How do you make your spaghetti with meatball sauce?

I know spaghetti is the pasta, but you know what I mean.

Sometimes I do a bolognese sauce, but usually I make meatballs, about nickel to quarter-sized, also an equal amount of browned sweet Italian sausage cut after broiling into small bites and added to the sauce with the meatballs cooked in olive oil.

For sauce, I use cans of tomatoes, dicing them, adding lots of sliced mushrooms, diced onion, fresh minced garlic. Some water, red wine, and Maggi are used. Spices include bay leaves, garlic powder, parsley, lots of oregano, pepper, a little basil, crushed red pepper, and black pepper. I add some olive oil to the sauce, a couple tablespoons.

Meatballs are made w ground beef (sometimes veal added), regular and Panko bread crumbs, eggs, a little cream and ketchup, and spices similar to the sauce.

I cook it for hours, adding a small can of tomato paste if needed to thicken, water if too thick, stirring often.

Today I made a huge batch (almost 20 quarts), will freeze a lot for future meals. It is in fact best a few days after being made.

Spaghetti w meatballs is my deathbed meal.

we’re blessed in my area with some great old time Italian butchers, so I don’t even try to make my own blend. I brown and let it simmer in store bought tomato and basil sauce. When that goodness leaches out into the sauce, it becomes heavenly.

I tend to go for a drier & more concentrated sauce, so usually (in order): minced garlic, anchovies, chunks of sausage (from the butcher), tomato paste, red wine, canned tomatoes and chili flake. Sometimes toasted breadcrumbs as garnish

Generally we go with a rather simple prep from Marzella Hazan (Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter):
-quart size jar (we can our own tomatoes) or 28 oz can of whole, peeled tomatoes
-5 T butter
-1 medium onion, peeled & cut in half
-a little salt

Crush tomatoes by hand and add to saucepan; add butter & onion. Simmer for 45 min. Remove onion. Taste for salt & add as needed.

Sometimes we add a parm rind and a couple of cloves of smashed garlic, which would be removed at the end.

This is a great sauce for a simple pasta dish, gnocchi, or even pizza.

you forgot the meatballs!

To degrease the browned meat really effectively but easily, just toss a sturdy paper towel into the pan and stir around for a minute. Then, remove and dispose the towel.

No offense, but how is this better than a pour of wine or the tomato liquid? Just seems unnecessary to me.

Do so before adding any tomatoes or wine. Try it.

Upon rereading I see where you were going. I thought you were saying you cleaned the pan with that but now I read it as you are removing some of the fat this way. If that is the case I’ve done similar, but not necessary for tomato sauce.

Yes. I will brown a sizable batch of lean ground meat with various spices, de-grease as such, and then freeze portions for later use. Any resultant Bolognese sauce is easy and not fatty.

I do this once a month on a Sundays, usually about 2lb meat and 2lb sausage with some extra pork ribs for the texture they lend the sauce:

Meatballs are beef and pork mix with garlic, breadcrumbs, grated romano, an egg, salt and pepper. Also parsley when it is growing outside but I skip it rather than buy it in the winter.

Brown the meatballs along with hot and sweet Italian sausages and some pork spare-ribs or neck bones.

Remove all the meat, add olive oil if more fat is needed and a head’s worth of garlic cloves, crushed, then sprinkle in oregano and pepper flakes to taste, add 1 whole onion (if large, 2 if smaller), diced, and a whole carrot, diced, add salt and pepper, cook until onions are translucent.

Now add 1 small can of tomato paste and continue cooking. You’re building layers of flavor here so let everything get some color. Then deglaze the pan with some white wine, whatever is open, or red if that’s all you have. Add all this to a blender with one 28oz can of tomatoes and blend until smooth.

This mixture goes back into the pot with another 2 28oz cans of tomatoes, crushed or blended also, the meat and any drippings that have accumulated, and a bay leaf. Let that cook for the rest of the day, adjust seasoning as needed.

This was adapted and tweaked from my grandmothers recipe over the years, and it’s damn near perfect at this point. One important note is to use the best quality tomatoes you can find, or find a brand that you like and stick to them. We also can our own on the farm, but if I’m out, I really love the “Jersey Fresh” branded crushed tomatoes you can get in the tri-state area and they are usually cheaper than most REAL San Marzano tomatoes, and for me they make the best sauce (and pizza topping) of the grocery store options.

Similar to my Grammy’s. Don’t discount how much the pork rib adds to the flavor. Yes the SM tomato is crucial.

How about a great Vitello Tonnato recipe? That was one that blew my mind when I was young visiting Milano.

This:

And this:

Never looked back.

Spaghetti - I buy some fresh pasta, whether spaghetti or not.

Meatballs - Equal parts coarsely ground beef and pork, a lot of finely minced garlic, nothing wrong with a little finely minced onion if you like, a lot of fresh chopped basil, a little coarse salt, a little coarse ground black pepper, add a small dash of Worcestershire and/or Pickapeppa sauce, shape very gently into golf-ball size or a little smaller. Saute gently until barely cooked through, tossed regularly to brown evenly.

Sauce - Towards the end of summer, slowly cook up a bunch of fresh, very ripe tomatos, adding fresh oregano. Do not overcook, so that they remain mostly liquid. Cool, and freeze in ice cube trays, covering the trays tightly to avoid freezer burn and dehydration.

Use as many cubes as you need to make the right amount of sauce for the amount of pasta and meatballs, heat the sauce gently. Cook the pasta al dente at the same time you add the barely cooked meatballs to the sauce.

I prefer to put the sauce and meatballs on the plate, then put the pasta on top and mix through gently as I eat the stuff.

I am not a celebrity chef for good and obvious reasons.

Dan Kravitz

PS: I agree with Victor Hong and have been sopping up excess grease the way he suggests for a long time.

Dan Kravitz

I bake mine. Don’t need the extra oil.

It’s funny to see those who discuss baking or using Victor’s method to remove oil from the sauce, as opposed to the method that Todd discusses using ample meats and their fat to add flavor and texture to the sauce. FWIW I don’t have any one method, but tend to view these as separate options. I enjoy a sauce cooked all day with meat, and finished with some butter, but for a weeknight sauce will gladly pan fry or bake meatballs and add to a really lean basic sauce.

I haven’t put in a proper garden at the new house yet, so this year I’ve been buying the giant (108 oz) can of whole peeled tomatoes at Costco. Very happy with quality and the price is absurd in comparison. From that I make a base sauce that can be used on pizza or with pasta and make alterations as necessary. Makes about 5 pint jars of finished sauce.

Sorry, I read the post title as requesting a sauce recipe. For meatballs I use a beef/pork mix (70/30 or thereabouts), a panade with fresh bread crumbs/milk, sauteed onion, parsley a little parm, S&P, and an egg. Form balls and brown in skillet, then finish in oven. Meatballs also can be finished in the sauce.

For years I would make the meatballs from the recipe for Monday night meatballs on the web(comes from an Italian restaurant in San Fancisco) and they were quite good.However recently my wife has just been sauteing meatballs from the prepared Italian sausage mix at Gelson’s market and it’s much better.
my wife corrected me.She also adds fennel,oregano,bread crumbs and an egg.

My wife is half Sicilian. So I make it by following her orders.
We use 1/3 each of beef, veal, and pork. To me the key is really getting a crust on the fried meat balls. They soften back up with cooking in the sauce. We definitely put browned Italian sausage in too. We toss a couple of the meatballs in the sauce for the full, long cook. They will usually break up, at least partially, which deepens the sauce. Then we’ll put the rest of the meatballs in for less of the total sauce cooking process.