Create Incredible Meatballs With The Flavors Of A Bloody Mary Cocktail

You can do a lot with tomatoes, from putting them on pizza, in salads, or on burgers. You can even mix tomato juice with vodka by ordering a Bloody Mary at the bar, or on an airplane. Of course, since tomato sauce and meatballs go well together, is it surprising to learn you can also prepare Bloody Mary meatballs for an extra culinary kick?

Now, there won't be any vodka going into the meatball mix itself (although there's nothing stopping you from drinking a proper Bloody Mary with your meal). Instead, you just need tomato paste, horseradish, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco sauce, and celery salt to replicate the flavor. The meatballs are prepared separately, and you add the cooked sauce afterward.

The result is a spicy and salty flavor that works great with the savory taste of fresh meatballs. Plus, it's a much more unique way to add some flavor to your dish compared to common meatball enhancers, like garlic or onions.

You can prepare all the ingredients for the Bloody Mary sauce yourself, or you could simply buy a pre-made mix, like Frank's RedHot Bloody Mary mix. Frankly, it's the same as cooking standard meatballs with marinara: You can make the sauce from scratch, but there's no shame in buying Ragu or Newman's Own pasta sauce at the store, either.

If you're preparing the sauce yourself, you have some room to substitute ingredients. In fact, just as there are lots of different Bloody Mary recipes, there are a number of variations to consider when making these meatballs. For example, you can amp up the spiciness in your dish by adding some cayenne pepper, as this will still blend well with the tomato paste and Worcestershire. Adding some meat broth into the meatball sauce – like the way clam broth is added to a Bloody Caesar (or Canada's version of the Bloody Mary) – is another fairly straightforward option, as well.

There's a lot of other unusual tricks available to help level up your meatballs, including the addition of cinnamon. This ingredient is commonly used in Moroccan meatballs – alongside spices like cardamom, cumin, nutmeg, and clove — in a mixture called ras el hanout (which includes over a dozen different spices). You can also use cinnamon to make meatballs in the style of Greek pastitsio, which combines meat, pasta, bechamel, and additional seasonings.

Another surprisingly effective ingredient to add is applesauce, which can make the juiciest meatballs. It sounds bizarre (and even less intuitive than the Bloody Mary mix). But applesauce often has a very mild flavor, and only adds a hint of sweetness. On top of that, it adds a lot of moisture to the meatballs, which helps prevent them from drying out. Unlike the Bloody Mary recipe, though, the applesauce would be cooked into the meatballs, rather than separately in the sauce.