Firecracker Pork Meatballs
When I created this recipe I had no idea I would love them as much as I did. I’m not a huge fan of sweet things for dinner but there is something incredibly addicting about this sauce – and they’re easy to throw together.
Firecracker Pork Meatballs
Ingredients
Meatballs
- 1 lb ground pork
- 1 cup Italian style breadcrumbs
- 2 eggs
- salt & pepper to taste
Firecracker Sauce
- 1 cup buffalo sauce
- 3/4 cup light brown sugar
- 1 1/2 tbs apple cider vinegar
- 1/2 tsp red pepper flakes or more to taste
- 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.
- While the meatballs are cooking you can make the sauce. In a small sauce pan add the buffalo sauce, brown sugar, apple cider vinegar, red pepper flakes and salt and pepper. Simmer to melt the brown sugar and keep warm to serve with the meatballs.
Pork is really easy to work with. There are times when I’m making chicken meatballs or turkey meatballs and it’s a little sticky. Those meats are so lean that they have a different consistency when ground than both pork and beef. The nice thing about working with ground pork is you get the best of both worlds, it’s a milder meat and it’s also easy to work with. I use my Basic Pork Meatballs for this recipe so it’s a great recipe when you need to throw something together quickly.
I mentioned above that there are so many great pork combinations that what you can do with this basic pork meatball recipe are endless. The other nice thing is that there are so many cultures that use pork in their cooking that it gives me a lot of inspiration for different meatball recipes.
Since this is a great base meatball recipe they are really easy to roll into meatballs and throw in the oven. You can take a scoop of the meat to form a ball. You can either kind of eyeball this (I do just because I have made so many meatballs over the years it feels like second nature to scoop out roughly the same amount of meat) or you can get a meatballer on to help make sure that your meatballs are the same size.
Once you have your meatballs portioned and rolled out you can work on making the sauce. It’s really easy to throw together once the meatballs are in the oven. You can make the sauce on the stovetop and once you have the meatballs cooked and drained you can add them to the pan that you make the sauce in and coat them evenly before serving.
The sauce consists of just a handful of ingredients which makes it simple to throw together. There isn’t a lot of cooking time either since the real goal is to make sure the sauce is warm and that the brown sugar is melted and incorporated evenly into the buffalo sauce. The longer you let the sauce simmer with the red pepper flakes the hotter it will get so just keep that in mind when making this dish.
Once the sauce is complete you can either take the meatballs and add them to the sauce in the pan and let your friends and family help themselves – or if you are bringing this as a meatball to share at a family gathering or company potluck you can add the meatballs to a crockpot and cover them in the sauce. Depending on how you are serving these meatballs you may want to double the sauce recipe. If they are going be sitting in a crockpot you may want a little more sauce.
I love serving these meatballs over rice. It make a really simple meal that you can throw together on a weeknight that the whole family can enjoy – given the family is a fan of some spice. I usually start the rice in a rice cooker before starting the meatballs and the sauce since the rice cooker we have takes a little longer than cooking the meatballs and cooking the sauce.
You can always get some of your favorite stir fry veggies to add to the sauce to make this a little more of a well rounded and balanced dinner. I’m a fan of adding carrots, green beans and broccoli to this recipe to give it a little more substance and make it more of a one pot dinner.
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