tenspeed
Executive Chef
Yesterday our daughter had a first birthday party for our grandson. It was a mid-afternoon party, and I helped out by making appetizers. I decided to make meatballs as one of them. I've never made meatball appetizers before, but thought how hard can this be? I searched for recipes, and settled on this one:
Barbecued Meatballs Recipe - Allrecipes.com
I took the suggestions from the comments and used Italian style bread crumbs and Sweet Baby Ray's BBQ sauce. I baked them on a foil lined cookie sheet for 30 minutes, and finished them off in a slow cooker on low for 2 hours to coincide with the start of the party. Kenji at seriouseats cautioned against overcooking meatballs, as they will dry out like any other meat.
They got rave reviews. I thought they came out pretty good, but not as good as the comments I heard. Then it registered with me. Many of the recipes I looked at called for using bags of frozen meatballs. My hand made, not overcooked meatballs made with 85% ground beef were most likely compared against mysterymeatballs from the frozen food case, which I'll guess that most milennials are used to. That's a pretty low bar to have to top.
It wasn't all that much work to make them. I scaled up the recipe to 3 lbs. of ground beef, which I guessed was the capacity of my 4.5 qt. KA stand mixer (it was). It took about 20 minutes to shape 60 - 65 meatballs, which was about 2/3 capacity of a 6 qt. slow cooker.
The moral of the story: some shortcuts aren't worth taking.
Barbecued Meatballs Recipe - Allrecipes.com
I took the suggestions from the comments and used Italian style bread crumbs and Sweet Baby Ray's BBQ sauce. I baked them on a foil lined cookie sheet for 30 minutes, and finished them off in a slow cooker on low for 2 hours to coincide with the start of the party. Kenji at seriouseats cautioned against overcooking meatballs, as they will dry out like any other meat.
They got rave reviews. I thought they came out pretty good, but not as good as the comments I heard. Then it registered with me. Many of the recipes I looked at called for using bags of frozen meatballs. My hand made, not overcooked meatballs made with 85% ground beef were most likely compared against mysterymeatballs from the frozen food case, which I'll guess that most milennials are used to. That's a pretty low bar to have to top.
It wasn't all that much work to make them. I scaled up the recipe to 3 lbs. of ground beef, which I guessed was the capacity of my 4.5 qt. KA stand mixer (it was). It took about 20 minutes to shape 60 - 65 meatballs, which was about 2/3 capacity of a 6 qt. slow cooker.
The moral of the story: some shortcuts aren't worth taking.