Basic Pork and Beef Meatballs

When you mix these two different types of meat together you get a little milder meatball than you would if you used just straight-up beef. I buy all of my ground meat from our local butcher so the beef we buy has a really good beef flavor and doesn’t have any fillers. The addition of the pork in this recipe makes a meatball that’s great for a handful of recipes and I have tried a couple of other folk’s premade meatball mixes and some other recipes and it seems like a lot of people like to mix these meats.

If you have a larger group of people to feed or you have a larger family dinner to make some tasty meatballs for this recipe is really easy to double since this recipe I wrote uses half a pound of each meat and it’s hard to buy just a half of a pound of either meat. It’s just me and my husband most times when I make meatballs so this amount is great for us two. Also, I have days where I’m making a lot of meatballs to try out new recipes so using a half-pound of meat really helps my trial and error process. This meatball works for so many meatball recipes, especially when you’d like your meatballs to simmer in a sauce or if you’re making traveling meatballs. It’s also really quick to throw together for those last-minute invites to peoples game day parties or just to hang out and share some food. 

This recipe is really versatile and also really quick and easy to make if you’re short on time or if it’s been a busy week and you just don’t feel like cooking. The biggest thing to keep in mind is if your meat if frozen there is definitely some time that you need to factor in to thaw the meat. Planning ahead is always the best way to combat this problem. You can always put the meat in the fridge before work or even the night before to make sure it thaws out so you can work with it the next day. These meatballs come together quickly and also have really basic ingredients a lot of us already have in our pantries.

You can also customize this recipe to your or your family’s tastes by adding certain spices or spice mixes or even just simply changing the breadcrumbs you use in the recipe. The most important thing is to make sure you keep the ratios of meat to breadcrumbs and eggs the same. If you make changes to that your meatball can come out tasting more like a breadball if you use too many breadcrumbs or the meatball might not hold together as well as you’d like if you don’t add enough breadcrumbs.

Of all of the meatballs that make up the basic recipes are some of the ones that are more difficult to photograph but they are a the foundation of every meatball recipe that I make. The pictures aren’t really that impressive and to me, they all are dying for a stuffing or a sauce. But I wanted to make sure I photographed everything I made and also give you a reference of what they should look like during the meatball rolling process and after they come out of the oven.

These basic recipes are just a start to the crazy creations that I come up with. I think about meatballs a lot – probably too much really, but I I think you need a good basic recipe to build off of and these meatballs fall into that category. I make a lot of meatballs and some of my favorite meatballs are the ones where I mix different meats. It gives the meatballs a different flavor and texture than just using one meat. Keep an eye out for more and more basic meatball recipes with different combinations of meats!

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