Food
Broken Meatballs, Broken Hearts
Too often, recipes for spaghetti’s best friend end with shattered, undercooked tragedies. It doesn’t have to be this way!
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by macniak/Getty Images Plus, Unsplash, and Liudmila Chernetska/Getty Images Plus.
Recipe for Disaster is Slate’s column about the things recipes get wrong—and how to fix them. If you’ve noticed a recipe annoyance, absurdity, or outright lie, file your complaint here and we will investigate!
Meatballs are somewhat gross, no? I’ve always said that if you make meatballs just once, you’ll instantly start thinking about becoming vegan: Mush the beef and pork together with your bare hands, feel the coldness of the flesh betwixt your fingers, and then squeeze the meat together so it forms an abominable, spherical paste. Woof, a gross and crude description, I know. It should also be said that meatballs, once cooked, can be quite lovely and delicate! Still, many people seem to have issues keeping their unholy balls of meat together. It’s a common occurrence: “Why do my meatballs always fall apart?” the people cry out.
In fact, one person cried directly to us here at Recipe for Disaster. Just listen to their pain:
Twice recently I have tried to make a recipe with meatballs in it (one New York Times recipe, one Alison Roman) and each has been a catastrophic failure. Meatballs don’t hang together for me, they fall apart and become a mess, it takes forever to brown them (WAY longer than the times specified in the recipe), and they don’t really ever get brown before they fall apart anyway, and the result is disgusting. I am going to THROW THE ALISON ROMAN MEATBALLS OUT!!! That’s two pounds of ground meat!!!!!
Five exclamation points here. Five. That’s one exasperated home cook. So, let’s dissect the frustrations: 1) the meatballs don’t hold together, and 2) the meatballs aren’t browning. The reader also states that they tried two different reputable recipe sources—New York Times Cooking and Alison Roman—so it’s best to start by looking at those recipes specifically.
Roman has a way of naming her recipes so that they lodge into our memories like the penultimate episode of a prestige drama. One of her most famous recipes is “Goodbye Meatballs,” dubbed so because they were created for a dear friend decamping from NYC to L.A. Now, I’m a pretty staunch Roman fan. In fact, the very reason I like her so much is that I usually find myself enjoying how she cooks, and moreover, I usually agree with most of her opinions on food. Lupini beans do need to be cooked in a little bit of oil. Eggplant shouldn’t be breaded for eggplant parm. And rhubarb is essentially “strawberry celery.” However, when it comes time to describe how to mash and roll meatballs, we part ways.
The instructions for “Goodbye Meatballs” are incredibly misleading: “Once everything is well-mixed (it should look like … sausage or something), roll one tiny sacrificial meatball.” This is a little lazy. “Well-mixed” is true, but not very descriptive, either. Then we’ve got the “sausage or something” line. Or something? Some people reading this recipe want to make meatballs for the first time. Can we give them a little more than “or something”? It’s far too nonchalant. Not only that, but it turns out that sausage is exactly the thing that you don’t want when rolling meatballs.
Take a look at Daniel Gritzer’s meatball recipe for Serious Eats, which advises directly against sausage similitude:
All by itself, this amount of beating would produce meatballs with a tight, sausage-like texture. To avoid that, I then work the remainder of the meat into the mixture by hand, being careful to distribute it thoroughly, but not over-mix it. Those little bits of ground meat are going to deliver a meatball that still has the texture of ground meat: not quite as loose as a hamburger, but not as tight as a sausage, either.
A whole paragraph here dedicated to mixing, with details and accurate descriptions throughout, instead of a shrugging “or something.” The New York Times Cooking recipe for “Classic Italian American Meatballs” is more formal in tone, but it falls short as well, commanding the reader rather curtly, “With your hands or a spatula, mix in the ground beef and pork until the ingredients are evenly distributed.” What of the texture? And why on earth would you ever use a spatula to mix meatballs? You aren’t going to evenly distribute anything trying to mix ground flesh, eggs, cheese, and breadcrumbs around a big stainless-steel bowl with a rubber spatula. No, with apologies to the squeamish, clean hands are the only way.
If you’ve had problems with your meatballs falling apart, chances are you’ve been reading a briskly written recipe like the two mentioned above. Meatballs are too finicky for such brevity. You have to mix and roll them somewhat delicately, but not compact them so that they become dense and tightly wound. The latter method is what makes meatballs heavy and unpleasant. It’s a difficult balance to strike, I admit. One that takes practice, or at the very least, properly detailed, even textbook-esque instructions, like Gritzer’s.
As it pertains to browning, perhaps my biggest disagreement with Roman’s recipe for meatballs comes here: “I have done them on a sheet pan, and they are fine. They are not bad at all. But they are not brown. I don’t know who needs to hear this but putting your meatballs on a sheet tray in the oven to ‘brown’ them will steam and potentially overcook by the time they look anything close to brown.” This is just … not accurate.
As Gritzer says in his Serious Eats compendium about meatballs, “Browning, though, comes with its own set of options. Pan-frying is one, but with meatballs this large, I find it too easy to deform them in the pan, and too difficult to brown them evenly. Instead, I find that broiling on a rimmed baking sheet is the fastest way to get an even sear.” Aha! Gritzer understands and anticipates our reader’s problem: spherical decoherence once those balls hit the hot oil. If you can avoid frying at home, do it. An oven set to 350–400 degrees browns just fine, and, if the meatballs are the right size (more on that soon) and spread apart, they develop a decent crust, too. Alternatively, you can just use the broiler, which gets red-hot (500 degrees), flipping once. Just be sure to finish those now-crisped balls of meat in the sauce, because the centers will almost certainly be undercooked.
Francesco Lucatorto, an Italian chef from Genova who runs Ceci’s Gastronomia in Los Angeles, also likes browning his meatballs in an oven. At Ceci’s, the meatballs get “blasted in the oven real quick,” he told me, before being simmered in red sauce, just like Nonna used to do. No frying necessary.
I have personally tried every kind of known meatball method, and I find myself gravitating most to Lucatorto’s. The benefit to simmering raw meatballs in sauce is obvious: The meatballs become tender and tomato-infused. However, the meatballs also have a tendency to rupture as you stir them around. This results in a weird tomato-y meat sauce and broken, lackluster meatballs. It’s best to sear them hard first in the dry heat of the oven, then finish them in sauce so they get moistened, cooked through, and coated with delicious red gravy.
In addition, I think everybody should be making their meatballs smaller. Giant, hulking meatballs are fun, but they have too much surface area to brown evenly. One of my favorite plates of pasta is orecchiette and mini meatballs, a dish that hails from Puglia. The meatballs and the pasta are roughly the same size, which makes for even bites, but also allows for intense meat browning. There’s much less surface area on something the size of a large marble, and the process happens fast. In only a 350-degree oven, the bottoms of each small meatball get sticky and caramelized in roughly 20 minutes. Take a metal spatula, then flip the meatballs again to brown the other side. Just be sure to spray a sheet tray with cooking spray first. You don’t want stuck meatballs, and you don’t want to get stuck on your meatballs, either.
To be honest, when I undertook this particular culinary investigation, I was primed and ready to blame the user. However, when I examined the Roman and NYT recipes, I had to check myself: The lack of clarity in the instructions was actually to blame here. Mashing the words “meat” and “balls” together indicates a primitive animal could easily make this beloved Italian dish, but the truth is that these delights are much more nuanced. Meatballs are a conversation. I hope our poor reader, and all those who’ve spent their precious time shaping only to see their efforts disintegrate before their eyes, will adopt better techniques and try striking it up once more. The end result is worth it, I promise you. Heed the counsel of the great experts cited here, and if I may add one final piece of advice: Just, ugh, try to look away and put on some noise-canceling headphones when you’re mixing the meat slop. It really is some nasty work.
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