Chris Makes Meatballs

The energy's been pretty good at home.

I mean the kids are just like,

they're just there all the time.

They don't go anywhere.

They don't go to school.

They never leave.

[upbeat music]

Cool, we're doin' this right?

Hey, I'm Chris Morocco.

And we're gonna be making weeknight meatballs.

I sort of took the architecture of BA's best meatballs

and I stripped it down to the bare essentials.

What is it that ultimately makes a great meatball?

So,

[chuckling]

yeah.

So right now I'm in Philadelphia where I recently moved

just so we could have a little bit more room

for everybody to do virtual school,

remote work, all of that.

We rented a studio space

just 'cause it was a little bit easier

in terms of all the people we kinda needed.

It means a lot to be here right now.

'Cause obviously we've taken a break from filming,

and so much has been going on at Bon Appétit.

And I've stayed really quiet about a lot of things.

There haven't really been any easy answers

to a lot of the issues that we've had.

I've really invested the time

in kinda working with the folks

within BA to try to make things better.

To try to put better systems in place

to support all of our staffers.

And it also kinda reflects who we are now

kind of as a team.

And it really includes a lot of voices from people who

I care about, still care about,

we're still part of this brand in one way or another.

And I think we took a good amount of time to really,

take a hard break and look at how we're doing things,

and how we can be better.

So, you know, just on a personal note,

yeah, just, it means a lot.

I think what I kinda realized kinda getting into

so much time spent with my family.

I really had to kinda go back to the fundamentals.

I needed a meatball recipe that could be done

incredibly quickly on a week night,

it's right there in the title in case you didn't catch that.

[imitating rocketship]

Weeknight meatballs.

Okay, it's moist, and it's tender.

Key things obviously are the meat,

and then the bread mixture.

And for a weeknight version, gotta go with breadcrumb,

AKA in this case panko.

In the past, I've really enjoyed searing the meatballs

off on the stove top.

In this version, we're gonna do it in the oven.

Should we make some sauce?

[chopping]

See what's happening with this garlic.

[smashing]

The sauce isn't part of the recipe per se.

You could use kinda any high quality jarred marinara sauce.

But we're gonna make our own,

just so there's a little bit more going on here.

It's also nice to finish the meatballs

in the sauce a little bit,

kinda get it like saucy saucy.

So nobody wants to just see meatballs on a plate.

Right?

Am I right?

Gonna do quarter cup of olive oil.

No point in skimping, not today, maybe not ever.

And I'm gonna thinly slice this garlic,

and there's probably eight cloves here

but I feel like anecdotally

we're really talking about six good sized cloves.

So we're just going to do this gentle.

[shaking pan]

I am not going for browning,

I'm just going for like a little bit

of golden around the edges.

I was actually gonna look for a pinch

of crushed red pepper flakes.

Not to make the sauce spicy, but it just kind of opens

up the flavor a little bit.

Maybe a pinch of Mrs. Dash.

[Man] Are you just raiding the pantry at this studio?

It's good to get the lay of the land, you know?

Do you not just like walk into other people's homes

and immediately start smelling what's ever

in their fridge and stuff?

No?

Is that just me?

Mrs. Dash extra spicy seasoning blend.

Here we go.

Just for a little pop, just a prickle,

old sauciers trick,

a little pinch of cayenne pepper.

Just wake up the flavor.

We'll just ignore the fact

that there's literally 18 other ingredients in there.

So basil, you get a completely different,

well not completely different

'cause it still tastes like basil,

but you get a completely different set of flavor

characteristics to the basil when you kind of extract them

at the higher heat that the oil is currently at.

Sometimes when you put it into just the tomato sauce

it tends to go a little bit browner.

Fun fact.

We'll see if that's actually what happens.

Watch it turn totally brown town.

Anyway.

[popping]

Here's the thing about canned tomatoes.

High quality tomatoes are just key.

So I like to kind of just lightly crush them

up as I add them.

Yes, they kinda go all over the place

when you do it like this, but what am I gonna do?

Like bring a blender from home?

I don't think so.

You know what I friggin' hate?

Diced tomatoes.

They never break down.

Like who [beep] wants that?

[tapping]

So we're just gonna kind of get this to a slow roll,

and keep it out of slow roll.

So this is incredibly coarse salt.

Like the coarsest kosher salt I've ever seen.

So I'm gonna put in what feels like

an unnaturally small amount just because by volume,

it's just gonna be a lot saltier.

Does that make sense?

Okay, so next.

So this is why these are weeknight meatballs.

Everything kinda goes into one bowl,

and then we're gonna bake these

on a rimmed baking sheet.

I guess.

Oh,

oh.

This is what happens

when you don't bring the friggin' blender,

and you can't make blender parm.

We're gonna grate parmesan by hand.

It's not gonna be all fun and like ASMR.

How sad is this?

Who can live like this?

You can just take the piece of parm, cut the rind off,

cut it into kinda one half to one inch cubes,

and then just blend it in a high powered blender.

[mimicking blender]

And it comes out beautiful,

where it's all kind of like pleasantly dense and pebbly,

it sprinkles so nicely.

Blender parm, you know?

We need about an ounce, or half a cup.

We're gonna do two eggs.

Sometimes if I don't feel like measuring,

I'll just like, count it out.

One, two, three, four, five, six,

kinda like a bar tender's pour.

Where you just like, three seconds for each shot.

You know?

I dunno.

I'm just gonna mix these up.

This is one and a half cups of panko.

I just wanted to check this measurement.

Okay.

Whatever, we'll do it all.

And you need to hydrate your breadcrumbs

with some kind of liquid,

whether it's like water, milk, broth.

Otherwise your breadcrumb starts to pull moisture

from the meat.

You are kind of like setting yourself up

for a bit of a drier, tougher meatball.

No good.

[stirring]

Well, so this is just with the egg

and it kind of looks like, oh,

well the breadcrumb is kinda wet, so we're good, right?

We're not.

So we're gonna go with like a half a cup of milk.

That's a quarter, then we'll do another quarter.

This starts out looking kinda wet,

and let's face it, like a little bit gnarly,

but that's the secret.

This is creating what's known as a panade,

a breadcrumb mixture that's gonna be used to lighten

and moisten something.

Key stuff.

So this is about, let's call this a teaspoon

of garlic powder.

Full of umami, full of flavor,

without having to kinda chop up raw garlic.

Some of you will of course point out

that that's exactly what I did with the sauce,

but imagine you're using jarred sauce

and you're trying to move pretty quickly.

[cracking pepper]

Good amount of black pepper.

So we're gonna call this one ounce

of grated Parmesan cheese.

Now we're kinda getting into a little bit

of like a coarse paste sorta territory.

And that means it's gonna disperse very evenly,

and very readily throughout your meat mixture.

You don't wanna bite into a meatball

and have like a little pocket of bread,

and a little pocket of meat.

Not where it's at.

All of this, okay for one pound of meat.

For ground beef, my standard is 80 20 chuck.

Sure, 85 15 if you have to.

90 10, just walk away, make somethin' else,

like get some pork chops.

'Cause it's not meatball night.

I'm gonna completely and thoroughly mix a quarter

of the meat into the breadcrumb mixture,

'cause I don't wanna put all of it at once.

The reason for that is 'cause you then have

two very separate mixtures trying to combine all at once,

and that is gonna lead you down the road

of over mixing, and you create toughness.

So by bringing this a little bit closer to this,

it means the rest of it can be put in

and brought together like relatively quickly.

Does that make sense?

If you start to kind of turn one into the other,

the rest of the meat will go in there.

This is not making any sense.

It's not making any sense.

Like, what am I even trying to say?

Does that make sense?

So, the rest of the meat can then go in and we're good.

Basically the goal was to create a very homogenous mixture.

It's pretty supple.

So what I realized is if we make slightly bigger meatballs,

okay, a bigger meatball will actually brown

on the outside without over cooking in the center.

So let me see if I can eyeball this

into eight roughly equal balls.

Do you ever get like really competitive with yourself?

I use a good amount of olive oil on my hands.

I want them to be coated in the oil,

and I want there to be a good barrier

of oil on the baking sheet.

It just means you get a little bit better heat transfer.

Delightfully imperfect balls here.

I'm even gonna do a little extra drizzle

of oil on these guys.

It just doesn't hurt.

You could get away with searing this

on the stove top if you wanted to,

but to keep it in the kind of like the weeknight lane,

we're gonna go in the oven.

Temperature is 425.

I'm leaning towards the top of the oven

'cause I wanna get some browning

on the surface of the meatball.

And you usually tend to get pretty nice

reflected heat off the top of your oven.

And then when are we checking in, like 10 minutes?

Oh yeah, how about 15?

We're gonna check in on those in like 15 minutes.

I don't have a timer.

Yeah my timer is currently being held hostage by this child.

So anyway,

that's how it goes.

Okay, we're gonna take a little peaky peak here.

This is right at the 15 minute mark.

So because it is a wetter mixture,

these meatballs are going to kind of pancake

out just a little bit.

Good bit of browning,

we're still a little bit tender on the inside.

See how the whole thing kind of flexes there?

A fish spatula, indispensable for separating meatball

from baking sheet and keeping all that lovely browning

on the meatball itself.

That's what I'm talkin' about.

Maybe five more minutes.

Meanwhile, sauce looking pretty good.

Unfortunately, I don't have my wooden spoon.

[sipping]

All right, we're gonna hit it with a little more salt

and just keep it going, like incredibly coarse salt.

You know how basil has that like peppery little bite to it,

raw basil.

You get that in there.

Just from like those few sprigs, just sayin',

I feel like we went a little bit over here.

I could lie and be like, yeah, 165 on the dot,

but we're actually at like 175, but that's cool.

All right, so sauce.

[sipping]

That's good.

It's very rich, flavors are nice.

Think we could like bump up the salt

even a little bit more,

just like completely out of sorts

with this really coarse kosher salt.

I'm obviously being a bit of a pain about it,

but like it's a real thing.

It's always nice when you can kinda finish the cooking

of the meatball in your sauce to let it cook through.

So my grandma would simmer her meatballs for hours,

and they were really good.

They were kinda falling apart.

But what I started to notice,

there was kind of like a continuum

of kinda how long to keep your meatballs in there.

And you should mess around with it

because I think you'll find that after a while,

your sauce becomes more flavorful,

but kind of at the expense of your meatball.

It's like A Beautiful Mind or like Carrie Mathison,

it's just like pieces of paper, like photographs.

I just think it's important for people to know.

All this stuff just gets like pent up,

and it has to come out.

But seriously though, this is what it's about for me.

How do you connect with the people

who are interacting with your recipes?

I'm still intimately involved in telling these stories

in print and on our websites.

To not be part of how we tell these stories in video

it's not an option for me.

We're committed to a different way

of doing things moving forward,

but to not be part of like that bigger picture for me,

being in charge of the test kitchen

it just like, it wouldn't make sense.

Being back with some of the folks

on the video production side means a lot to me.

This is like part of how I want to continue to tell stories

around food, and talk about meatballs,

and go on like, 15 minute long monologues

about blender parm.

'Cause it's important, you know?

So can I just talk about something for a sec?

That little bit of basil, that braised,

in with the sauce, I'm totally here for that.

Look, it's not like bright green anymore

but it's not brown either.

Maybe it's just wishful thinking.

Let's just use the knife just to break into one.

Very little resistance.

Very soft, pretty homogenous, lots of flavor.

You don't bring a knife to a meatball fight, right?

Because if you need a knife to cut through your meatball

you've definitely done something wrong.

So forks only, or even spoons, you know?

[eating]

It's a funny story.

I was so terrified of that really coarse salt

I didn't put nearly enough in the meatball,

but that's fine.

It's gonna be fine.

[eating]

There it is.

Everything you like about meatballs,

but just kind of stripped down

to the most weeknight friendly version.

You don't even have to make your own sauce.

So it's really nice to be back

making meatballs with you guys, for sure.

I've missed this, seriously.

[upbeat music]

Lord knows I don't get out that much.

So very nice to be here.

This is like one of those terrible moments

where I really wish there was somebody else

to taste the food.

Even when I was shooting at home,

at least I had the kids running around causing problems.

[eating]

It's sucks not to have people taste your food.

Cool.