Making Meatballs for Gourmet Macaroni & Cheese Recipe

Video Transcript

"I am going to add some milk to our breadcrumbs while our pasta is cooking. What I want is I want this to absorb all the liquid, this is going to make a nice base for our meatballs. In an old European household this would be called be called stretching the meat but it really adds a real silky velvety texture to the meat. So good, um, um, um and that is going to sit for about twenty minutes till it is all absorbed. I am going to put a little apron on just to make sure that I don’t wear my meatballs. It is always a good thing to have a little apron, all right. The first thing we are going to do is take a look at what we have got here. I have about a pound and a quarter of ground sirloin and about a ground; I have a pound and a quarter of ground sirloin and a pound and a quarter of ground veal. Now if you are not a veal fan you can substitute pork for that, you can do this with turkey, but for me the veal and the beef bring such flavor so go for it. We have got our bread that was soaking in the milk so what we want to do, if you kind of look down here, it has becomes sort of this white cloud. We are going to squeeze some of the moisture out of it, you actually want to get it down to where it is almost a paste, this is going to come into our meat, we don’t want it to be too wet, but this is going to give us our consistency in our meatballs. You have got to be able to get your hands in here, get the last of our bread, okay and I am going to do a little hand wash. Whenever you are dealing with meat or poultry, you want to make sure that you are keeping your hands really clean. A couple of trips to the sink, only takes a minute, but it helps to keep you from having cross contamination and getting people sick. Next we are going to put our eggs in and I am going to take a good handful of flat leaf parsley, this is Italian parsley, just a little more than that and I am going to rough chop that and I will show you a little trick with chopping. You grab this parsley and kind of roll it into a little cigar, I showed you this last episode but the claw is really important, you have got your fingers tucked down and your nail down under and your thumb behind. Your thumb is a guide, the reason we want to do this, is when we take our knife, this part of our hand becomes our guide for our knife and you are never going to cut your finger. The thumb in the back is pushing the, pushing forward the vegetable; you can look up when you are doing this because again that hand is the guide. And then you can come back over and just rough chop it, just an easy rough chop we are not looking for perfection here, we are not looking for a fine chop, we want to be able to see these great particles in our meat. Um, it smells so good, I wish you could smell this, this is like the fresh country, this is like being back in Rome and walking through the streets, and it is four a.m., I remember when I was a model working in Rome, at four a.m. I would be coming in from the discos and on one corner you would smell the fresh bread baking, another corner you would see people chopping the parsley and the basil for what was going to be the breakfast and lunch. It was wonderful, have a hot coffee, fresh baked bread, you know. A little bit of basil, about the same amount, an ample amount of basil, and basil has that great, kind of licoricey flavor, it is hard to describe, it smells of, it smells of sunshine, it smells of, to me it smells of passion, and you can take and roll it like a cigar leaf on leaf and we are just going for a rough chop. If it is a little bruised, that is okay we are not going to worry about it. Again that thumb is behind so that I don’t chop my thumb off, another rough-cut. I wish you could smell this, this is just heaven. Okay in goes our basil, and a little bit of garlic and finally we are going to add some more Parmesan cheese and that is about a half a cup. Okay, and here is the fun part, you have got to get your hands dirty. You know if you have had a bad day, you fought with your loved one, this is a great way to work the aggression out, just get your hands in there and squish it, and now we add some toasted bread crumbs and just a little more spices, so you can see this is still a pretty wet mixture and this is what we want. You don’t want the mixture to be too dry because these meatballs need to be moist. "