Meatballs Like You Haven’t Seen Them

Wow, who knew so many people had meatball opinions? Mine have a nice texture; as someone said, throw on that sauce just before serving.

And Martha Stewart likes her fried eggs crispy also. But I don’t. Crispy meatballs are finger foods. Just let the meatballs cook in the sauce.

I cannot help but come back to the similarity of crispy meatballs to Scotch eggs and Arab kibbes, as recently discussed in "Spinach Pies, and Other Reasons to Linger at Sakib". Once I induced my wife to make crispy meatballs of a somewhat larger size by mixing the ground beef with white mushrooms. The result was excellent.

I wonder if it would be possible for you to state your preference without recruiting semantics to aid you? Your "soggy" meatballs would be someone else's "tender and fluffy" meatballs. Your 'crisped' food is someone else's 'burnt' food, and so on. As it happens, I've worked on meatballs for the past seven years, with about four hundred variations so far, from around the world. Some are 'crisped' and some are 'sauced'. None are soggy. I don't really even know what that would be like.

I adore this recipe. Fun to make, fabulous to eat--even cold leftovers the next day. Thanks so much, Alison.

In my mother’s kitchen on Sunday mornings the meatballs evolved through several stages. Beginning with the raw chopped meat with eggs and spices, akin to steak tartar, and ultimately into the sauce or gravy to be retrieved as infused little pillows of delight. But the intermediate species were crispy, fried boules that were my favorite and apparently what Ms. Roman favors as well. So beyond the crispy meatballs, noted here, there is lots of room for experimentation with each stage of meatball evolution.

the solution to sogginess problem is simple. Don't pour the sauce until just before serving.

I always prefer crispy over saucy.

Alison, its your choice but to use yogurt in a spicy dish is sacrilege. Its these middle eastern people who came up with this concept, easily confusing yogurt with other available mediums...I should know, I make my own yogurt but only consume it south Indian style. However, I am like you, I don't like watery or overly liquid dishes and lean towards drier dishes unless if its my special sausage dish with red wine and hot veggies. I'll try this with Field Roast vegetarian sausages...:)

I don't always like yogurt, so I'm thinking romesco sauce, or ricotta whipped with blitzed sun-dried tomatoes instead. So many possibilities, thank you.

Ms. Roman, your diatribe against "saucy" recipes reminds me of the "Curb Your Enthusiasm" episode where Larry David, planning a restaurant venture with friends, infuriates Ted Danson by vetoing Ted's personal chef's application for head chef, on the grounds that his food is "too saucy". Crispy ground meat in various forms is a standard component in various cuisines (e.g., Middle Eastern kebabs) and in Indian Parsi cuisine, mini-meatballs are a side to the signature meat-legume-mixed vegetable stew, Dhansak (influenced by the Iranian tradition of using legumes to extend meat). But you need to get over yourself. Combining a sauce, which adds its own flavor, to a crispy ingredient is not a culinary travesty. I would concede that combining them at serving time preserves crunchiness. This is done for the Indian snack bhel-puri, where individual diners/customers combine crunchy ingredients like puffed rice, deep-fried puffed mini-breads ("puri") and fried chickpea vermicelli ("sev") with soft ingredients such as onion, potato, tomato and chickpeas, plus "sauces" in the form of sweet tamarind-date chutney, spicy cilantro-mint chutney and hot chili-garlic-ginger chutney in proportions determined by personal preference. Combining these well in advance would be like combining potato chips or fries with gravy/ketchup 1/2 hour before serving. Your recipe is delicious, however.

@ Denis Pelletier Montreal The author's crispy meat balls remind of Scoth eggs. Served cold, two or three Scotch eggs are a filling meal. They are the only British food that I like, besides occasionally excellent fish and chips.

Crisp, not crispy!

Allison seems to think openly disliking foods everyone else enjoys (puréed soups, avocados, eggplant parm) makes her opinions chic and original. But it just makes her sound like a picky toddler.

Great recipe! You can have crispy and saucy at the same time. Just don't DROWN everything in sauce. When I make Eggplant Parmigiano, the crust is nice and crunchy because I use both panko and home made bread crumbs. But the topping is the key. Just a few tablespoons of sauce and a sprinkle of cheese and fresh basil keeps the eggplant shining through nice and crispy. Same goes for Chicken Parmigiano.

So, you "can’t stand when people squeeze lemon over my fried calamari or schnitzel," yet call for squeezing lemon over your crisp meatballs. Are you trying to have it both ways?

"I will forever favor crispy over saucy" -- Applause, Present arms!, 21-gun salute. Thank your for your authoritative endorsement of crispiness. But I am not in agreement with you about the lemon juice on squid rings: I find that lemon juice adds to the taste of almost all sea priducts, perhaps with the exception of cooked lobster flesh and scallops.

A worry: The 12 to 15 minutes the meatballs wait while the eggplant and chick peas are cooked mean that the meatballs will have lost much crispiness at plating time. That is ALWAYS a problem when a crispy item must wait for other elements of the dish to cook (even if kept in a warm oven). Crispiness resulting from cooking is quite ephemeral. Perhaps undercooking the meatballs a bit and keeping them in a hot oven might work.