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There are few dishes out there as comforting as homemade meatballs or polpette. Often a staple in Italian households, these delicious morsels of meat are regularly tossed in with a plate of spaghetti and sauce, but one of my favourite ways to enjoy them is just in a bowl with a piece of fresh, crusty bread on the side.
Anyway. If you’ve never had the pleasure of making meatballs by hand yourself, here’s your chance to learn, amore. TikTok creator, @melissajorealrecipes has gone ahead and shared her family’s recipe for Italian meatballs and even tossed in a secret recipe for y’all. Here’s how to make them.
She even gets her nonna in the footage for the meatball recipe, which is adorable.
@melissajorealrecipes BEST MEATBALLS EVER! ????????✍???? #meatballs #recipes #italianfood
♬ original sound – Mealtime with Melissa
Melissa Jo’s meatball recipe
What you’ll need:
- 4 pieces of day-old Italian bread
- 1/2 cup of milk
- Ground meat (some use pork, some use beef, some use a mixture of both)
- Pecorino Romano
- 2 eggs
- 1/2 cup fresh parsley
- 6 garlic cloves
- Handful of panko
- Handful of Italian breadcrumbs
- Fresh basil
- Salt and pepper to season
Directions
- Rip up the pieces of bread and add milk to the bowl. Mix it up and let it sit for about five minutes.
- Take your ground meat and place it in a bowl. Add in Pecorino, eggs, parsley, garlic (roughly chopped).
- Remove your bread from the bowl of milk and squeeze out excess liquid.
- Add the bread, panko and Italian breadcrumbs to the ground meat mixture.
- Season your meat with salt and pepper then combine the mixture with your hands and roll it into small balls.
- Add your meatballs to a frying pan with some olive oil and leave to brown.
- Once browned, transfer the meatballs into a larger pot of sauce and leave it to cook “slow and low all day”.