Recipe: Baked (not fried!) Meatballs

We've been talking about spaghetti and meatballs for some time. It just seemed like too much work. The problem is that most pre-packaged meatballs are disgusting. Yeah - disgusting! Random particles and rubbery bits...and overall poor flavour. Note: Even the Longo's brand meatballs aren't good - how is that possible?

Little known fact: I don't really know how to fry any food other than bacon. I burn that too. It became important to find a recipe that didn't involve any crisping, searing or initial frying. Who knew you could bake meatballs? Best idea ever.

After reviewing a few different recipes, including one from Chef at Home and some no-name Pasta book, it became apparent that there wasn't a perfect recipe available, so a few needed to be combined. Here are the results - these are not scientific.

Ingredients

Beef

Pork

EVOO

Leek

Parmesan Cheese

Egg

Garlic

Basil

Thyme

Oregano

Salt

Chili Powder

Spelt Bread Crumbs

General Method

• Combine all ingredients with 1/4 of the breadcrumbs
• Form the meatballs and roll in remaining breadcrumbs
• Place on a baking sheet
• Bake 20 mins at 400 F

Adapted from 3 other recipes

Comments:

• Try rolling some meatballs in breadcrumbs before baking and leave the rest plain - try them before deciding which you prefer
• The 1/2 pound of beef and pork yielded approximately 14 meatballs and quite a bit of wasted meat - will double up the recipe next time and freeze the extra meatballs
• Whisk the egg before adding it to the mixture 
• Using leeks instead of onion was a last minute sub, since there weren't any onions around (oops!) - it created a milder flavour considering the large volume of leeks that were used (you can see them!)
• My favourite herb right now - fresh thyme. Delicious...use it! All of the other herbs listed above were dried

with pasta, sauce and cheese

Overall Recommendation:

• Pretty quick if you've got everything you need
• The most time consuming part of this method is preparing all of the ingredients
• I served this up with the marinara sauce I posted previously. Note that for 14 meatballs a double batch of sauce would have been preferable!
• Since this recipe usually goes with spaghetti, I'm opting to defer making these again for a while... carby goodness.