Craving a cosy, comforting meal? Learn how to make juicy, flavourful meatballs simmered in a rich tomato sauce, served on perfectly cooked Spaghetti. This dish is easier than you think – and miles better than store bought!
In this video, you’ll learn:
How to make tender meatballs from scratch
Tips for a rich, savoury tomato sauce
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For the Meatballs
* 500g (approx. 1.1 lbs) Pork Mince (20% fat)
* 500g (approx. 1.1 lbs) Beef Mince (5% fat)
* 1 x 200g Packet Crumb (e.g., breadcrumbs or stuffing mix crumbs)
* 2 Large Eggs
* 1 tsp Garlic Powder
* 1 tsp Paprika
* Salt: (to taste)
* Black Pepper: (to taste)
* Handful Fresh Basil: (roughly chopped)
* Handful Fresh Parsley: (roughly chopped)
* Olive oil for browning (not listed in your ingredients but typically used)
For the Tomato Sauce
* 3 Medium Onions: (chopped)
* 3 cloves Garlic: (chopped)
* 3 sticks Celery: (chopped)
* 1 Small Bottle Red Wine (approx. 187ml-375ml)
* 2 Tins Tomatoes: (e.g., crushed, chopped, or whole peeled)
* 2 Chicken Stock Pots
* Handful Fresh Basil: (roughly chopped)
* Olive oil for sauteing
For Serving
* 1 Packet Fresh Spaghetti (typically around 500g for 4 servings)
* Freshly Grated Parmesan Cheese: (optional garnish)
* Chilli : (optional garnish)
Hi guys, welcome to Zafria UK where flavor meets fun in every dish. I’m Jane and today we’re kicking off our channel with a bang. And by bang, I mean juicy, tender homemade meatballs simmered in a rich, mouthwatering tomato sauce, this is one of our favorites. Whether you’re cooking for the fam, impressing a date, or just hungry for something amazing, this recipe is going to be your new go-to. So, grab your apron, turn up the heat, and let’s get rolling. Meatballs, that is [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] [Applause] [Music] a generous amount of pepper. You are going to season your sauce, so you can always add more pepper. Then also generous amount of salt. your fresh herbs, basil and parsley. And then finally, two eggs. Now that you’ve popped everything together, don’t be scared. Get your hands in there, get stuck in, and start combining everything till it’s all well mixed together. [Music] You’ll also get a great sensation of smell from the basil and the parsley. That’s what makes these meatballs amazing. [Music] Now that everything’s mixed together, you’re going to start rolling your meatballs. So, you can choose which size you prefer. is what we call a larger size, which is about that size. Or we prefer doing more of a bite size meatball, which is about that size. Again, it’s up to you what size you prefer. You’re now going to roll all your mixture. And then you need to pop it in the fridge for 10 to 15 minutes just for it to set and recool before we assemble the next part. [Music] We’re working on gas today at home. Get your gas fired up. Obviously, we haven’t got it too hot. Probably on a medium heat. We tend to use this olive oil. We just find it quite a good quality olive oil. Obviously, it’s got quite a bit of cinnamon in the bottom. So, just give it a good shake around before you use it. With the olive oil, you’re just going to want to coat the bottom of your pan. So, that’s about how much I’ve got in mine. Let’s give a little swirl around. You’re going to now saute your onions. You want to keep them quite translucent at first and then obviously you’re going to brown them up a bit later. The reason we’ve obviously left everything quite chunky is we are going to blend our sauce once it’s all cooked. So it doesn’t really matter on chopping it too finely. So just give that a little stir around. Wait for the heat to come up. [Music] Hey. [Music] Hey. [Music] [Music] Again, [Music] why I said this is also a great dish to give to kids is because there is your carrots and celery celery in. And because you’re blending the sauce, you don’t actually see any of the carrots and celery. So, it’s a great way to trick in into eating some vegetables. So, again, we’ll just give this a quick stir around. Also, Alan, I was saying another alternative you could put in here if you wanted is some peppers. Green peppers, red peppers, yellow peppers. You could also incorporate some potato if you wanted some potato. That would be done when you put the meatballs in. That way, if you didn’t want to serve it with another starch, you wouldn’t have to. You could also serve with some roast potatoes. the roasted potatoes off and then add them in at the end. So, there’s quite a few versatile ways of doing different things with the sauce as opposed to making it with the carrots and the celery. Again, if you wanted to add any fresh chili, you would do that when you blend the sauce to give it that extra little bit of a kick. So now you can see the onions are starting to go translucent. So we’re going to add our celery and our carrots. Again, like I said, we didn’t finally chop everything, but we did chop it fairly small just so that it cooks a little bit quicker. I’ve said we’re we’re tired after hard days work and we we like to cook everything fresh at home. We also want the convenience of things being made quickly. That’s so wholesome. So just give that a little stir around. Incorporate it all together and let it sauté off. sweat all your onion, celery, and carrots out. So, we’re going to pop our lid on. We’ve turned down the heat slightly, and we’re just going to leave that now to sweat away. So, now we’re just going to check on our stuff. That is sweating away nicely. Just give it a little mix again just to ensure it evenly cooks. Make sure it’s nice and spread out as well across the bottom of the pot. pop your lid back on and we’ll check on it in a moment. Right, as you can see, all our items are sweating down nicely. So, now we want to get a bit of color onto it. So, I’m going to take the lid off, give it a stir, and leave it now to go a light golden brown. Right. Check on them again because obviously you want it to go light golden. I do not want it to burn. There’s nothing worse than a burnt tasting onion. Give it a good stir around. As you can see, some of it is starting to go a little bit golden. And we’re almost ready for the next step. All right. So, let’s check on it again. It’s started to turn a light golden color. So, now we’re going to delaze with our red wine. We’ve gone just for a general one at the supermarket. Very inexpensive. Also, if you don’t want to use this, you can use the Canor red wine stock pots. They don’t contain any alcohol or you could use an alcohol free red wine if you didn’t want any alcohol in it. We’re going to use the whole miniature bottle. Just pour it in. Give a little bit of a stir just to pull off anything that may be on the bottom of the pan. We have used the claw red wine stocks before and they are a great alternative to always keep in your cupboard. We generally like the cannor stock pots. We keep all of them in stock at all times from the chicken ones to the vegetable ones, even the reach beef ones. As you can see, it’s got a light little bubble on it. We’re just going to cook off some of that alcohol that we poured in. Pull through some of the flavor. Like I said, we use quite a lot of the Canor stock pots because we find they have a really good flavor. We also had an interesting find at the Waitro in Newton Moons. We found a mushroom one. We struggled to find it anywhere else, but that one is a great stockp to use. It really has a strong mushroom flavor. So any sort of mushroom sauce you’re making, it just adds that extra element to it. So I’d recommend if you can find the canoor mushroom stock pots, you should definitely keep those in your cupboard. Right, we’re back and what you can see is most of the red wine has reduced away. So, we’re now ready to add the rest of our ingredients for the sauce. What I would recommend as well, we’re going to add some water. So, pre- boil your kettle. Just before you get to this stage, we’re just using Tesco’s tin tomatoes. You can use any brand of tomatoes. Again, we’re going to blitz it. So, they can be peeled whole tomatoes. They can be chopped tomatoes. It really doesn’t matter. So, throw your two tins of tomatoes in. Add your chopped garlic from earlier. Make sure to get it all out. Give it a little stir. Again, don’t worry too much about the whole tomatoes cuz we are going to blitz this down. We’re also going to be adding some thyme to our sauce. We’re going for 2 tepoon of thyme. Again, you can swap out some of the herbs if you want. If you don’t have a preference to particular herb. Give it all a little stir around. For the heat, we’ve got it on relatively low heat. As I say, we just wanted a slow reduction on the wine when we added it. And now we also just want this to lightly boil, not aggressively boil. We’re going to add our water. Now it’s about two cups of water. I say we pre- boil ours in the kettle just so that it doesn’t cool the sauce down by adding cold water. And again, just give that another stir around. So, once you’ve added your water, you’re going to add your stock. Like I said, we use stock pots. You might be wondering why we’re using chicken stock pots. It’s just a flavor we prefer. You can use any stock pots that you want or any stock cubes. You can go with beef. You could go with vegetable. I say we’ve just made this meal quite a few times and we’ve decided that the chicken flavor is something that we quite like in it. We might add more water once we’ve let this slow boil for about 15 minutes. We’ll have a look at it once that’s finished. So, just give your stock pots a stir around. Another reason we also use the stock pots is that we find sometimes with the stock cubes, if you want to dissolve them quickly, they don’t always dissolve evenly into a lot of the dishes that we make. And that’s why we just prefer the stock pots. At this stage, you’re also going to add some pepper. You’ll see we’re not going to add any salt. The reason is obviously we’ve just added the crock pot. Plus, we’ve seasoned the meatballs as well. So, we’re going to taste it once we’ve blended the sauce and see if we would like any more salt in our sauce. Also, again, with the pepper, it’s up to you how much pepper you would like in it. We quite like black pepper, so you’ll see we add quite a generous amount of it. Give that all a good stir about. Make sure it’s on a relatively low heat. You’re going to pop the lid on about 15 to 20 minutes. Just let all the flavors incorporate before we blitz our sauce. Right, let’s check on our sauce. So, that has all infused nicely. Now, the last step for the sauce we’re going to do is add some more of our fresh basil that we had for our meatballs. And then we’re going to blend our sauce. Obviously, at this point, just turn your stove off. We just have a normal sort of household hand blender. Just be careful because obviously it’s extremely hot. [Music] So now pop it back on the heat again. Don’t let it boil too hard because it’s already cooked. In the meantime, I’ve also got the water ready for our pasta. That’s going to go on to boil as well. And of course, just remember to add some salt. So now we’ve got our meatballs. As we said earlier on the video, the reason we pop them in the freezer is just cuz it’s summer here in Scotland. And yes, it does occasionally get quite warm here. So, just to chill them down slightly, just for a couple of minutes so they don’t break apart when we put them in our sauce. Now, you need to place all your meatballs into your sauce. What we are going to do, cuz we have quite a large amount of meatballs, we’re going to add a touch more water. Again, boiling water just so that all the meatballs get covered nicely in our sauce. Then we’re going to be popping the lid back on and letting them simmer until cooked. Pop your bag on and let those slow simmer. Now, don’t worry about losing too much of the flavor by adding a bit of water. We have added two stock pots, so the flavor will be nice and intense along with all the garlic, the basil that we’ve put in, and the tin tomato. So, we’re just going to check on our meatballs. this stage you want to give it a light stir but be very delicate because you don’t want your meatballs to break up just to incorporate all the sauce and make sure that the meatballs cook evenly. Pop the lid back on. Just let it simmer away. Right, we’re going to now check on our sauce again. We’re going to leave the lid off now just to reduce some of the liquid down. Just give it a light stir again just to move it about a bit and let that reduce down for about five to 10 minutes just depending what consistency your sauce is at. Another thing to mention with the meatballs, obviously we’ve done a mix of pork and beef with a 20% fat ratio on the pork, 5% on the beef mints. If you didn’t want to do a mix or you want to keep cost down, you can just do a beef mint, you can just do a pork mint or a little bit more costly is to do a chicken mince, the only thing to bear in mind if you did a chicken mince, which you’d need to add a bit more crumb because it’s a little bit more moist. Just also when you get a beef mint is just to make sure that you get at least a 20% fat ratio so that they don’t dry out. We’re also now going to put our pasta in our pot as our water is now hot. Like I said earlier, we’ve gone for a fresh spaghetti. This is just from Tesco’s. I’m going to put the whole packet in because we will also probably take some work tomorrow for lunch. And again on your ratio to puffer, it depend whether you’re going to freeze any of your meatballs or if you’re going to do for a big family meal, you could always add maybe two packs of fresh pasta or a pack of dried pasta, whatever side you would like with your meatballs. So let that now reduce and just boil out some of that liquid. Right, we’re back to check our sauce. We’ve got it at the consistency that we like it. We do like saucy things. You can reduce it down as far as you would like it if you like to have just a little bit of sauce. Just keep reducing it down. Because we’ve used the 20% pork mints, it’s not going to dry out. Our pasta is also done now. So, we’re going to strain that, taste our sauce, and finish off our meal. So, we’ve strained our pasta. A little top tip, just to avoid your pasta from sticking together, once you’ve strained it, add just a little touch of olive oil. Say a half teaspoon. Or another top tip is just a little knob of butter as well. Give a little stir. Your butter won’t stick together. Now comes the fun part. We’re going to try our sauce. See if it needs any finishing touches. A little bit more salt or a little bit more pepper. Such a nice rich intense flavor for us. I’m going to add just a touch more salt and a touch more black pepper. Like I said, we’re quite fans of black pepper, so we do use a lot of black pepper in our dishes. Give that a light stir. Again, just remember not to aggressively stir so that your meatballs break up. And that’s us done. Now, we’re just going to plate our meal up. [Music] A nice spoonful of pasta. [Music] A nice couple of spoonfuls of the meatballs and sauce. Of course, we always have a nice generous sprinkle of the good old parmesano cheese. We always opt for a fresh parmesano. Finished again just a fresh black pepper. And we are going to be serving ours with this lovely tiger loaf, [Music] which of course we’re going to spread with our fantastic French butter that we got from Marks and Spencers. And there you have it, our pasta meatballs with a bit of parmesano, all fresh, all made from scratch and full of goodness. So, I have gone with some fresh basil and some fresh chili on mine. We didn’t add chili to the sauce because we didn’t want the whole batch to be based on chili because we’re freezing some of it. That’s why I’ve just chopped some nice bird’s eyee chili on the top of mine with a lovely piece of the tiger bread with our French salted butter which I’m just about to spread on and enjoy. If you enjoyed cooking with us, don’t forget to give this video a big thumbs up, hit that subscribe button, and ring the bell so you never miss a flavor packed recipe from Zaffrica UK. And hey, if you’re in Glasgow, come say hi and grab a bite at our store Gingers in Burnside. We’ve got plenty more deliciousness waiting for you. Thanks for watching and we’ll see you in the next video where flavor is always the main ingredient.
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