Rachel Meatballs

Add all of your ingredients to your bowl and mix together until well combined. I do this by hand to make sure I have everything well incorporated and really it’s just a lot quicker and a lot more fun to get your hands dirty. I always use a larger bowl for this part – it seems to be easier than struggling with a smaller bowl and making a mess. I try to break up the eggs and mix the breadcrumbs over the meat before really digging and mixing the ingredients together. This way you don’t get clumps of breadcrumbs in the meat mixture. If that happens, keep working the breadcrumbs into the meat to evenly distribute the ingredients.

This meatball recipe is one of the more simple meatball bases that I make. I really like to keep the meatball simple so the flavors of the swiss cheese, Thousand Island dressing, and sauerkraut comes through. It’s a great recipe for a turkey meatball for a variety of recipes. It’s the Basic Turkey Meatball on this site that I use in a number of recipes.

The other nice thing is it’s a great base meatball that as substitute for any recipe you come across that calls for beef meatballs when you have someone that isn’t a fan of red meat. It works really well for this recipe since Rachel sandwiches are generally made with sliced turkey and the rest of the ingerdients make the whole sandwich.

This recipe is one of my favorite challenges – to take something that people are familiar with and turn into a meatball. Like I mentioned before this is one of those things you find on a lot of menus at bars, restaurants and diners. It seems to be something you find at every place that serves a Reuben. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love a good Reuben but I’m always a little hesitant about ordering them from somewhere I’m not familiar with. Sometimes the meat isn’t as lean as I like and I am not a fan of fatty meat. This always has the similar flavors with a leaner meat which is nice if you’re watching out for that in your diet.

This meatball is pretty easy to make. The nice thing about working with turkey is that it keeps the cheese in during the cooking process better than say beef. The ground turkey has a wetter texture and stickier than beef – kinda like chicken. This makes the meat mixture come out a little like a meat paste – as gross as that sounds – unlike beef or pork. This helps keep some of the stuffing items that I like to add to my meatballs inside while they cook.

Don’t get too concerned over the feel of the meat once the ingredients are combined – these meatballs are going to be stickier than beef meatballs. What you don’t want to do is add more breadcrumbs to counteract that. You’ll end up with a meatball that tastes and has more of a texture of a breadball. Breadcrumbs are a great binding agent to a point. I’ve over done it on the breadcrumbs with turkey and chicken meatballs in the past and the texture is not as good.

This recipe is a great thing that you can serve for a pretty quick and interesting dinner that you can serve as a meatball sub – like the example above or you can always serve them in a crockpot filled with sauerkraut where your family or guests can scoop out as much or as little sauerkraut to accompany their little turkey balls as they’d like.

Then your family or guests can top these little balls with as much thousand island dressing as they’d like too. I love this recipe because I put the cheese on the inside as well as bake them with a little slice on top which gives these little balls a nice little added cheesiness.

I feel like this is a little healthier version of the Reuben meatballs – they come out a little lighter too than the corned beef and beef meatballs that are found in the Reuben meatball recipe. They other great thing about these little balls is that they are a great alternative if you have folks in your life that don’t like beef. I went through a phase in my life when I was a teenager where I didn’t eat red meat. I’m pretty sure it all stemmed from this lady when I was little that forced me to eat the biggest hamburger on their boat and I cried… but enough about my mental problems.

What you can do to compensate for the sticky texture of the meat mixture is to spray your hands with cooking spray before you start rolling out your balls. This helps you roll out the meatballs without it sticking to your hands and also it prevents you from adding too many breadcrumbs – this makes it so you have a really nice meaty meatball that isn’t too bread heavy but it’s also easy to work with.

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