This series will cover my attempts to create the “ultimate” meatball for a competition, in my family, around who can make the best meatball. The competition is set to take place sometime shortly after Christmas. The goal is to answer a simple question: who can make the best meatball? My brother claims to have perfected the meatball and my father is determined to show his prowess from years before when he cooked meatballs every Sunday. I, however, have just made my first meatball ever.
They have been making meatballs for years and years… Naturally, I believe I’ll win this competition. I like to pretend that my inexperience is not my weakness, but it is instead whether or not I’ll motivate myself to actually work out a meatball that is worthwhile. Therefore, I’m writing up these posts as a way to force myself to continue through this journey and, hopefully, take home the gold medal. I’m speaking metaphorically here, but I could imagine medals becoming apart of this before the end.
The rules of the competition are fairly simple. The first, and most important, rule is that we have to create a meatball. We are defining a meatball as a ball of meat. It can be any meat of our choosing. For example, my father is experimenting with oxtail. My brother will use ground beef with a mixture of 80% lean and 20% fat. I know this because my brother who has “perfected” his meatball will not be changing his recipe from the last time I had it. Full disclosure, it was a fantastic ball of meat.
The second rule is that we cannot create our own sauce, instead we must use Rao’s Marinara sauce. This is a rule that I still contest and dislike after several months of arguing over it. But it came down to a 2 to 1 vote where I was the one. This took away my initial strategy of going in a completely different direction so I could make a meatball that would ultimately lose, but I could say it was like comparing apples and oranges. However, this bottled me into using a red sauce and even took away my control of the sauce. This plays to my brother’s advantage who would have used this sauce for the competition, regardless of whether this second rule existed or not.
Those two rules are the only rules, besides general fair play. We intend to have a minimum of three judges but have yet to agree on who the judges will be. Regardless, we will be giving each of the judges three different plates with the meatballs on them. The judges will have no idea who made each meatball but will rank them from best to worst. The highest ranked meatball will win the competition.
Because of my inexperience, I need to get up to speed quickly with meatballs and what makes them work and what makes them fall apart. The first step in this is to understand what timings will work for meatballs and what will not. For timings, I mean the time the meatball is cooked, but also the time the meatball is in the red sauce. Therefore, for this first week I’m going to test out how long a meatball can and should stay in the red sauce before it has to be taken out and served. Before I can do that, though, I need a recipe for the meatball.
For a starting meatball I went with a recipe found in a youtube video which featured Dan Holzman who is a co-founder of The Meatball Shop. Feel free to watch the video but I’ll break down the steps and ingredients below before getting into the results.
Put everything into a bowl and mix it up. Try to mix as quickly as possible to avoid the fat from the beef melting. After that, make a tiny patty and fry it up to see how it tastes. Adjust everything based on the taste until you are satisfied. In my case, I found the batch to be slightly less seasoned then I would have liked so I added some salt. From there you can take even portions of the meat and roll them up into balls. The video tutorial uses an oven, but the oven I have is extremely uneven so I went with frying them up instead.
For frying, I went until I had a solid crust all the way around the meatball. I used canola oil to fry them in a dutch oven. I did not use olive oil since it has a smoking point that is too low. Once they were done, I put them on a paper towel to de-grease. I drained the oil from the dutch oven but kept the remains from the meatballs on the bottom. I then put the red sauce in and allowed the the sauce to warm up. Once it warmed up, I put the meatballs back into the sauce.
At this point, trial and error is key. I have no clue how a meatball will taste after fifteen minutes in the sauce versus a whole hour. I decided to go with 15 minute increments to get a baseline for how the meatballs will taste. On the next batch, I will reduce the time increments but use a tighter range. I plan to continue this till I have found the perfect time for the meatballs to be in the sauce.
I was actually pleasantly surprised with this first batch of meatballs. This recipe is nowhere near being better than my brother’s, but I’m confident that it is a step in the right direction. I found out that the meatball spending time in the sauce drains it of fat. This fat is not only responsible for texture but also flavoring. Meaning, a minimal amount of time in the sauce is well advised. You want the sauce to become apart of the meatball without the sauce taking away from the meatball. Therefore, on the next round I’m going to go at 5 minute intervals starting at 10 minutes. In addition, I think the sauce needs more time to reduce and become more flavorful. I’m going to allow the sauce to simmer for 15 minutes before putting the meatballs into the sauce. I think this will give me the best of both worlds. As for changing the recipe itself, I think I may add a bit of the sauce into the meatballs before cooking them. But besides that, I want to keep it the same and play more with timing before going too deep into the recipe itself.