How to Make Meatballs Part 2

Marie Guaragna-Beirne: Bonjour. My name is Marie Guaragna-Beirne with MGB special events and today I am showing you how to make our old fashioned pasta sauce with meatballs. Now, I am going to show you the second part of our process, where we are adding the meat and the bread. This is just a local company that I like to use, it says seeded, it doesn't have to be seeded but it's an Italian bread, you can use this of course, for sandwiches or anything else but I like to use this for my meatballs and for per pound I use four slices of bread. Now, this might also be considered on the orthodox part of my meatball process. We are going to go ahead and cut off the crust because I don't like lumpy meatballs. I am going to use a serrated knife for this so that I can get all the crust off and this is another thing you can do, if you don't use all of your bread, you can of course freeze it and use it at a later time. So, I am just going to gently cut off the crusts with my knife, go all around and you can also feed this crust to the birds later, so everybody is happy, get them out of the way here. Now, we need to wet our crusts. I think it also helps eliminate lumps in your meatballs. So I am going to go ahead and I am going to wet this just enough so that I can get it working for the meatballs. Gently bringing it out a little bit, we want to have water in it because water is also going to help you make your meatballs tender.

Now, we are going to take our knife and we are just going to chop this up so that we have no lumps and you can use your hands and feel around, I know this looks odd but it definitely is a good part of the process and it makes really nice meatballs. Now we are just going to chop it up, you could use your hands and tear this apart, I just like to use the knife because it helps me get the lumps out easier and at this point you could also add some more water if you need to, just to help you get some more of those lumps out, but we look like we are doing okay.

We are just going to go ahead and add that to our mixture, and then our final ingredient will be the meat. Okay, I like to also being, this is the last part of the ingredient, I like to keep my meat cold in the freezer take it out last because I think it helps me manipulate and fold the meatballs easier. So, we are just going to crumple it up here and again, anytime you are handling raw meat, be sure to wash your hands. Now, here is where our whisk comes in, you could use your hands but I really like the way that this whisk is going to mix all of our ingredients together to help us form our meatballs. Just gently mixing it all together and at this point, even just smelling this with all these ingredients, it just smells almost good enough to eat. Mix it well. We are going to keep manipulating this until we get the right consistency to form our meatballs. Now, I have been doing this a long time so I can eye-ball this, but for you guys practice is going to definitely make perfect. But for now, as long as you see that all your ingredients are mixed together that should be helpful. At this point, once I get it mixed up, I am going to go ahead and go back to using my hands, when I feel like I have manipulated it enough and I might even add some more water at this point. Okay, gently take your hand and you can get the meat out of your whisk, you can also tap it, just be sure to cover your hands so you don't get meatballs all over the place. Okay, I like to keep this on hand to help me, if I feel like it's getting a little sticky then I can always just dip my hand into the water and mix it up. Now, we are going to use our hands just for the final manipulation process. Once you can see, once the meat stops sticking to your hands that's pretty much when you know that they are ready to form. Now, another part of my process which is also an orthodox is that I don't fry my meatballs. We are going to go ahead and we are just going to form these meatballs and we are going to just drop them very gently, right into the sauce and that's the last process of adding our ingredients for our meatball. Now we are going to form them and put them in the sauce so that they can cook.