Our recipe tester called one of them “miraculous.”
There are no strict rules for meatballs, as my 15 years of professional cooking experience at various magazine test kitchens and cooking for food photography shoots have showed me.
Meatballs, in essence, are just meat, seasonings and a binder. They can be mixed delicately or vigorously, made from a meat substitute, flavored with a variety of ingredients (herbs, spices, cheeses) and cooked any number of ways.
But while there’s no single formula, there are a few principles for ingredients and techniques that, once learned, will help you make better meatballs every time.
The three recipes below yield meatballs that are all quite different from one another, but each one holds important lessons. Make them all, and you may very well end up a meatball master.
Recipe: Classic Italian American Meatballs
I was taught that a classic Italian American meatball should be a delicate one. So my recipe is a mix of fattier ground pork and beef, lightened with Pecorino Romano and ricotta, which adds milkiness without milk. If that sounds pretty rich, that’s the point: Fat creates tenderness.
Look for a ground beef that’s has a high ratio of fat: 80 percent lean to 20 percent fat is good, but if you can find 70 percent meat to 30 percent fat, you should get it. And, it should go without saying, but a whole-milk ricotta is preferred.
How you handle the mixture matters too, and for a classic Italian American meatball, avoid over mixing. The more you mix meat, the more its proteins tend to bond, which, as my colleague Kenji López-Alt points out, can cause the meat to be chewy and dense. (That can be a good thing or a bad, depending on what you want to achieve.) Here we want a loose, tender meatball.
For that reason, you’ll mix together the seasonings, cheeses and eggs separately from the meat in this recipe. Not only does it help prevent over mixing, it also helps ensure flavors and fats are evenly distributed. When you finally mix in your meat, remember that you want the insides to stay as loose as possible. Gently incorporate the two sets of ingredients as if you were folding egg whites into a batter, working as though it could deflate at any moment. Once it’s all incorporated, a spoon is a great help. Use it to scoop out some Ping Pong-ball size meatballs. It’s just another way of reducing how much you handle the meatball.
When you’re ready to cook, searing the meatballs creates a seal and also flavor in the now-burnished crust. That good flavor ends up in the sauce when they all cook together.
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