Meatballs 1.0
Idea Behind the Recipe
My inspiration for meatballs was from a Youtube channel that I have recently been spending a lot of time catching up on. The channel is called Alex “french guy cooking”, and you can find it here. His channel blends everything that I enjoy including cooking, kitchen gadgetry, food science, and a lot of passion. Essentially if I was French and was smart enough to have started a Youtube channel years ago I would be the American version of Alex (or at least I like to think so). He recently started a series arc about meatballs, and I would recommend checking it out.
“Essentially if I was French and was smart enough to have started a Youtube channel years ago I would be the American version of Alex (or at least I like to think so).“
Another reason I decided on meatballs is that my wife recently brought home a bear roast from a co-worker who brought some in to share. I then decided this dish would have three elements to experiment with. First, we would make hand-rolled meatballs using the bear roast. Next, we would make homemade egg noodles because honestly there is nothing like fresh homemade noodles.
For the last element, I had a growler leftover from Christmas from my favorite brewery, Volunteer Brewing. The beer is called Bolaris Winter Ale, and if you are a fan of winter ales you know they are loaded with lots of spices that go well with the cold winter months. A rich beer like a winter ale also makes a pretty awesome gravy or reduction so that is what I decided I would do.
Process
I started with the meatballs first. I posted a recipe below closest to what I actually did. Since I was using bear I first started with cutting up the roast into small chunks and grinding them through my stand mixer with the grinder attachment. This could obviously be done with regular ground beef, but I highly recommend using different cuts of game meat or other cuts of beef to experiment. It’s important to use fatty meat or if using a leaner meat cut in some pork fat or some sort of additional fat. Bear has a good level of fat, so I decided to use only bear meat. Then I used a mixture of bread crumbs, eggs, Italian seasoning, diced onions, nutmeg, and salt/pepper. Speaking of dicing if you struggle with dicing onions I highly recommend watching Gordon Ramsay’s video on how to dice an onion. I then hand mixed everything to make sure everything was evenly distributed. After everything is completely mixed I then started forming my meatballs. I decided to make mine a little smaller than the average meatball. I had originally planned to fry them up in the cast iron skillet, but I diced my onion a bit larger than I should have. Ideally, I should have coarsely grated the onion, but this will go into my lessons learned for another time. Since I was unsure if my meatballs would hold up to frying I then decided to go ahead and bake them. Baking them is a good option if you’re not up for frying however frying does two beneficial things for you. First frying adds more fat, and fat equals flavor. They will also crisp up a bit more. Frying will also leave you some bits of meatballs if you use a stainless pan. I could have then scraped up the crispy bits later on when I deglaze the pan with my beer. After baking I then set the meatballs aside to rest.
Next up was egg noodles. The recipe for egg noodles is pretty simple. Take flour, eggs, salt, butter, and milk mix everything up and roll it out to your desired thickness. My wife Jen took over here because my patience with dough isn’t great. Since my pasta attachment for the stand mixer doesn’t go as thick as I’d like, since I like a thicker noodle, we hand-rolled our dough. We rolled the dough to a little less than a ¼” using a rolling pin. To slice we used a pizza roller, which worked perfectly. After slicing all that is left is to toss the noodles with flour to coat them so they don’t stick. These noodles don’t need to boil very long since they are fresh, so no longer than a few minutes. Be careful when you salt the water for boiling because the noodles will absorb it, which if you like saltier noodles that’s one way to get it done.
Finally, we are to the gravy, reduction, whatever you prefer to call it. Using my large stainless steel pan I added probably two cups of beer to start reducing. You can use whatever type and amount you would like. I think the richer the liquid the better, so I like to stick with dark beers and dark wines. Now the trick with reducing is to thicken and concentrate the liquid without overdoing it. Generally, you want to reduce the liquid to half the original liquid volume. This will also burn off any alcohol in the process. After the beer was done reducing I decided to go with a creamier gravy so I added heavy cream. With the heavy cream, you don’t want to add so much that you dilute the flavor of your gravy. Heavy cream also helps mellow out a gravy instead of using flour. You could also add beef/vegetable broth, and thicken with cornstarch or xanthan gum.
To plate, I started with the noodles, topped with meatballs, drizzled the thickened delicious gravy over, and finished it off with chopped parsley.
Recipes
Lessons Learned
So the biggest lesson I found was to grate the onions next time. I prefer the crunch from diced onions because it gives the meatballs a different texture, but grated onions will work much better to help bind my meatballs together. Another important tip while mixing meatballs, meatloaf, or even burgers is not to overmix. You want the ground meat to retain as much of its form as possible because overmixing causes the meatballs to resemble a processed store-bought frozen meatball. Other than that it was a pretty straight forward process. For the next attempt, I plan on using a variety of lean and fatty meats. Perhaps a mixture of deer meat and pork.
Useful Gadgets
This recipe really doesn’t require any special tools or gadgetry. I would recommend getting yourself a nice heavy rolling pin and a pizza roller, but other than that your hands are your only necessary tools.