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Spaghetti and meatballs is a simple dish, but I think there's a real way to elevate it by a few simple steps. I'm Angie and today I'm making my perfect version of spaghetti and meatballs. So, this is my son, a nice Italian-American boy. If you imagine the Italian-American grandma slaving over the stove all day, there's a reason why that food like tastes so much better, cuz grandma was like putting in the time. There are elements of this meatball recipe that are going to take you more time than say like a 30inute one that you would throw together, but I promise you that the end result is going to be infinitely better tasting. First, we're going to start with our meatballs.
The first part of the meatball recipe, I'm going to start by roasting garlic and making like a roasted garlic puree. I'm going to take our garlic and basically cut the top part off here and then just place them into a baking dish. The reason I do it this way is cuz when this is all said and done and I roast it in the oven, it's going to be easier for me to kind of squeeze it out if I have the base intact. So once these are in my baking dish, I'm just going to use a little bit of a neutral oil and basically fill the oil up about 3/4 of the way. A common mistake that people make with meatballs is they just chop up raw garlic, throw it into their mix, and then in the brief time that the meatballs are cooking, oftentimes the
garlic doesn't cook all the way, and you get some sort of like unpleasant chunks of uncooked garlic in there. This is going to ensure that your garlic, not only is it cooked totally through, but it's cooked like low and slow to a point of like deep caramelization, and you're bringing out these qualities and flavors in the garlic that you wouldn't have otherwise. So, I'm putting this in the oven and I'm going to let it cruise in there at 275 for 1 and a half to two hours. The garlic has this really nice caramelization on it. So, I'm just squeezing out all of my perfectly roasted garlic here. It's going to really impart this Oh my god.
I was trying to do the upward squeeze. You're inevitably going to get a little bit of oil in here. That's fine. It's just going to add some more flavor. It's actually going to help puree it. And then if you have excess oil left in your dish here, you can use this for another purpose. You can use it for marinades, dressings. Basically, you've just infused the oil here with that garlic flavor. So, there's a couple ways you can do this. You can take like a pastry scraper and push this through a fine mesh sie or you could put it in a blender. Just going to go ahead and dump that in. So, I've pureeed this now to like a pudding like texture. You can see it's a nice golden brown. This is a
timeconsuming project, but you can make a big batch of it and you can store it in the freezer. You can use it for other recipes. It's really well worth it. Now, I'm going to move on to some of my other steps to put together the meatballs. I'm going to start with some onions. We're going to puree them and then we're going to ring them out to remove any excess liquid. If I didn't ring them out, that might yield a very mushy meatball. One of the important things about a good meatball is a texture. You want it to be like tender, but you don't want it to be mushy. So, these are just Spanish onions. This is like a mild sweet onion. With anything that you're putting in a food processor, you just want to chop it
coarsely just to kind of get it going. I'm trying to puree these as finely as possible. I kind of want them to just melt into my meatball. And then I'm going to go ahead and ring these out just using a clean towel. So, you can see there's a ton of liquid coming off of these things. As you can imagine, if all this moisture made its way into our meatball mix, it would yield a much different textured meatball in the end. Really put your uh all your strength into it. There you go. This isn't the most attractive thing. So, you can see the onions are like basically dry. So, now I'm going to basically take the inside of a loaf of bread. So, this is like an Italian style crusty
loaf of bread. In the restaurant, what we do is we use the inside of the bread for our meatball recipe and then we kind of chop up the outer crust and we dehydrate that and we make that into toasted breadcrumbs that we put on top of our pasta. So, if you want to be an overachiever, that's that's another thing you could do here. In this case, I'm just using the inside. Often times, people will use breadcrumbs in their meatball recipe. We choose to use this technique because we feel like it yields a more tender result. Breadcrumbs is going to make your meatball dense ultimately. So, the fancy term for what I'm doing here, this is called a uh pinade. So, when you take bread and soak
it with milk. I have like two and a half cups of bread here. I'm adding like a cup of milk. It's going to add some richness that you wouldn't get from just regular breadrumbs as well. Just going to gently turn that over. Make sure these are all coated really well. I'm going to let this bread soak for about 15 minutes. While that's happening, I'm going to go ahead and start mixing together my other ingredients. People use all different types of combinations of meat for their meatballs. Honestly, much like pasta, I appreciate any type of meatball. Like, I never met a meatball I didn't like really, but I think the best combination here is 50% ve, 50% beef, an all beef meatball. I
think the beef flavor can like overpower everything. The ve is going to add like a little bit more of a delicate texture as well as a delicate flavor. So, it just kind of balances out the overall end result. So, I'm going to go ahead and start mixing these things together. I have my onions here. I'm going to add in my ve as well as the beef. We're also going to use a couple of eggs. This is going to be a binder. It's also going to add some richness to your overall flavor profile. We have two types of cheese here. We have pecarino toano. A lot of Italian Americans are big on pecarino cheese, specifically pecarino romano. I like to use pecarino
toano cuz I feel like it has a little bit more depth of flavor. It's not as salty and it's a little tangy as well. The other type of cheese we're using here is parmesano reano. Have some fresh parsley here. I'm removing all the stems and I'm just going to use the leaves. So, this is just going to be like roughly chopped. I'm going to add the parsley. So, now it's time to ring out this pinade to ensure that our meatballs are not mushy. The bread is moist, but it's not soaking wet. I'm going to go ahead and add this to my meatball mix. And finally, I'm adding the roasted garlic puree. And as with anything else, you want to make sure that you're seasoning your mixture with a generous
amount of salt and pepper. Freshly cracked pepper is the best. And now I'm going to just gently mix these ingredients together. Kind of breaking it up a little bit with my hands as I go. The goal here is to do as little mixing as possible just to make sure all these ingredients are combined. If you overm mix, you're going to end up with a tough meatball. It's okay if you have some little pockets of like a little of the bread and cheese. So, my meatball mix is really light and airy. So, now I can form the meatballs. I'm just going to add a little layer of oil to make sure they don't stick. I highly recommend using like a release scoop, like an ice cream scoop. First off, it's just more efficient. You're going to
move along much faster. Second off, it's going to ensure that all of your meatballs are the exact same size, so therefore, they will cook evenly. It's more efficient, actually, first to just kind of scoop them out, and then you can go back and form them. I'm spacing them out a bit just so when they bake in the oven, there's going to be more surface area available for browning. If you have time to pop the meatball mixture in the refrigerator before you form your meatballs, that's ideal. Just the colder it is, the easier it's going to be to form like a nice sphere shape, and they'll hold their shape better when they bake. I'm just gently forming these into like little balls. And they're kind
of rustic. I don't want to overly manipulate these because I want them to stay nice and light in texture. This meatball recipe is very special to me. My husband and I developed it. It's basically an amalgamation of both of our grandma's recipes combined. For like a rustic spaghetti and meatballs dish, I think a size like this works best. It's going to taste like meaty and hearty and substantial, which I think is an important part of the Italian American dish that is spaghetti and meatballs. I'm ready to put these in the oven. I have my oven preheated to 425°. So, if I want to cook these entirely, I'll leave
them in there for closer to 15 minutes. For the sake of this recipe, I might go a little less, maybe 12 or 13 minutes, just to slightly underbake them so that when they simmer in the sauce, they can kind of finish baking and kind of take in a little bit of that tomato flavor. I'm going to go ahead and make what we call our 10-minute San Marzano tomato sauce. It's a very quick and easy recipe. We intentionally like barely cook the tomatoes. We love to use San Morzano DOP tomatoes specifically. They're grown in San Marzano in this tiny little area that's at the base of Mount Vuvius and the way that the soil is there. It's like a combination of the sand from the neighboring sea and like the volcanic ash, whatever. Supposedly,
it creates the best conditions for growing tomatoes. I'm sold on it. We've done a ton of blind taste tests and we feel like these are just like so superior to other tomatoes. So these always will come whole and you can process them in a food processor. That's a quick and easy way to break them up or you can break them by hand in sort of a more rustic way. So I'm just going to carefully dump these in. This is a telltale sign of the samano style tomato. It's got this little like I don't know. Someone referred to it as a nipple one time and I like almost said that I'm like I can't say that. So, I'm just going to pulse these. So, we just want kind of this slightly chunky consistency. It's not like a perfect puree. And the reason that we
keep this sauce like fairly simple is because we're just really trying to highlight the quality of these tomatoes. So, now I'm going to go ahead and prepare some garlic. Just looking for like eight cloves. And I'm just going to gently smash them while they're in their like jackets here. This will kind of protect them as they cook. We're not looking to add a lot of heavy garlic flavor here. We're not adding chopped garlic. And after we let it simmer briefly, we're going to actually remove that from the final result. So, these are all set and I'm going to go ahead and move over to the stove. So, now I'm ready to cook my sauce. I just need like a heavy bottomed sauce pot here or a
Dutch oven. I've heated up my oil. I just added in my garlic. I'm letting that kind of fry gently in there. And add a little salt now just to kind of help draw the moisture out of the garlic. It kind of helps the garlic cook a little faster. And then I'm going to add in a little bit of crushed red pepper for a little tiny bit of gentle heat. Let that fry just very briefly. And now I'm going to carefully add my tomato puree. So there's all different styles of tomato sauce. People have the misconception that tomatoes should always cook for hours on end. There is a time and a place for that. I think like a Sunday style gravy where you're like simmering a bunch of meat in there like
that makes sense. But in the case of this sauce, we want to preserve the freshness of the tomato flavor. So, I already brought it up to a simmer. I turned it off, cut off the heat, and now I'm just going to add in some basil while it's still hot and let that just kind of steep in there. This basil is just going to add this really lovely aroma. The tomatoes are natural products, so they're always going to kind of vary in terms of their natural salinity, their natural acidity. For that reason, I always taste and adjust. So, I'm going to add a little bit of salt here as
well. Just like a tiny bit of sugar. The sugar is just kind of balancing out the acidity of the tomatoes. I think home cooks are often afraid to overseason things. And I get it. Obviously, it's it's like better to kind of start with less. You can always add more. You can't take it away. I get that philosophy. But in time, tasting things, kind of tasting the difference between what one bite with this much salt versus the second bite with a little more salt means and kind of training your palette is helpful because at the end of the day, sometimes like things take more salt than you would imagine, especially something that's like inherently savory like tomato. You just tend to take more salt
to be at that peak seasoning level in my opinion. So, we let this kind of steep 10 15 minutes. I'm going to go ahead and remove the basil, the chunks of garlic. They've kind of done their job here. Our tomato sauce is ready to go. These meatballs are ready. We have a little bit of a golden crust here and they're almost fully cooked. They're very kind of delicate. So, I'm just going to gently drop them into my sauce. These are beautiful, though. They're nice and rustic. Also got some nice like caramelization on the bottom there, too, which is really nice. I'm going to bring this up just to like a gentle simmer and
make sure this sauce is nice and hot. These are going to finish cooking in the sauce. Kind of drink in a little bit of that tomato flavor there. They're going to be great. So, we already have prepared our meatballs and our sauce. We made a very like simple paired down version of tomato sauce. If you want to like go crazy and take it to the next level, kind of like restaurant quality, I add a little more shallot and garlic but in a different format. I'm going to go ahead and grate some garlic on a microplane. So, this is a microplane. It's kind of the equivalent of using like a garlic press, but you're not crushing and destroying the garlic so much when you do it. You're basically just finely
shaving these little like strands of garlic. Some shallot. You don't have to do all this extra stuff, but it adds just some complexity and depth. I'm also going to prepare a little bit of basil. So, we're making spaghetti and meatballs today, but technically we're using spaettatini, which is a slightly skinnier version of spaghetti. It just feels like a little more refined. When it comes to dried pasta, I highly recommend buying an Italian-made product. These are companies that have been making dried pasta for hundreds of years using really high quality grains from Italy. And I think it really makes a big difference. This is like extruded through a bronze dye, so you can tell it kind of has that rough texture on the
outside and that is going to help the sauce cling to the noodles when it's all done. One important note about cooking pasta is that you really want to use a generous amount of salt in the water. Any of these extruded dried pastas you're going to buy, they're not seasoned with salt. So, you basically want to impart seasoning um from your pasta water. If you don't do that, you're just going to end up with an unseasoned dish at the end there. You want to ensure that your pasta water is at a rolling boil before you add the pasta. If it's not, the minute you add it, it's you're adding something that's basically cold. It's going to drop the temperature. it's going to take that
much longer for you to get back up to a boil. That could yield like a very gummy end result. The last thing is you want to make sure you have a lot of water for the pasta to swim in so it can move around freely. If you don't, you can end up with your pasta sticking together. So, while the pasta is boiling, I'm going to go ahead and start my pan sauce. I'm adding some olive oil. I can tell that my olive oil is kind of heating up just by the way it's moving in the pan. I'm going to go ahead and add some shallots. I'm going to add a little bit of salt. Again, this is going to start drawing some moisture out of my shallots and ensure that they cook a little more evenly. I'm just going to add a little pepper.
These shallots are almost cooked all the way. I'm going to go ahead and add my grated garlic. So, this garlic is grated so finely that it's going to basically just kind of melt. Cooks very quickly. It's ready to go. And now, I'm going to just go ahead and add in my tomato sauce. So, I'm just kind of shaking the pan to mix everything together. At this point, my spaghetti should be cooked. I cooked the pasta to like al dente. I mean, you're kind of best off sort of following the instructions on the box. So, the spaini is going to cook a little faster than spaghetti just cuz it's thinner. I kind of tossed it in the sauce here at this point, if you so choose. This is not the most Italian
ingredient, but can add a little butter just to kind of add a little creaminess. It's going to help emulsify the sauce, help it coat the pasta really nicely, as well as a little bit of cheese. And then finally, some basil. I'm really flipping this pasta around a lot, but you can achieve the same thing if you just vigorously mix with a wooden spoon. You could do it with a pair of tweezers like these. You're basically just trying to ensure that your butter and cheese are kind of melted in there. And then we're good to go. You can see that the sauce is really clinging to the spaghetti. Now we're ready to add this to our plate and top it with some meatballs.
I'm just going to kind of twirl these with my tongs here. You don't have to do it, but I think it makes for a nice polished finished result. And then I'm just going to go ahead and add my meatballs on top. You know, I'm a more is more kind of gal here. Maybe we'll do like three. Add a little more cheese cuz why not? Love cheese. I like to use a microplane again for grating cheese. It's just like a very delicate dusting and it's going to kind of melt into the pasta there. And then just a little more cracked pepper. And that's it. We have spaghetti with meatballs. I think to get a perfect bite, you got to get a little
bit of everything here. Yeah, it's perfect. The tomatoes are really bright and acidic, but then you kind of have the contrast of rich meatballs, but they complent each other perfectly. The meatballs are so delicate and they kind of just gently fall apart right into the rest of the dish. The sauce is clinging perfectly to every bite of this pasta. I just love this pasta shape. The texture is like really fun and it just like works really well with the rest of the dish. This is inherently a simple dish, but the way that we've executed it, we've just added layers of flavor and complexity that just yielded this very refined end result. I really encourage you to take the extra time and effort as
well as to seek out some of these high quality Italian ingredients. All of that, I think cumulatively, is going to yield the best result. And I think it's it's really well worth it to create the best version of spaghetti and meatballs.
