January 30, 2020 Massive Meatball Madness
Since these meatballs freeze perfectly, we do four times the original Cook’s Illustrated recipe, which if you’ve subscribed to the web site is here - Classic Spaghetti and Meatballs. There are definitely some economies of scale, but only at the end. Mixing up 4 times as much takes little more time than mixing a single recipe. On the cooking side, you can keep 2 pans going about as easily as one.
We did, finally, quantify the ratio of parsley leaves to finished product and discovered it’s right about 4 to 1. It takes 4 times the volume of leaves that you need of final product.
First thing to do is make up the tapenade, with help from our able beaked assistant this took only 10 minutes instead of the usual 5!
While Bill was doing that (and several other preps as well) Martin got to prepare a half cup of parsley. That’s after mincing it, so we guessed that if we started with two cups of parsley leaves, it might be enough. All those stems are from just the third batch that was stemmed!
That’s what a full 2 cups of unchopped italian flat leaf parsley looks like on the cutting board
After a few passes, the volume is down to about a third of what we started with.
And done!
We did get just a bit more than the half cup, so our guess of 4 to 1 is confirmed!
Livingstone helps with the garlic…
Mixing the meatball mix.
Forming up the meat balls, part 2
Forming up the meat balls, part 1
Sixty nine, yep 69, meatballs ready to fry and eat and freeze.