Homemade Italian Meatballs – Family Recipe

When it comes to making meatballs, this recipe was developed by my sister-in-law, Franca, and has been in the Coia Family for years. Not only are they so easy and quick to make, but they are so flavorful and delicious, as they are made with the perfect balance/mix of ingredients. Enjoy 🙂

1 lb of meat makes about 14 medium/large Meatballs:
(Ideally use a mix of ground beef/pork/veal – but ground beef alone is fine)

Ingredients:
► 1 lb of Ground Beef/pork/veal mix (or straight lean ground beef)
► 2 TBSP chopped fresh Parsley (otherwise use dry parsley, but fresh is best)
► 1 1/2 TSP minced Garlic
► 1/3 CUP Bread Crumbs (the bread crumbs from the bakery are best)
► 1/8 TSP Salt
► 1/8 TSP Black Pepper
► 2 Eggs

Note: This recipe can easily be doubled, tripled ext…if you are using more meat.

Directions and instructions
► Put all ingredients in a large bowl
► Mix them all thoroughly together, till all ingredients are evenly incorporated into the meat
► Take a small portion of meat and roll it into a ball (size can be as desired)
► Place meatballs on a tray & use immediately, or place tray of meatballs in the freezer (if freezing)
► If freezing, remove tray the next day and take off the individually frozen meatballs, and repack them into a freezer bag, for longer freezer storage
► Enjoy

Classic Italian tomato sauce recipe – How to make a classic Italian tomato sauce

Homemade Italian Meatballs Family Recipe

hello everyone my name is evo and welcome to cooking with the koias today i’m going to share our family recipe for making homemade meatballs thanks to my sister-in-law franca who is a fantastic cook herself we’ve had this recipe in the koya family for years and it starts with ground meat and i’m gonna say there is a difference in the meat that you use so we like to use what i call the italian triple mix ground beef ground veal ground pork that combo those three flavors put together is absolutely fantastic when it comes to making meatballs okay so i have about this today it’s freshly ground meat the triple mix and there’s two pounds here so i’ve got the recipe here that we’ve had written down for 20 30 years now at least so basically it calls for one pound of ground meat two tablespoons of parsley one and a half teaspoons of minced garlic a third cup of bread crumbs 1 8 teaspoon of salt 1 8 teaspoon of black pepper and 2 eggs so that’s the recipe and i’ll put i’ll put it in the description below for you so you’ve got it of course and because i have two pounds of ground meat i have to double that so i’ve done that already so i’ve got my parsley here fresh parsley put that in i’ve got my garlic i’m gonna add that okay nice freshly minced garlic now the bread crumbs i get my bread crumbs from our local bakery those are always the best you can get them at a bakery the italian breadcrumbs by far the best breadcrumbs as a last resort i guess you could buy the ones in the tins at the store but that’s got to be a last resort for me i really i always keep some spare on hand so from the local bakery okay and now i add my eggs add them one at a time and you can make sure that you don’t get any eggshells in your uh in your ground beef or ground meat mixture i should say okay that’s two three and four so the one thing i did not add which you heard me mention was the black pepper i’ve been avoiding black pepper lately hasn’t been agreeing with me so i’m gonna leave it out and i can tell you i’ve made my my meatballs without ground without black pepper the last few times and it’s perfectly fine so for today i’m going to leave it out and of course it goes without saying you always start with clean hands that’s a given mine are clean but we’ll give them another rinse because your hands are going to have to get right in there you could wear gloves because of course the meat is is going to be cold but basically what you want to do now it’s called it’s it’s a it’s a method for mixing meat that they that the bakers use uh when mixing dough it’s called the pincer method and basically you’re squeezing you’re getting all the ingredients and you’re you’re squeezing them together into your ground meat turn it over and just incorporate all those ingredients so as you’re doing this it’s going to be a little bit moist okay but as you continue to work it into the beef what will happen is your mixture starts to uh starts to firm up and starts to dry up and you’ll notice that as you’re moving along so you know what i always say i have expression and my kids will tell you they know it they hear it even my friends know it when it comes to mixing when you think you’ve mixed enough mix some more because you cannot over mix and by mixing it together you’re just making sure that all those ingredients are distributed evenly throughout your meat mixture so it pays to take that little bit of extra effort and just mix it a little bit longer than you normally would this has come together nicely so i’m going to mix it just a little bit more in keeping with my own wisdom all right so that’s pretty good so now what i like to do now i make my meatballs and i put them in a plastic tray and i’ll tell you why i do that [Music] because i’m going to freeze these so i don’t measure that’s one thing i don’t measure i guess you could if you had a little a little scoop a little ice cream scoop you could measure and make all your meatballs the same size but i like to make mine a little bit i’m going to say a little bit bigger than normal i like them a little bit bigger and with these meatballs you could do you could do anything you want if you haven’t yet i have a video where i show how we make our classic italian tomato sauce and we use meatballs as part of that recipe i’ll put a link here for you you can check that out but you could use these for making your tomato sauce you can make a nice meatball subs i mean there’s all kinds of things that you can do with with the meatballs and in fact if you wanna you could make real small meatballs tiny little guys like this remember my sister-in-law doing this and you put all these little tiny meatballs into your italian wedding soup your homemade soups and it makes for great soup so the sky’s the limit as to what you can do with the meatballs but once once you’ve got them made separate them like so and i’ll put this whole tray right in the freezer the whole tray right in and then tomorrow what i’ll do is i’ll take it out of the freezer because i don’t want them to get freezer burnt and they’ll all be solid frozen individually then quite simply i get a freezer bag and i put them all into the freezer bag and because they’re all individually frozen they don’t stick together so now when i’m cooking if i want to take out five or six meatballs out of the bag the freezer bag it’s very easy to do that so it’s a great way to not only make your meatballs but also to store your meatballs so that’s basically it that is our traditional recipe for making meatballs and i’m just going to continue rolling here and i would like to add one thing i mean i know a lot of people just buy pre-made frozen meatballs but i’ve been talking for probably not that long and look at already i’ve got you know eight meatballs done it doesn’t take long you can have this done in 15 minutes and you’ve got fresh homemade meatballs made by yourself ready to go and in the freezer and you’ll have them for you know weeks to come to prepare with your recipes so i hope you give this a try by all means leave me a comment if you have a favorite recipe for meatballs you’d like to share with us and our viewers just drop us a comment or if you’ve tried this recipe let me know what you think everyone who’s tried it here loves it and i hope you will too thanks for tuning in until next time good luck and bon appetit i’ve got five meatballs here and as you can tell they’re a little still frozen i just picked them out of the freezer i made them myself they’re my own homemade meatballs i’ll share that recipe with you one day uh and i’m just gonna put these in frozen if you have fresh ones just put them in fresh it’s whatever whatever works but these frozen they will cook up by the time the sauce is ready with no problem at all so now i’ve got my meatballs in there now it’s time to add what i’m going to call my secret ingredient and this you