Minced meatballs with gravy is a simple and very tasty dish. It can hardly be called festive, but it goes well with many side dishes and is suitable for an everyday budget dinner or a family Sunday lunch. In classic recipes, meatballs consist of minced meat or fish, in which only spices, onions, sometimes greens and ground nuts are added. However, Russian housewives are able to cook meatballs with gravy, using additional ingredients. They make the dish tastier and richer. In the article you will find recipes for meatballs with gravy with photos. Step by step they are easy to prepare, following the algorithm.
Meat selection
The taste of meatballs largely depends on the quality of the meat. Of course, you can cook meatballs with gravy from meat scraps or minced meat, which has lain in the freezer for a long time. However, such a dish is unlikely to amaze the imagination with its taste. It is better not to skimp and buy fresh meat, twist it and immediately use it for its intended purpose. Moreover, meatballs are tastier from several varieties of meat. For example, you can mix minced pork and chicken or beef and turkey.
Other ingredients
Also in the meatballs there are always spices that every culinary specialist chooses, guided by their own preferences. Paprika, black pepper, nutmeg, coriander go well with meat. It is difficult to cook meatballs with gravy that are really tasty without adding green and onions to the minced meat. Chives are finely chopped or twisted with meat. Onions finely chopped and put in minced meat raw or pre-fried. In the first case, the dish turns out more juicy, in the second - more aromatic.
There are recipes in which there are no other ingredients besides meat, onions and spices. However, many housewives improve the taste of the dish with the help of other products. Most often, bread is placed in the stuffing, which makes the meatballs juicier, more magnificent and cheaper.
Moreover, professional chefs advise adding dry bread, rather than soaked in water or milk. Wet bread does not hold meat juice as effectively as dry crumbs. And milk protein during frying curls up and makes meat stiff. For the same reason, it is better not to use chicken eggs when cooking minced meatballs with gravy.
The recipes for this dish are very diverse, in the list of ingredients there are a variety of products: rice, cheese, semolina, beans, cabbage, zucchini. However, with additives you need to experiment carefully, otherwise instead of meatballs you can get something in between meatballs and meatballs.
Gravy
Gravy and meatballs create an excellent culinary alliance. They mutually exchange tastes and aromas. There are a lot of gravy options. It is made on the basis of milk, yogurt or cream, tomatoes or broth, a mixture of vegetables or berries. Fragrant sauce impregnates the side dish and not only improves the taste of the food, but also makes it beautiful. The most convincing proof of this is the delicious and seductive meatballs with gravy, photos of which appear in step-by-step recipes.
What and where to cook
Meatballs are usually fried and then stewed with gravy. Therefore, for them, dishes with high sides, a thick bottom, a lid and good, uniform heat conductivity are considered optimal. It can be a stewpan, a cauldron, a deep frying pan, a ducklings, a glass baking dish. You can cook meatballs with gravy in thin-walled and aluminum dishes, but the risk is high that the products will burn.
It is very convenient to stew meatballs in a slow cooker. An oven effect is created in it, the dish does not even stew, but slowly languishes. In a slow cooker, you can do all the operations prescribed by the recipe: first fry the meat balls, then prepare the gravy, and then combine them together. The special coating of the bowl virtually eliminates the possibility of burning food. In addition, meatballs are cooked with gravy in a frying pan over medium heat or baked in the oven at an average temperature of 180 ° C.
General cooking principle
Typically, meatballs are molded in the form of small balls of the same size. So they cook faster, and they are convenient to eat. The diameter of such balls should not be larger than the average walnut, and some housewives take the size of the filling for dumplings as a guide. Regardless of which recipe is used, meatballs with gravy are prepared according to a single principle:
- First, minced balls are formed.
- Then they are fried or put in the gravy raw. It's a matter of taste, but fried meatballs are more juicy.
- Separately prepare gravy.
- Meatballs are put in the gravy and stewed or baked until tender.
Subtleties
There are several tricks that make the cooking process easier and help make meatballs especially tasty:
- The minced meat is homogeneous, and the meatballs are lush and airy, if the twisted meat and other ingredients are mixed by hand, and not with a blender or other kitchen gadget.
- It is not necessary to form meatballs too tightly, from this they become too rigid.
- It is convenient to sculpt meat balls using a teaspoon soaked in water, it is easier to control the same size of meatballs.
- If you add a little finely chopped smoked meat to the minced meat, then the dish will have a spicy aroma.
- Before roasting meatballs, you can roll in flour, so they will have a delicious golden crust.
- You need to fry them in a well-heated pan so that the minced meat does not stick to the sides and the bottom.
- Fry the meatballs in a row. If they all do not fit at the bottom of the dishes, they are divided into batches.
- Gravy can be made thicker by adding flour to it, and thinner - using broth, milk or water.
- Meatballs are stored in the freezer for a long time. At any time, they can be thawed and added to the soup or cooked with gravy.
With vegetable gravy
To cook meatballs with gravy from vegetables, you only need desire, some foods and about an hour. You can safely experiment with a set of vegetables by choosing the ingredients as you wish. This dish is most appropriate in the autumn, when vegetables are especially juicy and aromatic. It can be eaten separately, or served with rice or mashed potatoes. Ingredients:
- For meatballs: 300 grams of minced meat; 50 grams of rolls; onion head; spice.
- For gravy: onion head; small zucchini; a tomato; one carrot; one bell pepper; a few garlic cloves; 50 grams of tomato paste; salt and spices.
Cooking:
- Knead the minced meat thoroughly by adding spices to the meat, chopped in a blender or moistened with water loaf, crushed garlic and chopped onions.
- Blind meatballs of the same size.
- Fry them in vegetable oil to make them brown. Put the meatballs on a paper towel so that they give off excess fat. Although in this recipe you can not fry meatballs, but put them raw in the vegetable sauce.
- In the same bowl, if its volume allows, fry the vegetables cut into strips or cubes in the following sequence. First - carrots and onions, then - peeled tomato from the skin, and finally - pasta, bell pepper and zucchini. After that, fry the vegetable mixture for about 5-7 minutes.
- Add a glass of water, preferably hot, so that it boils immediately. Put meatballs to vegetables and simmer until all vegetables are ready under the closed lid.
With sour cream gravy
The dish is prepared extremely quickly and easily, goes well with pasta, fried potatoes, buckwheat. If the refrigerator has a stock of frozen meatballs, then after half an hour an excellent lunch may appear on the table. The following ingredients are required for preparation:
- For meatballs: 500 grams of minced meat, poultry meat in perfect harmony with sour cream; bulb; favorite spices; clove of garlic; one egg.
- For gravy: 200-250 milliliters of sour cream; a couple of spoons of flour; clove of garlic; spices, especially nutmeg and black pepper; salt; greens.
Cooking:
- Prepare the gravy by mixing sour cream with spices, flour, salt and a glass of water.
- For minced meat, it is better to take in equal parts poultry (turkey or chicken) and pork. Stir the minced meat thoroughly by adding chopped onion, egg, spices and garlic.
- Form the meatballs, roll them in flour and fry until lightly crusted.
- Pour with sour cream gravy and leave to simmer for 10 minutes under the lid.
- Adjust the density of the gravy by adding flour or water.
- Add pre-chopped greens to the dish and serve with pasta or another side dish.
With spicy tomato sauce
Due to the rich tomato flavor and spicy chili, these meatballs are easily suitable for any side dish and are able to warm during long winter cold weather. Ingredients:
- For meatballs: 500 grams of any minced meat; a few arrows of green onions; one onion; spice; breading flour; one tablespoon of mayonnaise or sour cream.
- For the sauce: a few very ripe tomatoes or one pack of natural tomato pulp; ground or fresh chili peppers; a pair of medium onions; greens to taste; salt.
Cooking:
- Knead the minced meat with all the ingredients. Moreover, it is better to pass onions through a meat grinder or grate so that he gives more juice to meatballs.
- Make small meat balls, roll them in flour and fry.
- Separately prepare the gravy, first sautéing the onion, and then adding the peeled tomatoes, finely chopped salt and spices to it.
- Combine the gravy and meatballs, simmer the dish for 10 minutes, add the greens.
Swedish Meatballs
Dish of Scandinavian cuisine. It has a delicate creamy taste, and meatballs literally melt in your mouth, if you follow the recipe exactly. For cooking you will need:
- For meatballs: 500 grams of ground beef, it can be diluted with minced meat from turkey or chicken fillet; two slices of dried white bread; salt; bulb; ground nutmeg and a pinch of black pepper.
- For gravy: 100 milliliters of cream with a fat content of 35%; 400 milliliters of beef or chicken stock; a few tablespoons of flour.
Cooking:
- In a separate bowl or in a blender bowl, mix the gravy ingredients.
- Grind the loaf in a blender.
- Fry the onion.
- Add onion and roll to the meat along with spices.
- Knead the minced meat well and form meat balls.
- Fry them in oil until almost ready, add gravy to the pan.
- Stew meatballs in sauce for a couple of minutes.