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Spaghetti meatballs, an ineitable Italian American classic. But what happens when we try to make spaghetti meatballs with very little money at all? And what happens when we try to make it with a whole lot more money than we should? I can think of only one way to find out, and I think you know what it is. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. They've supported this channel for over 7 years. In fact, they were my first ever sponsor. Squarespace is the perfect platform to create your own site and accomplish your goals online. Whether you're building a digital empire or just want people to give you hilarious episode ideas, Squarespace has you covered. I'm having a lot of fun making food ranking videos and my favorite part is seeing what you
guys suggest. So, I built a site where you can submit your episode ideas. Go to rankedwithbish.com and submit yours. And coming soon, you can see all my ranked lists. Squarespace's brand new designer templates make it so easy to set up exactly what you need. To create one of your own, head to squarespace.com for a free trial and use code Babage for 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. It seems unfair that this spaghetti is priced per serving while the others are priced by total cost. Is that just how poverty works? I don't think that's how poverty works. I think that's how capitalism works. So, yeah, actually, yes. In other words, yes, that's how poverty works. The two are one and the same.
Dollar. How do we make spaghetti and meatballs for a dollar? Well, first things first, probably can't use meat. There's no way we can not go over a dollar per serving using actual beef or pork or even chicken. So, what can make an analog to beef? Well, the obvious answer is to go vegetarian. If you're asking me, I think we should use lentils. Lentils are very commonly used as a meat surrogate. They definitely don't have much in the way of flavor or texture, so we're going to need to try and fix that. But, they're very nutritious and they will stand in for beef or pork in the meatball scenario. First thing we got to do is cook these. But I'm not just going to cook them in boiling water cuz this is an opportunity to add flavor even at such a low price point.
What we have here, bullion. Not very expensive. And this beef bullion is going to go a long way in helping these taste a little bit like meatballs. Now I'm going to add our rinsed lentils. I should have. These guys are now going to go 40 minutes to the point where they're quite tender but not falling apart cuz we need to be able to mash them up and clump them together a little bit but not turn them into a mash. All right, our lentils are nice and cooled off. All right, so we got to mash these up before adding anything else, I think. So now we're going to add some usual meatball suspects. I'm going to add a little bit of this lentil cooking liquid back just cuz it is perfectly good beef flavor. And then I'm going to make a pinade. I'm
going to take about a half a cup of Italian style breadcrumbs. These guys are preseasoned, so we don't have to use as much dry seasonings from the spice rack. Keep that dollar down. To that, I'm going to add a little splash of milk. This is going to help keep these otherwise very dry meatballs at least a little moist. I'm also going to add my egg right in here. And some flavor bonus points. Let's throw some shaker parmesan. Putting 1/4 cups worth in there. Salt FGP. It's probably half teaspoon of oregano. Likewise with parsley. And we want it to be a thick but not too thick paste. Let's add this to lentils. And voila, we got ourselves some sort of meatball mix. So I'm going to roll these guys up. Then we're going to pan fry them. Sauce up.
Ski down. Before you know it, we're going to have something resembling spaghetti meatballs for less than a dollar a serving. While those are frying up, let's talk pasta. For a dollar a serving, we obviously need to go to the very cheapest pasta. Usually that is spelled ranzone. There's a couple reasons I don't like using this or buria or any of the, you know, bargain pastas. And that's because of its texture. Well, flavor and texture. I think it has worse flavor, but on top of that, as you can see, it is a rather smooth and shiny texture. This translates to less sauce adhering to the pasta, which means that it's going to look gross and naked. Okay, we've got some great brown crust on most sides of our lent
balls. So, now we're just going to go ahead and All right, there's our sauce and balls. Let these guys simmer just for a wee bit. Let's be real. This is dollar spaghetti meatballs. What are we doing? I mostly just cuz I want to do it. It's It's bad pasta anyway. I might as well have some fun. Oh, I haven't done that since I was a kid. Now, while it's cooking, I'm going to add some sugar to this sauce cuz it's way too harsh. Probably a tablespoon's worth to start to see how it goes. I'm probably adding one teaspoon each. Oregano, garlic powder, onion powder. That mixed in there. Now, we
have to diversify it. Ski is about minute shy of being done. That's right where I want it to be. I'm going to scoop up a big old cup of this nice starchy pasta water. Now I'm going to strain this stuff. Bring it right back onto the burner. We're going to add some of our sauce to the pasta. Probably a cup's worth of sauce. I'm going to add about 1/4 cup of our pasta cooking water. And we are going to continue to cook that for just a minute or so. All right, piscet is done. Snapped in half just the way I did it when I was a kid. Felt really, really good. Even though I doubt I'm ever going to do it again. And we budgeted for two balls per ball banger. What? We budgeted for two balls per serving. Always room for a
little extra shake of the bottled parm. And there you have it. Spaghetti and meatballs with a very significant quotation around it for less than $1 a serving. Let's get a look at that cross-section. Looks like a meatball with seeds in it, but it does look like a meatball. Let's try this guy out. Surprisingly better than I thought it was going to be. It's definitely a little mushy, a little dry, but it has a meaty bite to it and a solid flavor. Like, we put meatball trappings in there and it tastes like a meatball. This is a passable spaghetti meatballs for less than a buck per bowl. Pretty cool. Pretty cool that you can do things like that in this world. Not for long. Enjoy it while it lasts. So, for this first batch, we had to do per serving because it's
physically impossible to make a batch of spaghetti and meatballs of any kind for a dollar. The pasta alone costs a buck 50. So, this was less than a dollar per serving. Moving forward, we're going to see what kind of spaghetti meatballs we can make for that total budget. But for now, a buck for this bowl, that's a buck by any man's bowl for a dollar. This spaghetti is the most reasonably priced. and reasonable things don't perform terribly well on YouTube. Why are you including it? I don't know. Honestly, I have no idea. Uh conceptual symmetry, um levels, um accomplishable recipes for those at home. There, I got there. It's because this is a good one to Well, is it? Let's find out if it's a good one for you to make
you. What kind of spaghetti meatballs can we make for $10? And luckily, this budget gets us into very basic solid spaghetti meatballs territory. We can use actual meat. So, this is about a little less than four bucks worth of ground beef. It might even be cheaper where you guys are at because we're in New York City and everything's a little more expensive. Pretty much same deal. We got one egg. We got/4 cup of breadrumbs. Really, you want to make a pinade here. And I already poured in the breadcrumbs cuz I'm a stupid man. Uh, so just don't do that. We're sticking with the shaker parmesan because this is significantly cheaper than the real stuff. Half
teaspoon of dried garlic, half teaspoon oregano. Uh, throw some parsley in there, half teaspoon of onion powder, 3/4 of a teaspoon of salt, some FGP. So now, because I was stupid and I didn't make the pinade properly, I'm going to try to make up for it by beating all the liquids together before Look, I still make a made a pinade. I have nothing to feel bad about. And now work it into the meat. Basically just want to massage this together until you don't see any more streaks of the pinade because all that really is milk and bread. So you don't want like a big chunk of that in the middle of your balls or your meatballs. There it is. Very, very simple meatball mix.
Let's fry them up. Oil's hot. I'm not going to fry those up until they're nice and crisp. I'm going to do it over moderateish heat. Like I'm not going to blast these to sear them. that can make the muscle fibers like contract too much too quickly and it could help. It could make the meatball crack. So, I'm kind of slow frying them, if you will. All right, we got some good browning on the meatballs. Now, I'm going to finish simmering these in the sauce. Uh, we're doing PGO cuz it is an inexpensive bottled sauce. Going to add this to the meatballs.
Let them finish cooking. And now, unlike the lentil meatballs, these meatballs are going to help flavor that sauce cuz PGO sauce right out of the jar, not great. But after it's simmered for 20 minutes with these meatballs in it, those meatballs, they're going to expel a lot of juices, a lot of fat. It's all going to go in the sauce, make it taste better. Meatballs have been cooking about 20 minutes. I don't want them to get metallic or tinny. So, I'm going to remove them from the situation. Bring them to a second location. All right. So, we got this guy cleaned out so we can finish the spaghetti and the sauce right here. Speaking of spaghetti, what kind of spaghetti are we going to use?
Well, the step up from Ranzani, but yeah, Barilla. Uh, usually 20 cents more. I don't know if it's worth it or not. It does seem like it has a slightly softer texture on the outside. We're going to stick with good oldfashioned blue box, the other one. Soon as the spaghetti hits the pot, we're moving it around this time both to prevent it from sticking and to get it down in the pot so that it cooks evenly. When you don't want to have the spaghetti sticking out like that all over the place. I'm going to set a timer for eight. We're going to check the dness and we're going to finish it in the sauce. Just like last time, we have room in the budget for some extra richness in the form of a/ tablespoon of
unsalted butter and little drizzle of olive oil. Some finishing with fat. It softens the harsh edges of the sauce. If you are using jarred pasta sauce, this is your way to instantly upgrade it. This isn't some freshly grated Parmesan cheese. Could use a pinch of salt, taste of pepper. Okay, spaghetti going down. Flatten out a little spot for my balls. That's who's added on top. And there we have it. $10 meatballs. Ones that have actual meat in them. So, that's an upgrade. Let's see how it all came together. Pasta is properly cooked. Nice and al dente. The sauce has these really strong acidic fruit notes that are getting softened out by the fat we added right
at the end. Parmesan cheese for sure, but definitely the butter and the olive oil and the meatballs. This whole thing tastes picture perfect for the little Italian place in your hometown where you grew up with the red gingham t tablecloths. That's what this tastes like, which is perfectly great, especially if it's nostalgic for you. There's a reason that restaurant's still in business. So, that's what $10 does. But what can 25 Jive Alive Thrive and Beehive? What can $25 do? According to Google, to buy what $25 used to get you when you started this show, you'd now need $34. Can I have $34?
There's a disconnect between the very astute observation about the state of our economy and inflation and you're just asking for 34 bucks. What do you mean? Well, let me answer your question with another question. The dollar menu at McDonald's used to be a whole bunch of items that only costed a dollar. Now it's called the value menu and nothing costs a dollar at all. Everything costs more. So would you come over and paint my house for me for $34? Yes, we have a deal. This is where we're getting into sort of foodie territory. Some fresh herbs, some fresh vegetables, some more meats involved, and uh $25. So, for the
meatballs at the $25 level, I'm using a mixture of half ground beef, high quality vacaled ground beef and half sweet Italian sausage removed from its casing. Italian sausage on its own can make for a pretty bouncy springy meatball, but I find when you cut it with a little bit of beef tends to be a little bit more tender and palatable. Then for the pinade, rather than breadcrumbs, we're going to use little bits of actual bread, specifically white sandwich bread. Some milk we're going to use to hydrate the pinade. And don't be afraid to really mush it up. You might also want to let this sit for about 10 minutes to ensure total absorption. To the pinade, we're adding one egg. Throw in a little pinch of crushed red pepper
flake, about half a teaspoon's worth. I'm going to crush in two cloves of garlic. And we are going with freshly grated parmesan. It's going to work a lot better in the meatball than the jarred stuff. It's going to taste better, too. So, I'm going to finely grate about 1 oz in there. I'm also going to throw some freshly chopped herbs in there. I've got some parsley, 3 tablespoons worth once it's chopped up. And a lot of people don't add fresh basil to meatballs. And I say pish posh. Uh because the thing with basil is that when you cook it, it oxidizes and it turns brown. But you know what else is brown? Meatballs. So, it doesn't really matter. And I love having the hit of fresh basil flavor in there. It's,
you know, I think it's definitely worth the trade-off. We're also going to season this with salt and pepper. Also going to add dried oregano just to give it that kind of classic American red sauce joint Italian flavor. So, I'm going to start by kind of incorporating the two meats together. Just getting letting them get to know each other a little bit. There's our pinade. I'm also adding about a half a small finely minced onion. All right, that looks like a pretty damn fine meatball mix. Now, we just got to form these into balls. I just decided that the $25 level is the true Italian grandma one because it's, you know, it's damn
good food, but it's not getting into any cheffy It's just here's the ingredients. How can I best put them together to make the best possible end product? I think it's diminishing returns from this point. All right, those bad boys have some nice browning on them, which means it's time to finish them in the sauce. In this case, a more expensive jarred sauce than we used last time. Now, this time for spaghetti, we're stepping things up a notch with deco. It's the stuff that is it's become available in almost every grocery store.
It's really high quality pasta for not that much more. If you can spring the extra I think it's like050 cents a dollar. This stuff's worth it. Tastes really good. Behaves really well in this 12-in highwalled saut sauté pan. Fan stuff out in there. And it fits directly into the pot. No hanging out. No having to bend and push it down into the water. It's just in there ready to go. I think these meatballs are pretty much done. I'm going to pull them out and I'm going to finish the spaghetti in the sauce right in this pan.
Okay, spaghetti is nice and al dente. Another thing I love about using a shallow pot like this, it's very easy to just bing. Normally, I'd finish this with a little bit of fat, but it is just the carbone sauce mixed with the meatballs cooking in it is just loaded with fat. So, I think it's already all good. So close to not making a mess. This close. This time I'm going to class things up by use of a carving fork, which I'm just going to use to twirl the pasta. Get it into our bowl and just kind of shuffle it off. See? Classy. Let's get a couple balls on there. Looks a little silly. Normally you don't do meatballs with this pasta configuration, but whatever. We need visual variety. Bit more sauce on top.
Freshly grated parm, of course. Just watch those balls wiggle. Hit it with a little bit of last minute seasoning. Get a little bit of crunch from some flaky finishing salt and top things off with a little bit of fresh basil. And there you have it. $25 spaghetti. Grandma classic. Let's see if it's worth the time and money. Let's take a look inside a ball, shall we? We have a nice even texture in there. The onions have cooked down, so they're not really even noticeable. It's nice and juicy. You can see as I squeeze it. Good juicy meatball. The sausage is just such an easy way to amp up the flavor of your meatballs. It's adding both the fat and flavor of pork and all the seasonings therein to your meatballs in one easy
step. It's definitely worth doing. And I don't know if this would hold up in a blind taste test, but I do think dco tastes better. There's this distinct almost sweetness to it. This is like in my mind the perfect bowl of spaghetti and meatballs. So, I can only wonder what'll happen if we throw more time and money at it. Stick around and find out. Babish cookware. Swear to me you'll only use it for good. There's a lot I could buy with 50 bucks. So why should I spend it on this and not a parlay on DraftKings? Well, I would rather spend $50 on a bowl of spaghetti because it's a sure bet when it's my recipe. Because when it's my recipe, I'll give you f I'll give
you five to one. Josh Allen throws 800 yards to this game. Who's Josh Allen? I don't know. $50 spaghetti and meatballs. Special occasion spaghetti and meatballs. I really need to impress my courtappointed therapist. Spaghetti and meatballs. Not that you should be doing that, but that's the kind of spaghetti and meatballs we're making. So, we got this chuck roast. A really nice well-rounded piece of meat to be grinding up. A lot of channels of fat in here. And we're breaking this down into cubes. And now we're going to grind it up. Let's use a food processor with a thoroughly chilled blade. So the blades in the freezer. Has been for overnight at this point. And now so too shall
this. These little guys are headed into the freezer for probably about 20 minutes. So now onto the question of the aromatics. Uh, we're still going with fresh onion and garlic, but I want them to be more cooked down. I'm going to start by sautéing our onions, garlic, letting them cool before putting them in the pinade. We're not looking for caramelizing. We're not looking for browning. I'm just going to cook these down for 3 to 5 minutes. The same way that you would and we are going to do when we make sauce. Throw a little water in there to sort of delaze the pan and get some of that nice brown stuff off the bottom. same way I would do if I was trying to quick caramelize onions. Now I've turned the heat down. I'm adding two crushed
cloves of garlic. And just letting that get a little bit of heat. Now we're going to let these cool and these are going to add more flavor to our meatballs and give them a better texture. Okay, beef is cold, blade is cold. These things help prevent smearing and give you a better chop. So you might be wondering why are we grinding our own beef? And really, it's for a sense of control. We can control the texture of the burger, the flavor, and the fat content by grinding our own meat. When you get preggroundown meat at the store, it makes for a great meatball, but it is ground to a paste. Basically, there is no texture to it. And now we can give this kind of a meatier, beefier texture uh in addition to a deeper flavor by combining it with other
meats. Cover your ears. You don't want big steaky chunks. You just want it to be a nice heavily grind pulsing. And the reason I'm doing that is that it kind of flings the beef up in the air. Goes and it sort of helps circulate the meat. You don't have big chunks that are just floating on top, not getting down to the blades. Oo, that is a nice looking ground beef. You can see there's no big steaky chunks. It's just a nice, really nicely loose textured ground beef. That's going to make for some great burgers. I mean, meatballs. So, for our meated balls, we're going to start by making the pinade. Now, for the liquid, we're not using plain old milk. We're using
buttermilk. And that's because it has enzymes in it that are going to deeply tenderize the meat and it's going to flavor it with a nice buttermilk twang. All the bread looks to be saturated, but it's nice and thick. We're going to add our cooled onions and garlic, our single large egg. So now this time we're still using fresh basil and parsley, but I'm going to add some fresh oregano to the mix. This has a intense vegetable almost aggressive oregano smell and flavor. So I'm not going to do much just like few picked leaves. For the cheese this time we are stepping things up. This is a 24-month granapadano very close to parmesan.
The added age is going to translate to a much stronger more pungent flavor. I'm also going to add some ground nutmeg. This is an Italian classic 1/ eighth of a teaspoon ground fennel. Half a teaspoon worth. And that is going to bring some of those nice sauce, Italian sausage notes. Season this with salt a little bit more prolifically than we did cuz we're not using a preseasoned sausage. Finely ground black pepper. Now, we're also going to add a healthy hit of anchovi paste. I like thinking of anchovi paste almost as um the way soy sauce is used in many Asian cuisines as a base sort of umami and salt booster thing. Not going to taste fishy as long as you don't go crazy with it. About a half tablespoon. That's the How about that?
Got a nice looking pinade. It's time to add our meat. And now what I have here is an equal mix about half pound each of ground pork and ground ve. And I want these to be primarily beef meatballs. So I'm going to add in about two parts ground beef, one part ve, one part pork. Let's get this all mixed up. This is a good feeling mix. It's not sticking to my hands too much. All right, there's our mix. Now, to maximize the unctuousness of our meatballs, we're going to utilize a trick that I learned from Jay Kenji Lopez Alts. I've got a/4 cup of chicken stock here onto which I'm sprinkling one full packet of powdered
gelatin. This is going to make an insanely thick uh completely gelatinized chicken stock that is going to be able I'm going to be able to chop into tiny little cubes, then mix into the meat. And that basically all that is going to melt when the balls are cooked and that's going to just make them super juicy and even more flavorful. We'll just dump in more meat flavor into the whole affair. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to microwave this once or twice until it's completely uh dissolved. And then I'm going to pour it into a shallow container, fridge it until it's solid, pop it out, chop it up. So, now let's try to break that up as best we can. Let's get these into the meatballs.
Time to roll. Going with slightly bigger meatballs this time. You know, trying to get my money's worth here. $50. You better give me some big old balls. And I'm putting these on an aluminum lined baking sheet because instead of frying them this time, I'm going to broil them. That's going to quickly put color on all of them. Just sort of streamline the process. And then they're headed in the sauce to finish cooking. So, here I have some whole DOP San Marzano tomatoes. Some really nice high quality ones. And uh you can totally, you know, cook these and sort of break them up as you go, but that makes for a very chunky sauce. So, I'm going to lightly puree these with a stick blender before they go in the pot. You can see there's
chunks of tomato in there, but there's nothing too big. There's a nice texture to it. Over on the stove top, we've got some extra virgin olive oil. Let's add our very finely minced onion. Let that sweat 3 to 5 minutes till nice and soft. Two big cloves of crushed garlic. Now, whenever you're making tomato sauce from scratch like this, an instant way to deepen its flavor and cut the harshness and acidity of the tomatoes is to use a good gug of tomato paste. So, I'm putting a fair amount in here and then mixing around, letting it uh cook a bit with the onions. We're going to do this until the tomato paste starts sticking to the bottom of the pan, basically creating a tomato fond. There we go. In go the tomatoes.
get to scraping. Make sure nobody we don't want anybody to burn. And pretty standard thing to do to amp up the flavor of the sauce is to add a springrig of basil. I picked off a bunch of the leaves and pick off even more because this stem is full of flavor and it's easier to pick out. So, I'm picking off the big ones, putting it in there. Save those for the many more applications we need basil for today. Then, if you really want to be Enrique Glaciius, we're going to chop off the rind of our parmesan and throw that in with the sauce. And then you can be my hero or I can be your hero. Whoever's doing it can be Enrique Glazes. This guy is going to simmer for about an hour. We want it to, you know, lose a lot of that moisture that we just put
in, lose that water, let it evaporate. We want the uh basil to have imparted all of its goodness. And we want the tomatoes to have mellowed and sweetened. All right, there we go. Nicely colored balls. Drop these straight in the sauce where they can more gently cook. Cuz if you just roast these straight up, if you just bake them, you're going to squeeze out all that gelatin. Wow, that is pretty picture perfect. So now these are going to simmer in the sauce for probably 20 minutes, just until they're cooked through. Don't want to overdo it. If you cook these too hot, too fast, you're going to squeeze all the juice out and they're going to be tight and tough.
Save that for your booty, not your balls. All right, so I got my pasta water boiling. So now it's time to discuss pasta. What are we going to use for the $50 version of spaghetti and meatballs? And we found this guy. This is Pastifico Pastapicio Garcino, which if you look very, very closely right there, you'll see that this is Dolce and Cabana pasta. I don't know why, but it is. That is their word mark. And this bag, I believe, clocked in around $12. So, looking at uh some pretty expensive sketi here. Looks like Bob and Bob's Burgers almost. It looks like a drawing that his kids like that looks to me like Bob's Burgers if a kids if his kids did a drawing of him. It looks like it's a very nice pasta. As you can see, it's definitely bronze dyed.
like it's super rough and matte and uh almost sandy sandpaper kind of vibe on the outside and uh that's going to ensure great sauce adhesion and more starch being released into the pasta cooking water. In it goes for oo mutos as the Italians say. Going to grab a bunch of this sauce preemptively put it in this sauté pan ready to receive my pasta. All right, so pasta's almost done. First thing to do is taste it and see if it's actually worth $10 or whatever it costs. No, no. Tastes like normal spaghetti. Pasta's done. So, it's going straight into our nicely cooked down sauce. Of course, we have to add a couple splashes of our pasta cooking water. So, now I'm going to finish it off with some really
expensive coldressed olive oil. Nice drizzle worth. I think uh we're going to need to season it with salt because I just realized I didn't season the sauce. Let's go ahead and make ourselves a nice little love nest here. I'm doing it in a ladle for easier transference over to the bowl. I don't want it to be a super tall pile of spaghetti. I want it to be able to be short and wide enough that it will support my ball. I want a little extra sauce on there. And I want it to kind of drape down the sides if possible. There we go. It's like a almost like a spaghetti volcano, but in some kind of Marvel movieesque plot twist, the volcano has been blocked by a giant ball. Let's get some cheese on there.
Some flaky finishing salt. Add a bit of crunch. Freshly ground pepper. Couple more drops of olive oil. Class things up a little bit with some extremely thinly julian basil. There we go. That looks pretty classy. That looks like something you'd get at Italian Disney World. And there you have it. $50 spaghetti and meatball. This is just one sauce is fantastic. Big diminishing returns on the pasta. Once you go past the $4 mark per pound, I don't think you're going to get much noticeable difference in flavor or quality. This tastes exactly like any spaghetti I've ever had. But I think where the difference is really going to be found is in this juicy ass meatball.
Look at that. That is a damn fine meatball. Really juicy. really deeply flavorful, super varied flavor from all the stuff we put in there, as well as the three different kinds of meat. The texture is nice and open because we use we ground our own beef, which is going to help create a less compressed, dense meatball. Is it worth 50 bucks? I think if you are really trying to pull out all the stops and really make something impressive and uh unique and that you can really put your own signature on, this is a wonderful way to go. I can't say go out and spend $50 otherwise you don't know what spaghetti and meatballs are until you've had this. I can't say that. But I will say while it might not
necessarily be worth 50 bucks. It's like I can't deny how good it is. One of the best meatballs I've had. Diminishing returns. It still returns. Is this spaghetti still good if no one knows how expensive it is? I don't know. If you get a boner and nobody sees it, did it really happen? $100 spaghetti and meatballs. What are you trying to prove? H What did your daddy do to you? How are we going to make $100 spaghetti and meatballs?
Well, by using the most expensive specialty version of every single ingredient. the most expensive pasta we could find, the most expensive tomatoes, meats, everything. And I'm also going to pull out all the tricks in my trick book to make these as sumptuous and ridiculous as possible. First up, the tomato sauce. And these are the most expensive versions I could find of tomatoes in this great nation. Fresh Hampton's tomatoes. This is not only some of the better tomatoes in the world, but also the maybe the most price inflated ever imagined. These are probably 10 times the price of your average tomato. I think these were like $15. So, just about the most expensive tomatoes you can buy and probably one of the trickier tomato
sauces to make because making sauce with fresh tomatoes takes many, many more steps of complication and much more time. Like, this needs at least 4 hours for the flavors to mellow out, for it to taste anything like what you might get out of a jar or a can. So, let's get started. First thing I need to do is cut a little cross into the bottom into every one of their bottoms. And then these are all getting plunged into boiling water for 30 seconds. And then plunged into ice water, which is going to make the skins peel off very easily. All right. So, I have my mixture of blanched and peeled red zebra tomatoes, kari tomatoes, and heirloom tomatoes. And to give them a more traditional red sauce vibe, I'm going to add some DP San Marzano Italian tomatoes. These were dum
dum expensive. They were uh $8 for a 14oz can. This is pretty outrageous. Then we're going to puree those tomatoes. Then for the aromatics, I have two small, very finely diced onions. I'm going to almost caramelize them. I'm going to cook them very, very slowly, draw out their natural sugars, and get them to a jammy caramelized state over the course of about 20 minutes. Then I'm going to add the garlic, sauté for a second, then I'm going to slow roast the sauce. So, I'm bring this up to a simmer and then it's headed into a 225° Fahrenheit oven. This is one of my favorite ways to make tomato sauce because it just gets really deep in jammies flavors in the oven over the course of hours and that's what we especially need using fresh
tomatoes. These guys need time and that's what we'll give them. So last night I roasted the tomatoes for like 6 hours and it basically turned them into tomato paste which worse things in the world than homemade tomato paste that made from heirloom tomatoes. Uh, so I basically cooked the hell out of it and then I passed it through a fine mesh sie cuz I want a really smooth seed-free sauce. Uh, I'm going to use this as a tomato paste base for my main sauce which I'm going to make from my favorites, Bianciano Dapoli. So, it's going to be really bright and fresh. We'll combine it with our thick, rich tomato paste. Cook them together for 30 45 minutes. I want to I want a good balance of fresh and roasty.
Now, I want to add oil. This was the most expensive olive oil they had at Italy, clocking in at $53. I com feed a whole bunch of garlic cloves, bay leaves, basil, peppercorns, and shallots for about 2 hours at 200° Fahrenheit, and it's made what I imagine is going to be an extremely flavorful infused oil. Yeah. Now, that is profound. I'm going to cook this for a little while just to uh maybe like 30, 45 minutes to cook off the totally raw tomato flavor. And I think we're going to have an absurdest tomato sauce. All right, now it's time to talk meat. And we have a very fine selection of meats indeed. We're going with the usual beef pork ve, but classy. So, first up for the beef, we have a dry-aged Australian Wagyu Denver steak. Uh something I would never
normally make into a meatball. This is just a beautiful steak that increases the fat content of the meatball, but you could just do that by adding fat. Just add beef fat. It's way cheaper and you're not wasting this gorgeous steak. But we're trying to make this as expensive as possible. So, I guarantee any restaurant that's selling a $100 plate of spaghetti meatballs is going to have Wagu or Coobe meatballs. So, only fitting. All I can do is say that blessing that I learned from The Pit on HBO. I love you. Goodbye. I forgive you. I hope you can forgive me. Next up for the pork, we have penetta. This is a very fatty piece of penetta, so I'm probably going to lose a little bit of
the fat because I have a surprise fat additive. And lastly, we have a lovely ve chop that I'm going to cube up and grind. Now, I've never done this, so I don't know if it's going to work, which leads me to ask myself, why am I doing it? Uh, what I have here are some lovely marrow bones that I have brined overnight in salt water. So, what I'm going to attempt to do now is scoop out the raw marrow. I'm going to use that as a fat source in the meatball mix. And marrow as a fat is just so flavorful. It's so over the top, and it's just going to taste good. Oh yeah, look at that. Like butter. Now got to break these guys down. There we have it. Our quote unquote meatball mix. All right, grinder parts are in the freezer. Have been
overnight. Need that nice and cold. These guys, not going to freeze them as hard as I did yesterday. Going to keep it under 20 minutes cuz I want really firm edges, soft cores, just like me. So now I want to get basil flavor into the meatballs, but I also want pine nuts and currants. This is like a very Sicilian style meatball. They just throw pine nuts and currants in there. But I'm thinking a great way to get that in there without chunks of anything is to make a pesto where I also incorporate currants. See what happens. All right. So, we're going to start with some pine nuts. Then I'm going to add a couple of our kfi garlic cloves. Some of these zante currants.
These are basically just sweet little raisins. Not too many. Just a little bit of salt. This is going to suck. But for the next, I don't know, hour or so, I'm going to process this into a very fine paste. I don't want pieces of currant picking around. And now I'm going to start processing in the basil leaves and adding our infused oil one little splash at a time. All right, never mind. Screw the old ways. Now we make the pinade. So into the pinade, we have our homemade breadrumbs. I took two slices of white bread, cut off the crusts, cut them into small cubes, dried them out in a low oven for about an hour or 200° F. Ground them
into fine breadrumbs. To that, we're going to add just enough buttermilk to hydrate things. Let's add this to it as well. This is liquidy. There we go. Nice thick goopy paste. To this, we are, of course, going to add our four-year-old parmesan. I also have a very finely minced collabin chili. Here comes our egg. And what we have here are duck eggs. Again, we're trying to make things as expensive as possible, but also duck eggs are a little richer than chicken eggs. So, it's going to continue the ongoing quest of adding as much fat to these meatballs as it can handle. Also, I'm going to add more of this ki garlic. And I'm going to crush some of these shallots in there as well. Then, we have some very finely minced high quality
anchovies. These are fish anchovies, so they are $10 for a tin. Now I got some porchini mushroom powder here. These are just dried portorchini mushrooms that I powderized. And I'm just going to add like teaspoon and a half's worth. And about a/ teaspoons worth of ground fennel in there. Now we've also got one of my favorite things in the whole wide world. Freshly grated nutmeg. This is a very old school Italian thing to put in lasagna, meatballs, all the best things in life. And why not some MSG? Just whatever, man. Let's let's have a good time. Let's enjoy ourselves. Let's throw a little dried oregano in there just for the nice nostalgic flavor. And I already put some anchovies in there and they're very, very salty.
So, I'm going to go easy on the salt here. Yeah, that is just right. Now, what we got to do is combine it with our balls. Oh, got to get the demiglass. Right. That's a nice hard demi now. All right, let's chop that up. Yeah, these little microbasters base the meat from within. Into the stand mixer goes dry-aged Wagu panchetta ve bone marrow ground beef. We're going to add all this beautiful reduced chopped demiglass. And we've got our pinade. It's very thick and pasty, so it is going to help bind it very, very well. Now, I really don't want cracked meatballs. So, I'm going to try
and kind of emulsify this together a little bit more than you might if you were doing it by hands by using a stand mixer. Looks good to me. Still have distinct cubes of demi in there. That's good. All right, let's get to it. I think this is going to be our method. We're going to fry the meatballs. Then, we're just going to put them in some nice warm sauce. I'm going to bring the sauce up to a simmer and then once we've added all the meatballs, I'm going to kill the heat. Let the residual heat take it the rest of the way. Now, onto the pasta. And it pains me to say this, but this bag of pasta was $18, which I think is unjustifiable. But I'll taste it and see if it's the most incredible thing I've ever tasted.
Other than that, big waste of money. Beautiful looking. Feels really nice. Let's see what happens. Here we go. Hold on to your butts. Get it moving. All right, let's try this pasta that costs a small fortune. Seems like it's breaking pretty easily. Wa. I will say that is the most flavorful pasta I've ever had. It has a great texture and it really tastes like wheat. It tastes like the stuff that it's made of. For the record, I do not think it's worth its it its cost of entry, but that is I will say that is different. I've never had pasta quite like that before. It's very good. Here we go. It does seem like it's breaking really easily.
Kill the heat. Finish it with butter. Little bed for our ball. Just like a fairy tale of sorts. That's one of the advantages of deep frying is that it's just a perfect sphere. Ah, make a little extra sauce. We have our four-year-old Parmesan cheese. A little grounded pepper, infused oil, flaky finishing salt. Careful not to knock the whole goddamn thing over like that. You know, like that. And a single micro basil on top. There you have it. $100 spaghetti and meatballs. Jesus Christ, that was a lot. Is it worth it? Only one way to find out. First, we have this meatball, which is so tender. Look at that. I didn't even dist disturb the spaghetti cutting through that meatball. See how tender
that was? It's Oh, well, that was bound to happen. It's only fine dining until you start to eat it. It turns into same slop as everything else. It is. It's got to be the best spaghetti meatballs I've ever had. But, um, would I rather spend two days making this and well over $100? uh or spend 25 bucks and make the like classic just higherend homemade. This one, I'm kidding. I think I'd rather do 25 bucks. I think $25 is the sweet spot for spaghetti and meatballs. All that to be said, like if you're bored and you want to see how far you can push meatballs, give this a try because
it is exquisite. That wheat flavor of the pasta is gone cuz it's underneath the, you know, sauce. It's definitely doing something nonzero. Like, it's it's subperceptual, but there's no way I'm ever paying $18 for a box of pasta ever again. The meatballs, I think a big takeaway from this is to get a really smooth whipped up pinade. Having all this fat emulsified throughout the mixture made it so soft. And also having just a pinade almost devoid of texture itself. It was very smooth. And then I think emulsifying that into the meat gave it this incredible ethereal texture. It's fantastic. I can't recommend you're paying $100 to make
this. I can't recommend you're spending two days to make it. But if for some reason you find yourself with both of those things on hand and wanting to burn them, it's not a bad way to do it. So, what did we learn today? Throwing money at spaghetti and meatballs doesn't necessarily make it that much better. In fact, the more money you throw at it, the less better it becomes with it. Incremental diminishing return. I said I mentioned diminishing returns in the video. And that's what this is. And that's what this show is called. And uh I hope you liked it. And I hope that you eat some spaghetti and meatballs right god dang now. And I hope
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