Simple Baked Meatballs – Delicious Recipe Ever : An Italian restaurant-quality meatball recipe that will make yours truly stand out! These meatballs are consistently exceedingly soft, bursting with flavor, never drying out, and certain to wow! Everything you need to know to consistently make them flawless will be covered here.
Simple Baked Meatballs – Delicious Recipe Ever
Nothing is more gratifying than a bowl of properly cooked, tangled, and steaming spaghetti covered in a bright, garlicky San Marzano marinara sauce, with heaps of handmade meatballs heaped throughout! Comfort food at its finest, indeed!
These are my favorite meatballs, and this simple recipe provides you a few alternatives (homemade sauce or store-bought, fried or baked).
Ingredients
- 2Â cups (5.2 oz)Â fresh bread crumbs*
- 3/4 cup whole milk, then more if needed
- 1 lb. 85% lean ground beef**
- 1 lb. ground pork
- 2 large eggs
- 1/2 cup finely minced yellow onion
- 2 garlic cloves, minced (2 tsp)
- 2 Tbsp finely chopped fresh basil
- 2 Tbsp finely chopped fresh parsley
- 1 Tbsp finely chopped fresh oregano
- 1 cup finely shredded Parmesan cheese
- Salt and freshly ground black pepper
- 3/4 cup olive oil, only if using the fried method
Instructions
To properly moisten the bread, add 1 Tbsp of milk at a time while stirring the bread crumbs and milk in a large mixing basin. Give it a rest for at least five minutes while you prep the ingredients.
Add the beef, pork, eggs, onion, garlic, basil, parsley, oregano, and parmesan to the breadcrumb mixture. Evenly season the top layer of ingredients with salt and pepper (I use only 3/4 tsp salt if I plan to coat the food with jar sauce because it can be salty).
Once the ingredients are evenly combined, gently toss the mixture and break up the meat with your fingertips.
Using lubricated hands, shape mixture into meatballs of uniform size, approximately 1 1/4 inches (or 38g) apiece.
Oven Baked Method
Before you begin to prepare the meatballs, preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
Two dark-coated nonstick pans can be brushed with olive oil or thoroughly sprayed with nonstick cooking spray (see note 4).
Arrange the formed meatballs, roughly 20 to a sheet, and space them equally apart. Bake for ten minutes in both the upper and lower oven thirds.
If the meatballs have already browned on the bottom, remove and flip them (scrape from baking sheet with a thin metal spatula). After moving the pans to the opposing racks, bake the meatballs for a further 8 to 12 minutes, or until the center of the meatballs reaches 165 degrees.
Add to a warm marinara sauce and stir. For even more soft meatballs, simmer over low heat (approximately 10 to 20 minutes, tossing occasionally gently).
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Notes
To prepare new bread crumbs Roughly chop stale, robust bread slices into small bits. Transfer to a food processor and pulse to create fine crumbs.
Additionally, you may use two and a third pounds of ground veal, beef, or pork. I have even, in a pinch, used two pounds of pure beef (probably not real, but excellent none the less).
To ensure that the yellow onion is tender when the meatballs are cooked, finely chop it to a size similar to that of minced garlic.
Meatballs baked on regular light aluminum baking sheets will still work; they will simply brown less.
You will need one recipe of marinara sauce or two (24 oz) jars of tomato basil sauce (like Rao’s) for this quantity of meatballs. Next, you’ll need 16 to 20 ounces of spaghetti that has been cooked al dente per the directions on the package.
Estimated nutritional value using the baked method. Because some of the oil is absorbed during the frying process, there will be more calories and fat. Furthermore, since the amount and type of pasta and sauce used will vary, they are not included in the nutrition calculations.
Nutrition Facts
- Calories 329Calories from Fat 191
- % Daily Value*
- Fat 21.22g33%
- Saturated Fat 8.7g54%
- Cholesterol 114.32mg38%
- Sodium 317.03mg14%
- Potassium 362.24mg10%
- Carbohydrates 9.93g3%
- Fiber 0.99g4%
- Sugar 2.32g3%
- Protein 23.4g47%
- Vitamin A 265.98IU5%
- Vitamin C 2.16mg3%
- Calcium 190.94mg19%
- Iron 2.38mg13%
