Recipe SWAT Team: Meatballs

Arthur Bovino

Yasmin Fahr|Jan. 6, 2011 12:25 pm EST

Each week our editorial team tackles a new ingredient or dish with one goal in mind: creating easy and delicious dishes. Check here on Monday for the weekly ingredient and look for our recipes on Thursday.

This week, Chef John of Food Wishes (winner of Saveur's Food Blog Awards for best video content) battled it out with us and contributed a YouTube video recipe for Mini Lamb Meatballs.

Join us in our weekly endeavor — post your favorite recipe and our editors will be alerted. We look forward to seeing what fantastic meals you come up with.

This week: Meatball recipes

Originally in Italy, meatballs were ways of using leftover scraps of meat. Today, we buy our ground meat from a butcher or grocery store, but as you'll see in the recipes below, they are still part of family traditions, great for dinner parties with friends, and a major comfort food. While Italians serve them as a first course, with pasta following as a second, in America we have re-invented them, whether with spaghetti in a now classic-American dish that evokes fond memories of Lady and the Tramp, or as fancy sliders with intricate sauces and buns.

However you decide to prepare your meatballs, choose good-quality ground meat and make sure not to over handle it when mixing or it will become tough. If you choose to fry and then simmer your meatballs in sauce, it is a good idea to use water to keep them moist while they cook. Bread crumbs and eggs are essential components in most meatballs as they help bind the ingredients together. Get creative by preparing them using various herbs and spices to replicate the flavor profiles of other countries, as you'll see in the Greek-inspired recipe below. Or, they don't have to be made with meat at all.

Experiment in any way that you'd like, and please share you adventures, tips and recipes with us.

Molly Aronica: Spaghetti and Meatballs