Stop Wasting Time Rolling Meatballs And Try The Drop Method Instead

Making great meatballs at home is quite a time-consuming task. There are a number of steps: soaking breadcrumbs in milk, grating the cheese, chopping up vegetables and herbs, and massaging the whole mixture together. Although these steps sound simple enough, there are also lots of ways you can mess up your meatballs. Use the wrong type of ground beef or overmix the whole thing and you can end up with tough, overdry meatballs that can't be saved even with butter-basting or generous servings of tomato sauce.

The one way you can significantly decrease your meatball prepping time is to skip the ball process altogether. Laboring over making uniform meatballs hardly gives you the perfect sphere shape to begin with. Why go through the process of rolling each meatball only to let it flatten on one side when you begin to cook it? Instead, you can use the drop method, where you scoop enough beef mixture to make a meatball and you drop it into a hot skillet.

Is the ball aspect of a meatball as important as the texture and flavor? Not really. Even a perfectly rolled meatball will become slightly misshapen during the cooking process — and that's arguably what makes cooking so beautiful. The drop method will significantly reduce how long you take to make your meatballs, but is it going to yield a better meatball overall?

Indeed, it will. One of the most common mistakes people make with meatballs is overworking them, which can happen during both the mixing and rolling stage. While you should, of course, sufficiently mix your ingredients together, over-rolling your meatballs and tightly packing the mixture into a dense ball will make the meat rubbery. In fact, this is something that can happen across the board for all types of ground meat mixtures, including hamburger patties and meatloaf. Scooping the meat cuts down on prep time and gives you more tender meatballs. Furthermore, using a scoop-and-drop method ensures that all of your meatballs end up roughly the same size. If you use an ice cream scoop to make your meatballs, you're going to get the same size every time, which makes it easier to cook the meatballs to the right doneness.

The next time you decide to tackle homemade meatballs, use the drop method; You'll get a juicier meatball in a shorter amount of time — and without dirtying your hands!