Spiced Italian Meatballs
We love meatballs. Making them on the Egg gives a rich, smokey flavour you just can’t get cooking them inside. They’re so easy to make and well worth the effort.
We’ll be trying these in a sub sandwich, but for now, we’ve had them with pasta and they were superb.
Cooking surfaces
BBQ Temperature
then
Ingredients
For the meatballs
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500g mince, 15% fat content is best
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2 slices white bread, 2 thick slices – 100g
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1 onion
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1 tsp cumin seeds
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1 tsp smoked paprika
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Salt
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Pepper
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1 tsp chipotle chilli
- 1-2 tbsp light olive oil
Sauce Ingredients
- 1 onion
- 3 cloves garlic
- 1 tsp chilli flakes
- 1 packet passata
- 200ml water
To garnish
- Basil
- Parmesan
Equipment
- Thermomix or another food processor. We use the Thermomix as it does far more than a normal food processor, including steaming, cooking, kneading, sous-vide…
- Big Green Egg small skillet. We love the Big Green Egg cast iron skillets. We use them almost daily on the Egg or even in the oven or on our induction hob.
Fill in the form below to be quoted for a small cast iron skillet:
Method
Make the meatballs
- Setup your Egg for a direct cook with the stainless grid and the small cast iron pan. Set the Egg to 180°C and get the pan warm.
- In a blender such as the Thermomix, blend together an onion and two slices of white bread. You’re looking to get a breadcrumb texture.
- Add the spices, salt and pepper, and the mince, and blend until the ingredients are mixed through and have become quite sticky. The fat in the mince will help hold these together.
- Take small portions of the mixture and form into golf ball-sized meatballs.
- Fry the meatballs in the cast iron pan, turning every 2-3 minutes, until they have caramelised.
Add the sauce
- To the meatballs, add the onion, garlic and chilli flakes, and fry with the meatballs to soften them. This will take about 5 minutes.
- Now turn down your Egg, add the passata and water and leave your meatballs to cook in the sauce. The Egg temperature will drop slowly but that is fine. You could use the ConvEGGtor if you’re not in a hurry, it will then bake your meatballs. Not using it will simmer them, but you need to make sure you don’t dry out the sauce and burn it.
- It will take about 25-30 minutes to cook and the sauce to thicken.
To serve
You can serve the meatballs with pasta, alone or with some garlic bread. They’d also work really well in a sub sandwich, I am going to have to do this.
The meatballs also freeze really well to then be thawed and reheated.