BBQ Bacon Blue Cheese Stuffed Meatballs

Who doesn’t love a good BBQ Bacon Cheese Burger? I have to tell you that that kind of burger is even better in meatball form. I’m a huge fan of stuffing meatballs with blue cheese. If you can find blue cheese in a wedge or even slices that’s the easiest way to stuff a meatball with blue cheese in my opinion. A lot of times though you can only find blue cheese crumbles. I’ve used blue cheese crumbles a bunch of times in my blue cheese stuffed meatball recipes. It’s a little more time-consuming but it still works. You can smoosh a couple of the blue cheese crumbles together to form a larger blue cheese ball. After working with the blue cheese for these bigger blue cheese balls I tend to put them back in the fridge to solidify again. Working with the already soft cheese and smooshing it together with your warm fingers makes these little balls a little on the soft side. Placing them in the fridge while you get the rest of the ingredients pulled together makes the cheese filling a little more firm.

Also for this recipe, it’s helpful to have the bacon cooked well enough where it can crumble as you mix it into the meat mixture. This way the bacon distributes throughout the meatball to give every bite a nice bacon flavor. Even if the bacon is a little dry the fat from the beef will help that out so you get a nice moist meatball.

One tip is to delicately wrap the meat around the soft cheese to keep the ball of blue cheese separate from the meat – you want to make sure you aren’t incorporating the cheese into the meat. Like I mentioned above you can make the blue cheese balls in advance and let them set up in the fridge for a few hours before you start making your meatballs, another way to make the blue cheese easier to work with is to make the cheese balls in advance and set them on a baking sheet in the freezer to fully set up and get frozen before making your meatballs. I don’t really run into too many issues working with blue cheese and keeping it as its own separate ingredient even without refrigerating it or freezing it before making the meatballs. I just take my time and gently wrap and roll the meat around the cheese. 

Once you have all of your ingredients well mixed you can flatten out the mixture so you can place a ball of blue cheese in the middle and roll the meat around the cheese until you have a nice little ball. I use my vast knowledge of making meatballs to get the right amount of meat mixture for each meatball. I’ve been making meatballs and stuffed meatballs for years so I kind of go by feel on how much meat to use. You can get those handy meatballers or meatball scoops to help make the meatballs a consistent size. One of the biggest things is to make sure you have enough meat to cover the cheese well.  I place mine on a foil-lined baking sheet with a little cooking spray to help them not stick and for faster cleanup.

The size of the meatballs always vary too – it really depends on how much cheese you have in the center – I tend to like a lot of cheese so my meatballs are a little larger. This will also impact the number of meatballs you get per recipe.

These meatballs are a great twist on those typical BBQ sauce meatballs you find at gatherings. The blue cheese and bacon are a nice surprise in each bite and will give your guests something to talk about at your next potluck.

These are great meatballs to serve to your guests straight out of the crockpot and they work well for those times where you just want your guests to pick up each meatball with a toothpick. I love having meatballs when guests are over and it’s always fun to have multiple kinds available for everyone to try. I go through phases where I make a whole bunch of meatballs that are either very similar or that fall into one of the categories of meatballs that I make and I bring them over to our friends to try and give me feedback. So you know that these meatballs have been tested out by folks before they hit the site.

The nice thing about meatballs is that you can make a whole bunch of them so they feed a good amount of people and they are small enough where folks can try more than one kind without getting too full!

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