if you watch any AR videos you’re going to think she’s going way overboard with salting and peppering. I guess she must know what she’s doing, though.)

Okay, now that you’ve waded through all my blathering you finally get to the recipe!

Debi's Version of Alison Roman's Goodbye Meatballs

A great, somewhat-complicated-but-totally-worth-it version of meatballs in tomato sauce

Course Main Course
Cuisine Italian
Servings 6 plus leftovers
Author Debi Simons

Ingredients

For the meatballs:

  • 1 cup whole milk, full fat ricotta cheese*
  • 1/2 cup finely-chopped parsley
  • 1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese
  • 1/3 cup panko bread crumbs**
  • 2 large eggs
  • 2-3 cloves garlic, pressed or minced
  • 1/2 medium onion, yellow or red very finely chopped
  • 2 teaspoons Kosher salt, plus more if needed
  • Freshly-ground pepper and/or crushed red pepper flakes
  • 1 pound ground beef, ground chuck if possible, or 85% lean/15% fat
  • 1 pound ground pork***
  • 2 tablespoons olive oil, or as needed

For the sauce:

  • 1 1/2 medium yellow or red onions, finely chopped
  • 4-6 cloves garlic, pressed or minced
  • Kosher salt and freshly-ground black pepper
  • 1 teaspoon anchovy paste, 1-2 whole anchovies, or 1 teaspoon fish sauce, optional
  • 3 ounces tomato paste
  • 2 28-ounce cans crushed (preferred) or pureed tomatoes
  • 1 6-ounce container grape tomatoes, optional

Instructions

For the matballs:

  1. Mix ricotta, parsley, parmesan, bread crumbs, eggs, garlic and onion in a large bowl. Season with salt, pepper and crushed red pepper flakes if you like and let sit for 10 minutes or so (this will hydrate your bread crumbs, which will make the meatballs very tender). 

  2. Add beef and pork and and mix well. I find ground beef to be hard to mix. If you don’t buy the ground beef/pork mixture, I’d advise that you mix the beef and pork together in a separate bowl and then add that to the bread crumb mixture, as you’ll have an easier time of incorporating everything evenly. Some people say that the only way to mix something like this is with your hands, so you can do that if you want to. (I don’t.)

  3. Once everything is well-mixed, roll one tiny sacrificial meatball. Heat a little olive oil in the pot you’re going to use to brown the meatballs, preferably a 12-inchnonstick skillet. Add the sacrificial meatball and cook until it’s well browned on all sides and is cooked through. Take it out of the pot and eat it. Alison says, “Does it taste amazing? Salty? Meaty? Tender and juicy without falling apart? Do you want it spicier? Go ahead and adjust seasoning as needed. (OccasionallyI’ll add more salt or decide this is when I want them spicy.)”  

  4. Roll the rest of the mixture into balls about 2-inches in diameter. You should get roughly 24 meatballs from this mixture. 

  5. Working in batches, brown the meatballs on all sides, about 3–4 minutes per batch, using perhaps one tablespoon of olive oil per batch and doing 2-3 batches. As noted above, your best bet here is a large nonstick skillet. They will not be cooked through, and that’s fine-- they will finish cooking in the sauce. As you finish each batch, remove the meatballs with tongs to a plate or bowl and use a heatproof spatula to scrape the oil/browned bits into the large pot (Dutch oven, stockpot, soup pot,whatever) that you plan to use for the sauce.

For the sauce:

  1. Add the onions to the large pot with the drippings from the meatballs and season with salt and pepper. Cook, stirring occasionally, until they’re translucent and tender but not yet browned, 8–10 minutes. You may need a little more oil. Add garlic, anchovies if you’re using them and tomato paste and stir until the anchovies are melted and the tomato paste has begun to caramelize and turn a darker shade of red, 2–3 minutes. 

  2. Add the fresh tomatoes if using and season with salt and pepper. Cook until they’reburst and jammy, 5 minutes or so. Add the canned tomatoes. Season with salt and pepper. 

  3. Bring to a simmer and adjust for salt, knowing the sauce will reduce a bit and become abit saltier once you add the meatballs. Add your meatballs and all the juices that have collected at the bottom of the plate or bowl where they’ve been sitting. 

  4. Reduce the heat to low and simmer the meatballs in the sauce (uncovered) until the sauceis thickened and the meatballs are cooked through and perfectly tender, 30–40minutes. 

For the pasta:

  1. Alison recommends that you use short, stubby pasta and not spaghetti, an idea I vehemently agree with. She says to cook it just short of al dente and then drain it and mix it with a little bit of the sauce so that it doesn’t stick together. I’d serve the pasta and meatballs/sauce separately so that people can adjust proportions to taste. (For my son, that’s about 3 pieces of pasta.) Let (or make) guests grate their ownParmesan over the top.

Recipe Notes

*Alison says that she’s also used cottage cheese, which worked perfectly “because cottage cheese is perfect!”—to which I say, yuk! Wouldn’t there be those little curdled bits all the way through? But use it if you want to, or if that’s all you have and you don’t want to run to the store. I’d mash it up a little bit with a fork, myself. And you'd need to have whole-milk cottage cheese and not that low-fat stuff, which is all they sell in my neck of the woods. So you're going to have to go to the store anyway. Sorry!

**Or you can make your own from that stale bread you frugally stashed in your freezer. Just don’t use those horrible “Italian bread crumbs” from the store that look like sand.

***I used a 50/50 blend of ground beef and pork that I happened to spot at the grocery store. It worked fine and was easy to incorporate since half of the job was already done. I couldn't be choosy about the type of beef, though. I'm going to try this recipe again using ground chuck with the pork bought separately, but this version came out very well.

Note: It's very little more work to make a double batch of the meatballs and freeze half. Spread out the uncooked meatballs on a baking sheet or other tray and freeze until solid, then put in a bag and use as desired--just like the Costco ones!

Also-you wouldn't have to make your own sauce, particularly if you're doing the leftover frozen ones and you didn't make a double batch of the sauce and freeze that. You could just fry the meatballs in the skillet as directed above and then heat them all together with as much jarred sauce as you like, probably just using that same pan if it's deep enough.