mini meatball subs!

My boss took Thursday and Friday off to have some dad time with his twin sons (fraternal twins), so he's not here to enjoy something he loves more than life itself: meatballs. The man is obsessed with meatballs to the point where, if I make spaghetti, he demands that there be meatballs. I can never make a normal bolognese or other red sauce. It's meatballs or death.

This time around, I didn't make my usual monster-sized meatballs: I used a smallish ice-cream scoop to make meatballs that were only a little more than an inch in diameter. All of this is in the service of using up the many, many hot-dog buns we still have. We've still got hot dogs and chili and cheese (not to mention regular hot-dog trimmings like mustard, relish, and the boss's sauerkraut), but now, we also have a meatball option—with mozzarella and Parmigiano Reggiano cheese. The red sauce I used with the meatballs is a combo of bottled arrabbiata and a homemade concoction from a can of chunked tomatoes (polpa a pezzettoni) into which I added dried oregano and basil, crushed fennel seeds, onion flakes, garlic powder, salt, pepper, a bit of brown sugar, and some minced fresh parsley. 

I could barely smell and taste the results, but the results seemed wonderful. There'll be plenty of meatballs and cheese on Monday.

I placed the melted cheese combo under the meatballs.

food-porn angle: left-hand "sub"

food-porn angle: right-hand "sub"

The classic meatball is a 3-meat combination of ground beef, ground pork, and ground veal (some folks use lamb). My local groceries don't sell veal, so I make do with a 2-meat combo of beef and pork (or as I sometimes call it, beep and poke). To this, I add the usual herbs and seasonings: salt, pepper, dried oregano-basil-parsley, chili flakes, garlic and onion powder, and in this case, a single egg, a 150-gram container of cream cheese, 2/3 cup of Parmigiano and, God help me, some panko. 

I'm normally pretty doctrinaire about not using panko when making meatballs: I don't like the idea of dragging meatballs in a meatloaf-y direction, but the fact is that a lot of cooks rely on what's called a panade, i.e., bread or bread crumbs soaked in milk.* This, along with an egg, can serve as a binder for meatballs, but it also supposedly keeps the meatballs tender. I didn't bother going through the panade ritual (which involves a few minutes of soaking)—mainly because I was out of milk and too lazy to go get some. I simply dumped all my ingredients together. Cream cheese is soft and vaguely milky, I reasoned, and once it got incorporated with the egg and the natural juiciness of the meats, the panko would end up thoroughly soaked. So I combined all the ingredients, mixing by hand, then scooped dollops onto two trays—making about thirty meatballs in all—and took each dollop and rolled it between my palms to create the proper meatball shape. I then baked the two batches of meatballs for 12 minutes at just below 350°F (177°C), and the result was meatballs that were exquisitely soft and nicely cooked through, i.e., there'd be no need to "finish" them in the tomato sauce. I could therefore cook the tomato sauce separately, dump the meatballs in, and pack everything up for storage after only a few minutes of cooling.

Interesting note: I watched a YouTube video in which the lady advised not fully cooking one's meatballs in the red sauce. Why? Because the meatballs tend to release a ton of grease, and you don't want that leaching out into your red sauce. This seemed like sound advice, but then I looked at my baked meatballs and noticed that, despite all the fat from the meats and cheeses, almost no fat had rendered out of them and into the tray. There was literally almost nothing. This leaves me to wonder what the hell sort of ingredients the lady was using to get such a scary amount of fat from her meatballs (fat that is, I should note, eminently reusable in making gravies, etc.).

Anyway, I enjoyed my two mini meatball "subs." Not a bad way to use up hot-dog buns, but we still have quite a few buns to go.

ADDENDUM: my Korean coworker, determined to do his own bizarre thing, ate two hot-dog buns separately, then slapped a couple meatballs on a plate, sprinkled some Parmigiano on them, heated them up, added cold pickles (which I'd bought for use with hamburgers), and ate his creation with gusto. It's this Korean lack of sense about what goes with what flavor profile that leads to abominations like corn and sweet potato in pizza (although I'm pretty sure the Japanese went over that particular cliff first, with the Koreans blindly and unquestioningly following). Of course, it's not just East Asians fucking things up:

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*This French-language dictionary entry notes that a panade can also have water and butter added. It's often simmered for a long time, and it can use cream instead of milk, and there might even be an egg yolk in there. I think most people who make panades for their meatballs don't go nearly that far: they just soak bread or bread crumbs in milk, stir the mixture up a bit, and that's it. The French entry also notes that, as slang, a panade can also refer to a soft person who lacks energy. And "to be in the panade" (être dans la panade) is to be in a miserable or inextricable situation.