I’ve had a little experience at this point with cooking some Italian meals. I’ve scoured over a number of cookbooks, experimented and failed, overreached, and had a few successes as well. The Italian meatball for spaghetti and meatballs is an easy one to screw up. My experience has taught me that even the easy stuff is hard to do in cooking. The key to a good meatball is to forget about using complex or numerous ingredients. Start with a pound of quality ground bison meat, some breadcrumbs, an egg, and subtle seasonings. I used some fresh dried basil from my garden earlier in the year, some kosher salt and a small amount of ground black pepper. That’s it. Don’t try to be Emeril here with a contrived mix of 12 seasonings. Keep it simple.
It’s hard to go wrong with some good ground bison meat. The flavor is sweet and at its perfectly cooked best makes an excellent meatball without the introduction of other fatty meats. Why mix it with ground pork or a bunch of oils? This particular ground bison was purchased frozen from a local supplier through a health food market.
When you mix the meat together with the egg and breadcrumb seasoning mix, be sure to use your hands. It just doesn’t mix together as well using a utensil. My meatballs were medium sized and I cooked them for exactly 20 minutes in the oven at 400 degrees. They were perfect. I then submerged them in my tomato sauce for 10 minutes.
I made a tomato sauce to go along with my spaghetti and meatballs and it is a simple recipe I adapted from one I read in Cooks Illustrated. Start with a 28 oz. can of good crushed tomatoes by Muir Glen or another quality brand, add 1/4 cup diced or grated onions, 4 cloves of garlic, 1 teaspoon of sea salt, and a generous handful of fresh or dried basil. Adding too much beyond these ingredients will start jumbling the flavors to the point where you might be disguising the tomato flavor you want only to enhance. I recommend avoiding “Italian Seasoning” mixes for your meatballs or your tomato sauce. These mixes contain marjoram and sage. Marjoram is mostly used in Polish cooking and sage reminds me of my grandma’s cornbread stuffing. These two seasonings are a little confusing to the palate when combined with oregano, basil, and rosemary. I recommend simmering the tomato sauce for only 15 minutes. If you simmer much longer than that the sweetness of the tomatoes disappears. Simmer only on low heat. I like to use the DaVinci brand of pasta because it tastes good and is affordable. You could go all out and buy a gourmet pasta or even make your own.
Don’t buy into the notion that your meatballs must contain fatty meat for flavor. It’s just not true. Lean ground bison makes fantastic meatballs.