This past weekend, I was on a mission from God (in my mind anyway) to make the best possible meatball possible. My wife thinks I have gone crazy, because to her the meatballs we have made in the past were fine to her, and they are. Still, my quest to make the perfect meatball cannot be quenched, though this past iteration was quite possibly my best. There are some more tweaks we will need to do, but more on that soon. Now I wanted to make a single meatball recipe, but two different sauces. Why? Simple, my wife was not interested in a meat based sauce, and I did. Now the only con to frying meatballs is that the sauce you make has no meat flavor in it. Yes, the onions and base can start from the fat that is rendered from the fried meatballs, but that still does not cut it. A true meat sauce requires meat flavors to be fully integrated in the sauce, via cooking and reducing with the meat, thereby concentrating the meat and tomato flavors, in combination. Further, I was NOT going to braise the meatballs after I went to the trouble of frying them and getting them nice and crunchy to only lose that in a pot of sauce!

So, I was left with the trouble of cooking two sauces, one with the rendered fat and one without. To get the rich meat flavor, I further rendered the fat of Nechama’s Smoked Andouille sausages (made from turkey and chicken), and then cooked them in the completed tomato sauce, to enrich the sauce with a lovely bit of heat and meat flavor. While this was successful, the extra sausages did not render well enough for me, and the extra steps were not worth the final outcome.

For the meatball recipe, I used a further modified version of the classic meatball recipe from America’s Test Kitchen:

• 1 cup of cooked but slightly watery oatmeal (cooled down) – this is the panade
• 2 pounds of 85% lean ground beef
• 6 oz. Aarons Best Sliced Beef Fry Cured & Smoked – well diced
• Two cups of squeezed shredded onions and zucchini – WELL SQUEEZED out
• 4 tablespoons minced fresh parsley
• 2 eggs
• 3 garlic clove, minced
• 3 tablespoons of paprika and cumin (combined)
• Salt and pepper
• Vegetable oil