Basic Beef Meatballs

    My recipe for a simple beef meatball. It’s the base for most of my beef meatball recipes. The nice thing is that it’s a very simple recipe and you can make meatballs of any size to work into dish to mix things up! If the recipe calls for beef, chances are you can make some meatballs to go in it!

    Basic Beef Meatballs

    Prep Time: 20 minutes
    Cook Time: 22 minutes
    Servings: 23 Meatballs
    Beef meatballs are so versatile. They can be used in various Italian inspired dishes like spaghetti and meatballs or you can make a meatball dip with marinara sauce and your favorite crusty bread. You can serve ravioli with meatballs or make your lasagna meatier by adding meatballs to it instead of ground meat.
    Meatballs also go great in soups like an Italian meatball soup, Lasagna Soup or an Italian Wedding soup. Beef meatballs are a staple at potlucks here in Minnesota where folks bring them in grape jelly, barbeque sauce or even in sauerkraut. They are a great little appetizer or snack that are easy to make, throw in a crock pot and share with your family or friends. They are easy to make and easy to transport so they are a perfect thing to bring to your next Sunday football party or work potluck. This basic recipe has endless variations that are only limited by my imagination or yours!
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    Ingredients

    • 1 lb ground beef
    • 1 cup breadcrumbs
    • 2 eggs
    • salt & pepper to taste

    Instructions

    • Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
    • In a bowl combine ground meat, breadcrumbs, eggs and season to taste with salt and pepper.
    • Take a scoop of the meat mixture and form a ball in your hands by gently rolling the meat around.
    • Place your meatballs on a greased baking sheet and place in the oven. Bake for 22 mins.
    Bowl of Basic Meatball ingredients

    This recipe is a great base for any beef meatballs that you want to make. It’s definitely not the most exciting recipe on this site but it is probably up there in the most versatile. If you just want to make simple spaghetti and meatballs for dinner for your family or if you want to impress a date with a nice Italian-inspired dinner, this is a great basic meatball to start with. They always come out tender and moist but keep their shape and can hold up to be stirred around in whatever sauce you decide to plop them in.

    These meatballs are kind of ready for anything! You can mix it up and choose your favorite fresh herbs to chop up and add to the meat mixture or even your favorite spices or your own custom spice blend that can make these little balls shine. The possibilities are endless in what you can add to this meatball base.

    Baking sheet with the basic beef meatballs rolled out

    This meatball mixture is really easy to whip together, quickly roll into meatballs, and throw in the oven. You can eyeball a scoop of the meat to form a ball or you can use a meatballer to make sure your meatballs are equally proportioned. I’ve made so many meatballs over the years it feels like second nature to scoop out roughly the same amount of meat, so I just eyeball it.

    One of the fun things about this meatball recipe is that the ingredients are so simple and you can choose so many different types of breadcrumbs to mix it up. There are panko breadcrumbs, garlic and herb breadcrumbs, toasted breadcrumbs, Italian-style breadcrumbs, and the list goes on and on. The important thing about this recipe is that the proportions are kept as is to make sure you get a really good and consistent meatball. The ratio in this recipe helps keep the meat mixture together and also allows them to be thrown in your favorite sauce and simmer on the stove until you’re ready to eat. 

    Bowl full of cooked beef meatballs and a plate with beef meatballs with toothpicks

    I know these ones don’t look like the most amazing balls you can stuff in your mouth, but they are a great start to any recipe. You can create so many different dishes out of these meatballs and you can also roll them out into different sizes depending on what you’d like to add them to. You might want to have just a couple of large meatballs to add to a sauce to serve with spaghetti – if that’s the case you should make sure you up the cooking time to make sure the meatballs are cooked all the way through. If you’re ever wondering you can test a couple and make sure you can take the temperature of the inside of the meatball. For Beef Meatballs you want the temp to be 160 degrees Fahrenheit.

    You can also roll these meatballs into little balls for any soup that could use a good beef meatball. They hold up well while simmering in the broth for any soup you can come up with. They are also a fun little surprise to your normal soup recipe, who doesn’t like finding little balls in their soup!? 

    These beef meatballs are a really easy main protein to throw together if you’re short on time for dinner – and they cook quickly in the oven too! 

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