In a recent Test Kitchen post, I admitted to a) being lazy and b) sexually enticing my husband via meatball. (I bring a level of professionalism to the New Yorker offices not seen in some time.) For all it revealed, though, my writing didn’t include the actual recipe for Frankies meatballs, so I’m sharing it here:
Ingredients:
- 4 slices bread (2 packed cups’ worth)
- 2 pounds ground beef
- 3 gloves garlic, minced
- 1/4 cup finely chopped flat-leaf parsley
- 1/4 cup grated Pecorino Romano, plus about 1 cup for serving
- 1/4 cup raisins
- 1/4 cup pine nuts
- 1 1/2 teaspoons fine sea salt
- 15 turns white pepper
- 4 large eggs
- 1/2 cup dried bread crumbs
- Tomato sauce (Note: As I explain in my post, the Frankies tomato sauce takes about four hours to make and requires a level of patience I do not possess. I just buy the sauce from Frankies directly; you can get some at your local grocery. Make sure it’s super garlicky.)
Directions:
1. Heat the oven to 325F. Put the fresh bread in a bowl, cover it with water, and let it soak for a minute or so. Pour off the water and wring out the bread, then crumble and tear it into tiny pieces.
2. Combine the bread with all the remaining ingredients except the tomato sauce in a medium mixing bowl, adding them in the order they are listed. Add the dried bread crumbs last to adjust for wetness: the mixture should be moist wet, not sloppy wet.
3. Shape the meat mixture into handball-sized meatballs and space them evenly on a baking sheet. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes. The meatballs will be firm but still juicy and gently yielding when they’re cooked through. (At this point, you can cool the meatballs and hold them in the refrigerator for as long as a couple days or freeze them for the future.)
4. Meanwhile, heat the tomato sauce in a sauté pan large enough to accommodate the meatballs comfortably.
5. Dump the meatballs into the pan of sauce and nudge the heat up ever so slightly. Simmer the meatballs for half an hour or so (this isn’t one of those cases where longer is better) so they can soak up some sauce. Keep them there until it’s time to eat.
6. Serve the meatballs 3 to a person in a healthy helping of the red sauce, and hit everybody’s portion–never the pan–with a fluffy mountain of grated cheese.
And that’s it. It’s almost easier than making chocolate-chip cookies using the recipe off the Toll House bag, which is something every American has mastered by age 7. So get cooking.