welcome friends welcome back
to the kitchen today i'm going to make a
meatball in
beer sauce and i'm going to use our
homemade
vienna lager that julie and i make i'm
going to start out with a little bit of
milk
and some bread crumbs and i'm using
really finely crushed bread crumbs you
could use a couple of slices of white
bread you could use
finely ground crackers it doesn't really
matter too much
which of those you use what you're
looking for is a medium
that's going to grab the moisture from
the milk and then carry that through
the cooking process so the meatballs
don't get dry and pretty much as soon as
you mix this in
it it fully absorbs the milk so i'm just
going to set that aside
in this bowl i have some ground meat
i've got a
one pound chub of ground meat to that
i'm going to add
some thyme i'm gonna add a little bit of
salt some black pepper and you don't
need to over
season the meat there's going to be a
lot of flavor in the sauce and it's all
going to come together
next in is some nutmeg and i'm going to
freshly grind a little bit of nutmeg
in there somewhere between half
and a whole teaspoon which actually is a
lot of nutmeg now that i've just said
you don't need to over season them
so i'm going to put that in
next i've got a couple of onions minced
up really
fine those go in
one egg
and the bread crumbs and there shouldn't
be any liquid milk in there it's all
absorbed into the breadcrumbs
and get in there with your hands best
way to mix it
now you need to divide this up into
meatballs pretty self-explanatory
and you can make them as big or as small
as you like
i think maybe just a little bit smaller
than
a ping-pong ball or somewhere around a
ping-pong ball and a golf ball
about that big and it's um it makes it a
whole lot easier if you wet your hands
which i never do but i understand that
it makes it a whole lot easier if you
wet your hands
to get them formed without it sticking
to your fingers
so i'm gonna form these meatballs
so i ended up with 17 meatballs not all
the same size but pretty close to all
the same size
and over here i have a pan that's
already preheated with some oil in the
bottom
so what we want to do is just brown the
outside
of these meatballs
we don't need to cook them all the way
through because we will be cooking them
later in the sauce
and one of my problems is always i'm
never
gentle enough at this point and i have
to get the uh i have to get the
meatballs broken up
so be very gentle with them turn them
very slowly
take care with them until they're nice
and brown on the outside
now there's still some oil in the bottom
of this pan the oil that i put in
originally plus whatever came out of the
meatballs
so i need to add a little bit of butter
to bring it up a bit i'm gonna
judge by what's in here i'm looking for
between three and four tablespoons of
oil in the bottom to match the amount of
flour that i'm putting in
it doesn't have to be exact you can just
eyeball it i'm gonna add that much
butter back in i'm to melt the butter
down
while that butter is melting i'm going
to add in a sliced
onion and we want to fry that up to get
it nice and
not quite brown but we want to get it
translucent at least
you also want to put in some garlic now
i looked out in the garden today i
didn't want to pull any garlic out
because i pulled a lot of garlic out
already and it's not really ready yet
but the scapes are growing and this
curly thing grows out of the grows out
of the garlic and it grows tall above
all the leaves and at the end
is the flower or where the little
bulbils
depending on which kind of garlic you
have some have a flower that gives you
seed i have some of those
and some give you a bulbil with tiny
little garlics that you plant next year
instead of planting a seed so all i've
done is
chop those up i'm going to put those in
as well what you have is garlic from the
grocery store
garlic from the grocery store is going
to be just fine
so just going to give this a stir around
i'm going to scrape up the brown bits
from cooking the meatballs because
that's going to add a lot of flavor to
the sauce
and it's not going to take very long
as much as i want to get that
translucent i don't want to add
too much color to them so let's move
right along
this is flour i just want to put the
flour in
and stir it in and coat it with the oil
and cook it just a little bit
and that doesn't take long at all almost
right away i am ready for the beer and
like i said i'm using
our homemade vienna lager
use a beer that you like i prefer a dark
beer for this and i prefer
prefer a dark beer that's not too hoppy
i like hoppy beers i really do
but i find that in a dish like this the
more you reduce the sauce
the more bitter it becomes and so a
hoppy beer that you enjoy
drinking all of a sudden becomes too
bitter at the end
to actually eat so i'm going to pour
this in a little by little i've got a
whisk standing by just in case
there we go it all goes in now and you
just want to whisk that until the sauce
is smooth it's not going to thicken up
just
yet really what you want to make sure is
that there are no
clumps of flour which is a little bit
hard to see over the foam from the
beer now this is coming back up to
temperature
we've scraped the bottom it's going to
come to a
simmer and as it's coming to a simmer
and put the meatballs back in
now you don't want this to you don't
want this to boil hard
because the meatballs will break up so
it's just a light
gentle simmer is what you're looking for
and of course once you put all of the
meatballs back in if there's any
juice on the plate that goes in
as well now i'm going to put the lid on
this and i'm going to let it
simmer gently for about a half an hour
at about the 10 and 20 minute mark i'm
going to lift the lid
and i'm going to turn the meatballs over
make sure that they're all
in that sauce
i almost forgot the most important part
you need a little bit of sweetness to
balance this out
now the first few times i had this and i
made this i used applesauce
applesauce works really well you need
about a cup cup and a half
of applesauce mix it in when you put in
the
onions and the beer maple syrup
works incredible and this is our
homemade maple syrup that we
we tapped our maple trees this spring
out in the garden
so i'm going to put in about a quarter
cup
of maple syrup now of course you could
use any sweetener that you like
applesauce is probably the way to go if
you don't have maple syrup
there we go and i'll just take a spoon
and gently stir that in and leave it to
simmer
[Music]
hey jules hey glenn hi friends so
meatballs in a beer sauce okay
i'm why not let's give this a go
there's one for you why thank you and
one for me and there's a lot of sauce
here
great for dipping bread yeah rice oh
yeah
yeah you could put it on rice and
noodles and all of those yeah as if you
didn't want to just eat them with
bread so
a lot of the flavor depends on the beer
you put in
the meatball's really nice and tender
isn't it mm-hmm it's got a really sweet
flavor
i wasn't expecting a sweet flavor maple
syrup
i see you during your dance of joy yeah
so
the beer really changes the flavor like
i said earlier when i was putting the
beer in
if if it's too hoppy or too bitter to
start with it is definitely going to be
really bitter you're going to want to
pick something you like yeah
yeah if you don't like beer add red wine
red wine or white wine yeah well yeah
but then you know
if you really like coffee beer and some
people do
you may really like hopping meatballs
but it's true i don't know so feel free
to try it let us know
don't let me sway you on that but for my
own palette if it's too hoppy it gets
too bitter at the end
so many things you could do with these
meatballs of course you could make them
really tiny
put them in a crock pot serve them with
toothpicks
at a party i know that at the family
picnic
the meatballs go really quickly they're
gone
it's because they're that in the uh the
fried chicken
oh and the red curry pie at the end yeah
okay so
um really easy dish to pull off you
could do it in a crock pot it would work
fantastic you could put it in the oven
options options thanks for stopping by
see you again soon
you