Best meatball recipe | Easy pasta ideas | Jamie Oliver (2024)

FAQs

Which pasta is most widely used with meatballs? ›

Orecchiette: Known as small ears, orecchiette pasta derives from Puglia. They are often served with oil-based sauces and especially popular with broccoli rabe and sausage. Spaghetti: The most famous long pasta shape, spaghetti mixes wonderfully with a variety of sauces. It's the classic shape to serve with meatballs.

The best meatballs are tender, baked and browned in a hot oven to seal in all the juices. Simmered in robust sauce for a couple of minutes ensures they soak up all of those saucy flavours, this is an easy dinner recipe that will be a hit with your family!

Put a saucepan on a medium heat and add 1 tablespoon of olive oil and the onion, then cook for around 7 minutes, or until soft and lightly golden. Stir in the garlic and basil stalks for a few minutes, then add the fresh or tinned tomatoes and the vinegar.

It's mind-blowingly-fantastic. Now if elbow macaroni is not your thing, you can use ANY pasta to your liking – rotini, cavatelli, ditalini, penne – it is ALL GOOD. But I do recommend using a tube-type pasta for the sauce to sneak in.

Polpette Al Forno

"Al forno" simply means "baked in an oven," and it's the most customary way you'll find meatballs and pasta in the same dish together in Italy. While spaghetti and meatballs may not be so common, a casserole-style dish of pasta and meatballs certainly is - think baked ziti!

3-Meat Combo

Bobby Flay's meatball recipe calls for an even combination of ground beef, pork, and veal which makes for the best flavor and texture.

The only way to prevent your meatballs from falling apart is to add some flour in the precooked seasoned ground beef. once you season the ground beef to your taste, you then add some flour, not too much but at least half of a handful.

After all of the Italian meatballs I've been making lately, I consider myself a meatball expert. A good rule of thumb is to bake meatballs for 25-30 minutes at 350 degrees fahrenheit.

Is it better to use milk or water in meatballs? ›

Milk: We will mix a bit of milk with the breadcrumbs to form a panade, which will help to keep our meatballs nice and moist.

You can brown the uncooked meatballs in a sauté pan before adding them to the sauce. You can brown them in the oven. Or you can skip browning altogether and put the raw meatballs straight into the sauce to cook.

"The Jamie Oliver pasta sauces were selling around 5000 jars a week, but this was not enough for Woolworths to keep it in the range so it has been removed in favour of other products that may deliver larger volume sales.

Tossing in strips of basil, a sprig of thyme or some oregano can take your sauce to the next level. Although fresh herbs might pop a bit more, dried herbs and spices can work just as well. Sprinkling in some red pepper flakes, a pinch of parsley and a dash of salt and pepper can liven up your jarred pasta sauce.

Vinegar can add depth of flavour to soups, sauces, and stews. Especially great for tomato-based recipes, you can add a couple of tablespoons of vinegar towards the end of the cooking process to amplify the flavours of your other ingredients.

To complete the meal, meatballs are sometimes served with a greens salad, lightly sautéed vegetables or even French fries, patatine fritte in Italian. The fries are more of a kid thing, but we get it. What's your favorite meatball?

The traditional spaghetti and meatballs dinner is a creation of the American household and has no actual roots in Italian culture. Italy does have their own version of meatballs, but they're very different from what we know here. Known as polpettes, they're very rarely eaten alongside pasta.

The most popular dried pasta in Italy is Barilla, which has recently become more widely available in the United States. Like all Italian dried pasta, it is made under rigid Government controls from hard durum-wheat flour, called semola di grano duro in Italian and semolina in English.

In the United States, they underwent some changes. Traditional Italian meatballs were smaller and cooked in sauce, while the larger meatballs we associate with spaghetti and meatballs were an American adaptation. The dish evolved as Italian immigrants combined their culinary traditions with American ingredients.