How One of NYC's Best Italian Chefs Makes Spaghetti and Meatballs

[upbeat music]

Spaghetti and meatballs is a simple dish,

but I think there's a real way to elevate it

by a few simple steps.

I'm Angie Rito and today I am making my perfect version

of spaghetti and meatballs.

So this is my son, a nice Italian American boy.

You imagine the Italian American grandma

slaving over the stove all day.

There's a reason why that food like tastes so much better,

'cause grandma was like putting in the time.

There are elements of this meatball recipe

that are gonna take you more time

than say like a 30 minute one

that you would throw together,

but I promise you that the end result

is gonna be infinitely better tasting.

First we're gonna start with our meatballs.

[upbeat music]

The first part of the meatball recipe, I'm gonna start

by roasting garlic and making like a roasted garlic puree.

We're gonna take our garlic

and basically cut the top part off here

and then just place them into a baking dish.

The reason I do it this way

is 'cause when this is all said and done

and I roast it in the oven, it's gonna be easier

for me to kind of squeeze it out if I have the base intact.

So once these are in my baking dish,

I'm just gonna use a little bit of a neutral oil

and basically fill the oil up

about three quarters of the way.

A common mistake that people make

with meatballs is they just chop up raw garlic,

throw it into their mix,

and then in the brief time that the meatballs are cooking,

oftentimes the garlic doesn't cook all the way

and you get some sort of like unpleasant chunks

of uncooked garlic in there.

This is gonna ensure that your garlic,

not only is it cooked totally through,

but it's cooked like low and slow

to a point of like deep caramelization

and you're bringing out these qualities

and flavors in the garlic that you wouldn't have otherwise.

So I'm putting this in the oven

and I'm gonna let it cruise in there at 275

for one and a half to two hours.

The garlic has this really nice caramelization on it,

so I'm just squeezing out

all of my perfectly roasted garlic here.

It's gonna really impart this.

Oh my god.

[Speaker] No, glasses.

I was trying to do the upward squeeze.

You're inevitably gonna get a little bit of oil in here.

That's fine, it's just gonna add some more flavor.

It's actually gonna help puree it.

And then if you have excess oil left in your dish here,

you can use this for another purpose.

You can use it for marinades, dressings.

Basically you've just infused oil here

with that garlic flavor.

So there's a couple ways you can do this.

You can take like a pastry scraper

and push this through a fine mesh sieve

or you could put it in a blender.

Just gonna go ahead and dump that in.

[machine whirring]

So I've pureed this now to like a pudding like texture.

You can see it's a nice golden brown.

This is a time consuming project

but you can make a big batch of it

and you can store it in the freezer.

You can use it for other recipes, it's really well worth it.

Now I'm gonna move on to some of my other steps

to put together the meatballs.

I'm gonna start with some onions.

We're gonna puree them

and then we're gonna ring them out

to remove any excess liquid.

If I didn't ring them out,

that might yield a very mushy meatball.

One of the important things about a good meatball

is the texture.

You want it to be like tender

but you don't want it to be mushy.

So these are just Spanish onions.

This is like a mild sweet onion.

With anything that you're putting in a food processor,

you just wanna chop it coarsely

just to kind of get it going.

I'm trying to puree these as finely as possible.

I kind of want them to just melt into my meatball

and then I'm gonna go ahead

and wring these out just using a clean towel.

So you can see there's a ton of liquid

coming off of these things.

As you can imagine, if all this moisture

made its way into our meatball mix,

it would yield a much different textured meatball

in the end.

[person laughing]

Really put all your strength into it, there you go.

This isn't the most attractive thing.

So you can see the onions are like basically dry.

So now I'm gonna basically take the inside

of a loaf of bread.

So this is like an Italian style

crusty loaf of bread.

In the restaurant,

what we do is we use the inside of the bread

for our meatball recipe

and then we kind of chop up the outer crust

and we dehydrate that and we make that

into toasted breadcrumbs

that we put on top of our pasta.

So if you wanna be an overachiever,

that's another thing you could do here.

In this case, I'm just using the inside,

but oftentimes people will use breadcrumbs

in their meatball recipe.

We choose to use this technique

because we feel like it yields a more tender result.

Breadcrumbs is gonna make your meatball dense ultimately.

So the fancy term for what I'm doing here,

this is called a Panade.

It's when you take bread and soak it with milk.

I have like two and a half cups of bread here.

I'm adding like a cup of milk.

It's gonna add some richness

that you wouldn't get from just regular breadcrumbs as well.

Just gonna gently turn that over

and make sure these are all coated really well.

I'm gonna let this bread soak for about 15 minutes.

While that's happening, I'm gonna go ahead

and start mixing together my other ingredients.

People use all different types of combinations

of meat for their meatballs.

Honestly, much like pasta,

I appreciate any type of meatball.

Like I never met a meatball I didn't like really,

but I think the best combination here is 50% veal,

50% beef, an all beef meatball,

I think the beef flavor can like overpower everything.

The veal is gonna add like a little bit more

of a delicate texture as well as a delicate flavor.

So it just kind of balances out the overall end result.

So I'm gonna go ahead

and start mixing these things together.

I have my onions here.

I'm gonna add in my veal as well as the beef.

We're also gonna use a couple of eggs.

This is gonna be a binder.

It's also gonna add some richness

to your overall flavor profile.

We have two types of cheese here.

We have Pecorino toscano.

A lot of Italian Americans are big on Pecorino cheese,

specifically Pecorino Romano.

I like to use pecorino toscano

'cause I feel like it has a little bit more depth of flavor.

It's not as salty and it's a little tangy as well.

The other type of cheese we're using here

is Parmigiano Reggiano.

Have some fresh parsley here.

I'm removing all the stems

and I'm just gonna use the leaves.

So this is just gonna be like roughly chopped.

I'm gonna add the parsley.

So now it's time to wring out this panade

to ensure that our meatballs are not mushy.

The bread is moist but it's not soaking wet.

I'm gonna go ahead and add this to my meatball mix.

And finally I'm adding the roasted garlic puree.

And as with anything else, you wanna make sure

that you're seasoning your mixture

with a generous amount of salt and pepper,

freshly cracked pepper is the best.

And now I'm going to just gently

mix these ingredients together,

kind of breaking it up a little bit

with my hands as I go.

The goal here is to do as little mixing as possible

just to make sure all these ingredients are combined.

If you overmix, you're gonna end up with a tough meatball.

It's okay if you have some little pockets

of like a little of the bread and cheese.

So my meatball mix is really light and airy.

So now I can form the meatballs.

I'm just gonna add a little layer of oil

to make sure they don't stick.

I highly recommend using like a release scoop,

like an ice cream scoop.

First off, it's just more efficient.

You're gonna move along much faster.

Second off, it's gonna ensure

that all of your meatballs are the exact same size,

so therefore they will cook evenly.

It's more efficient actually first

to just kind of scoop them out

and then you can go back and form them.

I'm spacing them out a bit

just so when they bake in the oven,

there's gonna be more surface area available for browning.

If you have time to pop the meatball mixture

in the refrigerator

before you form your meatballs, that's ideal.

Just the colder it is, the easier it's gonna be

to form like a nice sphere shape

and they'll hold their shape better when they bake.

I'm just gently forming these into like little balls

and they're kind of rustic.

I don't wanna overly manipulate these

because I want them to stay nice and light in texture.

This meatball recipe is very special to me.

My husband and I developed it.

It's basically an amalgamation

of both of our grandma's recipes combined.

For like a rustic spaghetti and meatballs dish,

I think a size like this works best.

It's gonna taste like meaty and hearty

and substantial, which I think is an important part

of the Italian American dish

that is spaghetti and meatballs.

I'm ready to put these in the oven.

I have my oven preheated to 425 degrees.

If I wanna cook these entirely, I'll leave them in there

for closer to 15 minutes.

For the sake of this recipe,

I might go a little less, maybe 12

or 13 minutes, just to slightly under bake them

so that when they simmer in the sauce,

they can kind of finish baking

and kind of take in a little bit of that tomato flavor.

[upbeat music]

I'm gonna go ahead and make

what we call our 10 minute San Marzano tomato sauce.

It's a very quick and easy recipe.

We intentionally like barely cook the tomatoes.

We love to use San Marzano DOP tomatoes specifically,

they're grown in San Marzano in this tiny little area

that's at the base of Mount Vesuvius.

And the way that the soil is there, it's like a combination

of the sand from the neighboring sea

and like the volcanic ash, whatever.

Supposedly it creates the best conditions

for growing tomatoes.

I'm sold on it.

We've done a ton of blind taste tests

and we feel like these are just like so superior

to other tomatoes, but these always will come whole

and you can process them in a food processor,

that's a quick and easy way to break them up

or you can break them by hand

in sort of a more rustic way.

So I'm just gonna carefully dump these in.

This is the telltale sign of the San Marzano style tomato.

It's got this little like, I don't know,

someone referred to it as a nipple one time

and I like almost said that

and I'm like, I can't say that.

So I'm just gonna pulse these.

[machine whirring]

So we just want kind of this slightly chunky consistency,

it's not like a perfect puree.

And the reason that we keep this sauce like fairly simple

is because we're just really trying to highlight

the quality of these tomatoes.

So now I'm gonna go ahead

and prepare some garlic, just looking for like eight cloves

and I'm just gonna gently smash them

while they're in their like jackets here.

This will kind of protect them as they cook.

We're not looking to add a lot of heavy garlic flavor here.

We're not adding chopped garlic

and after we let it simmer briefly,

we're gonna actually remove that

from the final result.

So these are all set and I'm gonna go ahead

and move over to the soap.

[upbeat music]

So now I'm ready to cook my sauce.

I just need like a heavy bottom sauce pot here

or a dutch oven.

I heat it up my oil, I just added in my garlic.

I'm letting that kind of fry gently in there.

Add a little salt now

just to kind of help draw the moisture outta the garlic.

It kinda helps the garlic cook a little faster.

And then I'm gonna add in a little bit of crushed red pepper

for a little tiny bit of gentle heat.

Let that fry just very briefly.

And now I'm gonna carefully add my tomato puree.

So there's all different styles of tomato sauce.

People have the misconception

that tomatoes should always cook for hours on end.

There is a time and a place for that,

I think like a Sunday style gravy

where you're like simmering a bunch of meat in there,

like that makes sense.

But in the case of this sauce,

we wanna preserve the freshness of the tomato flavor.

So I already brought it up to a simmer, I turned it off,

cut off the heat and now I'm just gonna add in some basil

while it's still hot

and let that just kind of steep in there.

This basil is just gonna add this really lovely aroma.

The tomatoes are natural products

that are always gonna kind of vary

in terms of their natural salinity, their natural acidity.

For that reason I always taste and adjust.

So I'm gonna add a little bit of salt here,

as well, just like a tiny bit of sugar.

The sugar is just kind of balancing out

the acidity of the tomatoes.

I think home cooks are often afraid

to over season things and I get it.

Obviously, it's like better to kind of start with less.

You can always add more, you can't take it away.

I get that philosophy, but in time, tasting things,

kind of tasting the difference

between what one bite

with this much salt versus the second bite

with a little more salt means

and kind of training your palate is helpful

because at the end of the day,

sometimes like things take more salt

than you would imagine.

Especially something

that's like inherently savory like tomato.

You just tend to take more salt

to be at that peak seasoning level in my opinion.

So we let this kind of steep, 10, 15 minutes,

I'm gonna go ahead and remove the basil

with the chunks of garlic.

They've kind of done their job here,

so our tomato sauce is ready to go.

These meatballs are ready.

We have a little bit of a golden crust here

and they're almost fully cooked.

They're very kind of delicate,

so I'm just gonna gently drop them into my sauce.

These are beautiful though, they're nice and rustic.

Also got some nice like caramelization

on the bottom there too, which is really nice.

I'm gonna bring this up just to like a gentle simmer

and make sure this sauce is nice and hot.

These are gonna finish cooking in the sauce,

kind of drink in a little bit

of that tomato flavor there.

They're gonna be great.

[upbeat music]

So we already have prepared our meatballs and our sauce.

We made a very like simple paired down

version of tomato sauce.

If you wanna like go crazy

and take it to the next level,

kind of like restaurant quality,

I add a little more shallot

and garlic, but in a different format.

I'm gonna go ahead and grate some garlic on a microplane.

So this is a microplane.

It's kind of the equivalent of using like a garlic press,

but you're not crushing

and destroying the garlic so much when you do it.

You're basically just finely shaving

these little like strands of garlic, some shallot.

You don't have to do all this extra stuff,

but it adds just some complexity and depth.

I'm also gonna prepare a little bit of basil.

So we're making spaghetti and meatballs today,

but technically we're using Spaghettini,

which is a slightly skinnier version of spaghetti.

It just feels like a little more refined.

When it comes to dried pasta,

I highly recommend buying an Italian made product.

These are companies that have been making dried pasta

for hundreds of years,

using really high quality grains from Italy

and I think it really makes a big difference.

This is like extruded through a bronze dye,

so you can tell it kind of has that rough texture

on the outside and that is gonna help the sauce

cling to the noodles when it's all done.

One important note about cooking pasta

is that you really wanna use a generous amount

of salt in the water.

Any of these extruded, dried pastas you're gonna buy,

they're not seasoned with salt,

so you basically wanna impart seasoning

from your pasta water.

If you don't do that, you're just gonna end up

with an under seasoned dish at the end there.

You wanna ensure that your pasta water

is at a rolling boil before you add the pasta.

If it's not, the minute you add it,

you're adding something that's basically cold,

it's gonna drop the temperature, it's gonna take

that much longer for you to get back up to a boil,

that could yield like a very gummy end result.

The last thing is you wanna make sure

you have a lot of water for the pasta to swim in

so it can move around freely.

If you don't, you can end up

with your pasta sticking together.

So while the pasta's boiling,

I'm gonna go ahead and start my pan sauce.

I'm adding some olive oil.

I can tell that my olive oil's kind of heating up

just by the way it's moving in the pan.

I'm gonna go ahead and add some shallots.

I'm gonna add a little bit of salt.

Again, this is gonna start drawing some moisture

out of my shallots

and ensure that they cook a little more evenly.

I'm just gonna add a little pepper.

[pan clinking]

These shallots are almost cooked all the way.

I'm gonna go ahead and add my grated garlic.

So this garlic is grated so finely

that it's gonna basically

just kind of melt, cooks very quickly.

It's ready to go, and now I'm gonna just go ahead

and add in my tomato sauce.

So I'm just kind of shaking the pan

to mix everything together.

At this point, my spaghetti should be cooked.

I cook the pasta to like Al dente.

I mean you're kind of best off

sort of following the instructions on the box.

So the spaghettini's gonna cook

a little faster than spaghetti

just 'cause it's thinner.

I kind of tossed it in the sauce here,

at this point if you so choose,

this is not the most Italian ingredient,

but you can add a little butter,

just to kinda add a little creaminess.

It's gonna help emulsify the sauce,

help it coat the pasta really nicely,

as well as a little bit of cheese.

And then finally some basil.

I'm really flipping this pasta around a lot,

but you can achieve the same thing

if you just vigorously mix with a wooden spoon.

You could do it with a pair of tweezers like these.

You're basically just trying to ensure

that your butter and cheese are kind of melted in there

and then we're good to go.

You can see that the sauce

is really clinging to the spaghetti.

Now we're ready to add this to our plate

and top it with some meatballs.

[upbeat music]

I'm just gonna kind of twirl these with my tongs here.

You don't have to do it, but I think it makes

for a nice polished finished result.

And then I'm just gonna go ahead

and add my meatballs on top.

You know I'm a more is more kind of gal here.

Maybe we'll do like three, add a little more cheese.

'Cause why not, love cheese.

I like to use a microplane again for grating cheese.

It's just like a very delicate dusting

and it's gonna kind of melt into the pasta there.

And then just a little more cracked pepper and that's it.

We have spaghetti with meatballs.

I think to get a perfect bite,

you gotta get a little bit of everything here.

Yeah, it's perfect.

The tomatoes are really bright and acidic,

but then you kind of have the contrast

of rich meatballs, but they compliment each other perfectly.

The meatballs are so delicate

and they kind of just gently fall apart

right into the rest of the dish.

The sauce is clinging perfectly to every bite of this pasta.

I just love this pasta shape.

The texture is like really fun

and it just like works really well

with the rest of the dish.

This is inherently a simple dish,

but the way that we've executed it,

we've just added layers of flavor and complexity

that just yielded this very refined end result.

I really encourage you to take the extra time

and effort as well as to seek out

some of these high quality Italian ingredients.

All of that I think cumulatively

is gonna yield the best result

and I think it's really well worth it

to create the best version of spaghetti and meatballs.

[upbeat music]