Remember those small meatballs I made with broth meat a few weeks ago? I’m gonna use them today to make a spaghetti and meatballs pasta.
We’re not going to use marinara sauce for this, instead we’ll make a sauce with tomato and two small meatballs cooked inside it.
Let the meatballs unfreeze if you want, along with the sauce. While unfreezing is not necessary to cook them, it slow the cooking time down. Since it’s sunday, i have time to take them off the freezer. I also prepared the sauce in advance and froze it, but i’ll give you direction to prepare it while cooking pasta. Eight meatballs per person is a good number.
Directions:
As always, put the water for pasta to boil first.
Place some oil on a frying pan (3) and when it’s hot, put the little meatballs inside (4). leave them roast until they form a thin crust (5), otherwise they’ll melt when you’ll put them with the sauce. Alternatively you can fry them in deep oil. It actually works better because you won’t have to turn them over and over to form the crust. Once ready remove them from the pan and put them aside (6), let the oil cool down a little.
Put some tomato sauce in the pan, with two frozen (or not) meatballs and let them melt. Add a little garlic, and adjust salt. These meatballs are sweet so i’d also add some white wine to add some acidity to the dish. You won’t have to cook the sauce a lot, since meatballs are already made with cooked meat inside. Just enough to melt them and make the sauce. Make it dense (7), we’ll put spaghetti with some of their water at the end to make everything creamy.
7. The sauce should be dense.
The water for spaghetti should be boiling by now, put some salt and then the spaghetti. Counter the time of cooking. I like thick spaghetti so my cooking time is 13 minutes. Thinner spaghetti are around 9-10 minutes. If the water makes some foam, take it with a ladle and place it with the sauce (8). That’s gluten and will make the sauce creamy during the ‘mantecatura‘.
Mantecatura:
When the pasta is cooked, drain it (remember to keep some weater) and place it in the frying pan with the sauce (9). Add a spoon of water then mix it at high temperature until water is almost evaporated and the sauce sticks to spaghetti (10).
Add meatballs and mix everything carefully for another minute, without breaking the meatballs (11).
Plate on a big dish and enjoy. You can eventually spread some parmigiano or grana on it. I didn’t because i wanted to taste the sauce, and not the cheese. It’s up to you.
I noticed many put a handful of fresh basil on the top of the pasta. I’m not a fan of basil because its taste is strong enough to cover all others, but i suggest you to put one or two leaves while preparing the sauce and then remove it. It’ll release all tastes and smell to the tomato. Eventually place one or two fresh leaves later, after plating.
In an older post I stressed how italians would probably use smaller meatballs with spaghetti because you can have a single one in a forkful. 120 Grams of spaghetti is around 6-10, forkful of spaghetti, hence the number of meatballs to 8. Other meatballs are already spreaded with the sauce, so you actually always have some in your fork.
Smaller meatballs allows to have an entire one in a forkful of spaghetti. It’s much more pleasant than breaking them and make a sort of ragu.
Buon appetito!
-B
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