Kitchen Sink Meatballs

redbirdfarm
Feb 2, 2020
6 min read

Okay, I married an Italian. I didn't grow up with the Classic Italian Sunday Dinner™; don't get me wrong, we had Sunday dinners growing up, but I have no Italian Grandmother Recipe to follow here.

Which brings me to Kitchen Sink Meatballs. I guess, technically, this is a recipe, but I highly recommend deviating from it and putting your own spin on it. It's "Kitchen Sink" meatballs because you can throw anything you think is delicious in there, and it will probably make for delicious meatballs. I would just recommend that you precook anything that might not be tender immediately on its own, or you might have weird crunches in your meatballs, which is not a texture that brings "comfort food" to mind.

Meatball Recipe

Ingredients:

2-2.5 lbs ground beef*
1 lb ground veal
2 medium yellow onions
1 green bell pepper
8 oz baby portabella mushrooms
2 scallions
2 tablespoons diced garlic (approx 3-4 cloves, but measure garlic with your heart)
1 egg
1 cup +/- breadcrumbs
1 cup shredded mozzarella
1 tablespoon dried basil (or fresh, chopped finely)
some olive oil (maybe 3-5 tablespoons in total)

Directions:

Finely dice your onions, bell pepper, mushrooms, garlic, and scallions into separate piles.
Heat up a pan to medium, add some olive oil, and cook onions until soft and starting to caramelize. I cook my onions covered for 3-5 minutes, uncovered til they start to brown, then deglaze the pan with a little water and cook uncovered until the water is gone (but don't let the onions dry out completely/burn). Put in a large bowl.
Add your bell pepper to the pan (adding more oil if need be) until soft and lightly browned. Add to large bowl with onions.
Toss the scallion root portions into the pan with your garlic (just the oniony looking bits of scallions, not the green leaf portion). Put the green portions of your scallions in the bowl, put garlic/root portion of scallions in when they're lightly browned.
Put your diced mushrooms in the pan, add a little more oil if you need, cover until they're bubbling in the water that was released from them. Uncover and keep stirring until the water is evaporated, and mushrooms are lightly browned. Add to bowl.
In a large pot (6qt or larger), begin to heat tomato sauce. Don't fill the pot more than 1/3 of the way up, and storebought is fine, but homemade is so easy as well! I'll include a sauce recipe below. Keep the heat low - sauce burns easily, and you just want a light simmer.
Put your beef, veal, mozzarella, basil, and egg into the bowl.
Add breadcrumbs 1/4 cup at a time, mixing the contents of your large bowl until uniform. Depending on what you put in and how wet the ingredients are, you may find yourself needing more than a cup. I've honestly never actually measured the breadcrumbs, just keep going until you can form a nice ball but the meat mixture isn't dry or crumbling.
Lightly spray a cookie sheet or two with some oil, and form meatballs onto the cookie sheet, spaced about 1/2" to 1" apart. Larger meatballs take longer to cook but tend to stay more tender and juicy on reheating. I planned to make meatball subs for lunch, so I made them as large as possible without being unable to fit on a sub roll.
Broil your meatballs until they have a nice brown on the top - WATCH THEM CAREFULLY! It's a very small window of time from raw to perfect to burned. You could also cook them in a pan if you preferred, but it's a lot more work for no difference in results. We just want to give a "shell" of cooked edge so that the meatballs don't fall apart in your sauce.
Once the meatballs have properly browned, place them in your sauce. I recommend a spoon or spatula; splashing sauce hurts, and if you can be gentle with your meatballs, they're less likely to fall apart in the sauce.
Cook for 3+ hours at a very gentle simmer. The longer you go, the more delicious they are, so I try to make this a mid-morning activity so they're perfect by dinner time. Take a meatball out and cut it in half to confirm it's cooked all the way through.

Notes:

* For your ground beef, try to stay around 85-90%. If you have a higher fat content ground beef to use, you may want to cut down on the amount of veal that you add to avoid a greasy meatball. Similarly, if you are just dying to use your 96% ground beef, you may want to up the veal to balance it out. Fat keeps the meatball tender and moist - this is not the place for diet foods, so keep the fat content up enough (but not insanely high!) to have tasty meatballs.

The essential ingredients here are ground beef, ground veal, egg, and breadcrumbs. That's it. You can make this recipe without any of the other stuff (though, I personally don't think it will be AS good), or swap out what you like. Hate mozzarella but love parmesan? Great! Swap em! Mushrooms are a no-go? No worries, skip that step.

Store bought sauce is 100% fine here. Don't feel like you MUST make homemade in order to create delicious meatballs. However, I will say that homemade is very quick to get started, and I think it makes a difference. Plus, I feel more like a "Real Italian" if I make it homemade, and it allows me to sneak vegetables into my own food, because I am a small child at heart who would eat no vegetables if given the option.

Sauce Recipe

Ingredients:

2 15 oz cans tomato sauce or puree*
30 oz water
1 8 oz can tomato paste
1 medium yellow onion
2 tablespoons diced garlic (3-5 cloves, ish)
3 medium zucchinis
1 +/- tablespoon white sugar*
1 tablespoon basil
2 teaspoons oregano
1 teaspoon rosemary (finely chopped)
1/2 teaspoon tarragon
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 tablespoon olive oil
salt to taste**

Directions:

Finely dice onion and garlic (if not already diced), and shred zucchini with a food processor shredding disk.
In a large pot (6 quarts or larger), sautee onions in olive oil on medium heat until soft and just starting to brown (3-5 minutes).
Add shredded zucchini, mix into the oil/onion mixture, and cover. Cook until zucchini has turned a little green in the white portion and is soft, having given up some of its water.
Put zucchini/onion mix into the food processor and blend until smooth.
While that's blending, put tomato paste and garlic into the pot and cook it a bit in the oil, until it's fragrant. Add the zucchini/onion puree, and empty the two cans of tomato sauce/puree into the pot. Fill each of those cans with water (try to get the leftover tomato on the sides of the can) and pour into the pot.
Add everything else but sugar and salt (black pepper, tarragon, rosemary, oregano, and basil).
Stir everything together until it's uniform, and bring to a very light simmer (I'm talking 2-3 bubbles popping at a time, some delay between bubbles appearing) and stir occasionally.
After 5 minutes or so, taste the sauce. If it tastes a little too acidic, add some sugar. You may not have to add any sugar, or you may need to add more, but add in VERY small increments. It's very easy to get a sauce that's too sweet, and hard to correct if it is.
If you are making sauce for meatballs, you can add your meatballs at any time now. If you are just making sauce, let it simmer for a couple hours, taking care that it isn't burning on the bottom by keeping the heat very low and stirring every 20-30 minutes.

Notes:

* Tomato sauce in a can is a curious thing. I though t "okay, why do brands like Prego exist if it also comes in a can, is that the same thing?" - the answer is sometimes yes but also sometimes no. Check the label - the cans of tomato sauce from Sam's Club have sugar in it already. Some brands are just pureed tomatoes, in which case, you would probably need to add sugar to your recipe. Definitely taste your sauce before adding any sugar.

**Don't add salt until the end, or close to it. Especially if you're making meatballs, that adds a lot of salty flavor.

Making your Meatballs

Mix everything into your big bowl until just combined - overmixing can make your meatballs a little tough, so once it seems pretty uniform, stop mixing. Add breadcrumbs until you can make a ball without it falling apart.