Talking Food with Cory Bahr: Meatballs

I'm Chef Corey Bahr and today we're talking meatballs. Today is one of those risky sort of segments because we're talking about meatballs. Everybody's grandma's got their own recipe and ratio. It could be half pork, half veel. It could be half beef, half pork. It could be a third, third, third. It could be a quarter and they add bacon fat. Who knows? There's a ton of different ways to do it. But this is this the straightforward beef meatball. We're using a certified angus beef product here. It's a 80/20 meaning it's 80% lean beef and 20% beef fat, which adds that moistness and great texture to it as well. If I was to give you one tip, I would say don't overmix your meatballs. So let's go to town here. We're going to add some chili flake. Some Grana Padano. People use Parmesan. That works as well. Salt.

We have ground fennel.

Garlic, some bread crumbs that we've soaked in milk, and then a couple of eggs. This is one of those dishes that you got to get in there. Work with your hands. So you can see we got everything nicely combined. I like to use one of these dishers or cookie scoops, people call them. Pop it out onto some parchment. So now we're gonna come back, roll our balls up. Nice uniform look again, just being gentle. So it's time to sear off our meatballs. I know people, people normally sear these off in the oven. A deep fryer like this works really well because it's the purest form of convection heat. It only takes one or two minutes to get them nicely brown. If you do them in the house in the oven 425 degrees for about eight to 10 minutes.

Let's make our tomato sauce. We're going to make one of my favorite really quick tomato sauces today. It's called arrabbiata. We're going to start off with some olive oil in our skillet. We're going to add a pinch of crushed red pepper. Arrabiata is a spicy tomato sauce. So that's where you're going to get your heat. We're going to start with our onion, celery, carrot, we just want to sweat that down, filler all nice and tender. Now that they've been cooking for a few minutes, we're going to add our garlic, salt, about half a cup of dry red wine. The smells are amazing that nice garlic and wine, we're going to add some thyme now. And then about a quarter puree tomato. Just gonna bring that up to a boil and let that simmer for about eight to 10 minutes.

That's perfect, slightly spicy, great tomato flavor. Really, everything you're looking for to complement your meatballs. Again, this is a great tailgating dish because you can make it ahead of time pop it in the oven, warm it up whenever, you know they've got great shelf life. You can make them on a Monday and serve them on a Friday and they're great They still hold up. Like I said, these are wonderful and many different applications. Over pasta, just by themselves, serve them with some toasted rustic bread, or serve them as a meatball sandwich even.

And I just like to top mine off with a little bit more parmesan before I bake them. We're gonna pop these in the oven 350 degrees for about 15 minutes.

That's perfect. Cheese is nice and melted through.

It's so exciting. There you have our beef meatballs with our quick arrabbiata tomato sauce. Hey, if you want to cook this recipe for yourself, go to KNOE.com and click on Talking Food.