This article provides a detailed guide on how to make incredibly juicy Italian-American style meatballs. It delves into the author's personal journey to perfect the recipe, highlighting key ingredients and techniques that ensure tenderness and flavor.
Daniel joined the Serious Eats culinary team in 2014 and writes recipes, equipment reviews, and articles on cooking techniques. Before that, he was a food editor at Food & Wine magazine and the staff writer for Time Out New York's restaurant and bars section. Minced pancetta and gelled stock (optional) guarantee extremely juicy meatballs. Everyone has their own idea of the ideal meatball.
For me, it's a plump, juicy ball of highly seasoned meat that's so tender a spoon can pass right through it with almost no resistance. For several weeks I tinkered away, trying to figure out how to make the best Italian-American style meatballs possible. Halfway through my journey, my then-girlfriend (now wife) Kate tasted a batch, looked at me and said, 'Baby, you've nailed it.' I was chasing an image I had in my mind of what the perfect meatball would be, and I wasn't going to quit until I got there. What I imagined was a meatball large enough to look hefty, but so light and tender a spoon could slide through it with almost no resistance—a floater, not a sinker, as matzo ball. Then, late one night over the holiday, home alone after a long day of testing, I sat down with a bowl of that day's meatballs in red sauce. I pushed my spoon into one, scooping a piece off with ease. Moisture glazed the exposed surface. I took a bite, and my eyes filled with beef- and pork-fat tears. Here's how I made it. A lot of people make their meatballs with three different kinds of meat: beef, pork, and veal. I decided right off the bat that I was cutting the veal from mine, for no other reason than that it's harder to find and can be expensive. There's so much going on in these meatballs that I don't think even veal devotees will miss it, but if you're one of those folks who feel vealbe included, there's nothing stopping you—just get two-thirds of a pound of each of the three meats (to total two pounds), and then follow the recipe as written with that. I played with the beef-to-pork ratio quite a bit, since I was aiming for a very particular springy texture, the result of heavily mixed meat. Here, I simplified things with a 1:1 ratio of beef to pork, since I was going for a looser mix: not quite as loose as a good hamburger, but not tight, either. I knew I wanted to use a panade made with fresh bread, since I had found with my Swedish meatballs that dried bread crumbs produce a denser, drier meatball. To add even more moisture, and to help the bread break down into the blend, it soaks in a liquid first. A lot of recipes call for water or milk, but I wanted really full-flavored meatballs here, so I experimented with a few different liquids, including milk, red wine, and Buttermilk ended up winning in my taste tests, its tartness boosting the flavor of the meatballs and helping to balance some of the richness of the meat and fat. Red wine, if you're curious, is absolutely awful. It's important that the bread is completely moist throughout; after letting it stand for several minutes, mash it with your fingers or a spoon to make sure. I wanted a meatball with tons of flavor, so I went with a more-is-more approach. That said, if you don't want to use one of these ingredients, like fennel seed, you can just leave it out, or add a different seasoning instead. This part is highly customizable. I started with plenty of minced onion, leaving it raw so that it would retain some texture in the finished meatballs. Then I let the grated Parmigiano-Reggiano rain down. For the salt, I've found in my tests that four teaspoons of kosher salt provides just the right amount of seasoning for this amount of meatball mixture. when measuring by volume. Fine table salt is denser, and therefore more salty, teaspoon for teaspoon, than coarse kosher salt. So, for example, four teaspoons of table or fine sea salt will make these meatballs too salty. You can avoid this problem by weighing the salt (18 grams, in this case) on a kitchen scale. (If you don't already own a scale, it's past time to fix that! See our review of Perhaps the most important thing—even more important than flavorings—is that the meatballs are tender and juicy. I took a few different steps to get there. The first thing I did was add minced pancetta to the mixture. As the meatballs cook, the tiny bits of pancetta slowly render, releasing their fat into the meatball and boosting the juiciness (not to mention the flavor). After testing this several times, though, I need to stress that the fattiness of the pancetta is crucial—and that's a quality that can vary a lot from one product to another. In the photo above, the pancetta is at least 50% muscle, which is too lean. It didn't add as much moisture as it would have had the pancetta been mostly fat. with Chef Joe Ng, an expert in dumplings and dim sum. The general trick for soup dumplings is to fold a ball of meat, along with some gelled broth, into the dumpling ski
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