This is how my mother in law makes the meatballs and since we’re Romanians, I’ll call this the Romanian meatball recipe. Feel free to use the recipe and adapt to your taste.
I love cooking these meatballs, usually I yield 24 at least (50 if I double my ingredients) and it’s enough food for 2 days, as they can be re-heated nicely in the microwave. I pair them up with my creamy mashed potatoes recipe and some tomato sauce.
Romanian Meatballs Ingredients
You can make them with ground veal, but I like to use pork. FATTY ground pork, otherwise they’ll be too dry.
- 1 lbs fatty ground pork meat
- 1 egg
- 1 onion
- 1 bell pepper (you can put a red one, looks cool)
- 4-5 cloves of garlic
- 1/2 zucchini
- 1 big potato
- 1 bread slice (no crust)
- 1 tablespoon of paprika
- salt and pepper to taste
- diced fresh dill and parsley (you can also keep them in freezer), not the dried version.
How to Make the Romanian Meatballs Recipe
I’ll write the steps in “batches”, so that you don’t do the same thing twice.
- put the ground pork in a big bowl.
- add the egg (it will help hold the meatball in place, when you shape it)
- crush the garlic cloves
- dice your onion and peppers. Small pieces, we don’t want to get huge clumps of veggies in the meatball;
- peel the skins off and then finely grate the zucchini and potato. Take the water out as much as possible (I usually put them in a sifter and gently push down, to get the water out). VERY IMPORTANT to dry them out, otheriwse your meatballs will become VERY runny and will break apart during cooking.
- put the slice of bread (without the crust) in a bowl with warm water. When it’s mushy, get it through the sifter as well, to remove as much water as possible. I know it sounds crazy to do this, you will get nice meatballs, trust the crazy Romanian 🙂
- add the paprika, salt and pepper (I go for almost a teaspoon of salt and pepper, but you’ll know how much you want to put). Again, it sounds crazy, when I mix the ingredients together I just touch the mixture with my tongue to feel if it’s too salty or not. If you are scared of getting Ecoli, don’t do it, as it’s raw meat afterall.
- add parsley and dill.
- get a big pan with vegetable oil and heat it up
- shape the meatballs. I usually get a handful and shape like a patty
- fry them for 10-12 minutes on a side (medium heat) and check for the back to be golden brown. Not too charred, but not too “blonde” either.
- turn on the other side for few more minutes (will take less time, make sure you don’t burn them.
