- On the Spot
- Season 1
- Episode 3
Pro Chef & Amateur Try to Make Spaghetti and Meatballs With No Recipe
Released on 09/24/2024
Oh, that's what the thing's for.
Oh my God. Yeah.
[chilled jazz music]
Spaghetti and meatballs.
Handmade pasta with tender meatballs,
crafted from freshly ground beef,
pork and veal.
Bathed in a rich tomato sauce
with fresh herbs and Parmesan.
I have made pasta from scratch before.
Basically, I'm part spaghetti meatballs myself.
I might nail this.
I think I can get it done in about five minutes maybe,
10 minutes. [laughing]
No recipe, two hours, no problem.
I gotta use every ingredient.
Looks like I have some pork shoulder, some veal.
Whole milk. What do I do with the milk?
Well, I'm gonna start my pasta.
I'm taking the whole darn chicken with me, people.
So I'm gonna start with making my pasta dough
because that needs to rest.
I'm just eyeballing it here, right?
I'm gonna make pasta for the whole crew today.
Double zero flour is really nice.
Just means it's extra fine. It's milled really finely.
I have a little salt
and I'm gonna crack my eggs into the well.
You could easily do this on the table, like granny style,
but I'm doing it into a bowl
so that I don't have too much of a mess.
A lot of people think that all Italian chefs
use fresh pasta all the time.
The story really is,
is that most Italians will probably use dry pasta.
Fresh pasta tends to be special occasion pasta.
All right, I got two hours.
I'm gonna start with the sauce.
So let's start chopping.
First onion of the day,
but I feel like if I had an Italian grandmother,
she would like, cook her sauce for like six hours,
like all day.
Here's the thing, tomato sauce with meatballs
doesn't need to cook as long as most people think.
It isn't a general Sunday sauce.
Sunday sauce has lots of different meats in there.
That needs to cook a long time for that meat to break down.
I think I want this sauce to be pretty garlicky.
Spaghetti and meatballs, very homey dish.
I think I have to mess up real, real bad
for this to be like, inedible.
What's funny about spaghetti and meatballs,
it's not really an Italian thing.
Italians, you say spaghetti and meatballs
and they'll be like,
Yeah, you eat spaghetti and you eat meatballs,
but you never eat 'em together.
So it's truly a nice American dish.
Can I have a bench scraper?
She's ready to go. I knew she was ready to go.
I'm just chopping in my eggs to the flour.
I don't want it to be sticky on my hands.
So chop it in, start gathering it together.
Fold and push.
And I want this to be a fairly smooth ball of dough.
Now what I'm gonna do is get my plastic wrap.
I'm gonna let it rest for at least a half hour
so it's easy to roll out.
Here we go.
[pot lid clanks]
To the pot, put it on medium low.
Don't wanna burn anything. Need some olive oil.
Just gonna oil the pot a little bit.
I'm much more experienced in Italian cooking
than French cooking,
but I guess I'm not really experienced in can openers.
These are whole peeled tomatoes.
Full disclosure, don't work with these that often.
So I'm gonna put in crushed red pepper.
So this fennel seed,
I'm kind of between using it for the sauce
or using it in the meatballs.
I don't know what fennel seeds tastes like.
Oh! This is terrible.
I'm sure it has some like, flavor properties
once you cook it a little bit,
but just like, you know, jar to mouth, horrendous.
Got a little salt in there.
And a little pepper. Why not?
The tomatoes are pretty chunky. Kind of worried about that.
You know, immersion boiling your tomatoes,
they don't tend to fall apart.
And if all you have is big chunks of tomatoes,
like, it's not gonna cling to your pasta.
They are whole. It's big.
What I do need now is a grinder.
The reason I'm starting the meatballs
is because I'm gonna brown the meatballs
and then make this all from the same pot,
so that I get all those flavors from the meatballs
in my pot.
Ah. Jeez, okay.
So I'm gonna learn today how to use a meat grinder.
Never used one before.
One thing I need to get before I start
is some of the milk and some of the bread.
Traditionally, in my house, this wasn't a big thing.
I'm gonna use it here 'cause we have it today
and I have to use it.
So I'm just getting the white of the bread.
You could give this to the birds.
My grandmother would go in the backyard
and throw it for the birds.
The bread's gonna be not only a binder, an extender.
Meatballs were a way to extend a small amount of meat
to feed a lot of people.
One of the things I really can't stand
is a meatball that has too much meat in it.
With too much meat, they tend to be crumbly.
So I'm just gonna set this aside for a few minutes
and let my bread soak.
I'm gonna set up my grinder.
I like to get my meat super cold in the fridge
just because it grinds easier.
Big knife for meat chopping.
Let's give it a cut right on the line.
I have three types of meat here.
Beef, pork, and veal.
The veal is adding tenderness,
the beef is one of the main flavors,
and the pork not only adds flavor, but it adds a lot of fat.
I gotta cut 'em up into smaller cubes, I guess.
A lot of people cut this meat into cubes.
I like to cut it into long strips.
I'm gonna use the skin, but this is gonna go in the sauce.
Meat looks, honestly, delicious.
I could eat it like this, practically.
I won't. And you shouldn't.
Normally, I do 50% beef, 25% pork, and 25% veal.
I might not be perfect on that ratio right now.
Never worked with a meat grinder before.
I've seen them. I saw Sweeney Todd.
Put our beef into this bowl for now.
I think this is my veal.
And then I'm gonna get my pork.
Bowl goes under the grinder.
And this is why I like to use strips.
Watch this.
The grinder pretty much pulls it through itself.
With cubes, you're constantly fussing with it.
Once it catches, it pulls itself through.
Can I have a larger bowl please?
[Film Crew Member] I don't think we have a bigger one.
All right.
[meat grinder clanking]
I try and use as many fatty parts as I can.
Fat equals flavor in case you didn't know that.
[Jon chuckling]
What you're doing when you're grinding,
so you're doing something called mechanical tenderization.
A lot of times you'll see people with a piece of meat
that is not super tender,
and what they'll do is they'll pound it out.
Basically, that's what the grinder does.
It tenderizes our meat.
I think that's good.
Maybe two more pieces of veal and we're good.
Gotta open up this hatch, maybe?
Ah.
[grinder clanking]
Oh my God, is that it?
Are we in business?
All right. Okay.
Okay. Okay, okay, okay, okay.
Good lord.
All right, let's try with like, one piece of veal.
[grinder whirring]
Maybe I have to take some stuff?
Oh! I gotta put it back, yeah.
[film crew laughing]
I guess I just gotta keep putting meats in,
see if anything comes out.
Yep. Yes!
Fantastic.
Like, I don't think like,
anybody sells like, a ground blend
of like, veal, pork and beef at the same time,
so it's nice that I get to be able to customize it.
Pretty much any supermarket I've ever been to,
you'll see a blend pack.
It'll be beef, pork, and veal laid out side by side.
I've seen that a lot.
I think we've successfully grinded everything.
So there we go. There's our grinder.
We can take the grinder away.
I'm gonna put some parsley in my meatballs.
Will I put the fennel seed in the meatballs?
No. I'm not gonna take that risk.
I'm gonna put some oil, salt and pepper in the meatballs.
The herbs, I forgot about all the herbs.
Oh jeez.
I'm gonna add fresh garlic to my meatballs.
Chop, chop, chop. Into my bowl.
The parsley, and I think, I think sage,
are gonna go into the meatball mixture.
And meatballs should have grated cheese in them.
Adds flavor. Adds a nice smooth texture.
I'm also gonna save my rind.
This, like our pig skin, is gonna add flavor to our sauce.
Whenever I season,
people tend to think that I put too much salt in.
You're just gonna have to trust me that it's gonna be okay.
And pepper.
I'm gonna put eggs in here.
Not only a binder, they add moisture,
they make our meatballs tender,
all around more delicious.
Still don't know where the milk and the bread
is coming in.
And then last but not least, I'm gonna add my bread.
People normally do this with stale bread.
So you're rehydrating the bread with milk.
A lot of Italians will probably just use water.
Now we're gonna get in there and mix this.
I have a very small bowl with a lot of stuff in it.
My mush up technique is just get it all in there.
I'm gonna lobby for getting larger bowls.
Put that in the show notes please. Large bowls.
[Jon] Incorporate the ingredients as best I can.
A lot of people with meatballs
are afraid to work the meat.
They think the meatball's gonna get tough,
but for the most part they're not gonna get tough.
They'll stay nice and tender.
So I think that's about good and mixed up enough.
So gotta make my meatballs. Gotta form my meatballs.
So I have my sheet tray
and I'm just gonna take this scoop.
I use this to make sure my meatballs
are all the same size and uniform.
I like my meatballs much smaller than this,
but they had a big scoop and a small bowl.
Next time, small scoop, big bowl please.
Actually this is gonna be good.
These are gonna be a good size.
I feel like they're enough.
You could eat it in one bite.
So we're gonna make a little tester
before we actually cook them.
I just want to taste the meat
and make sure it's seasoned nicely.
And if I have to, I'll backtrack.
Make it nice or make it twice, baby.
That's what we usually say.
Honestly, I think that I did okay.
Actually, you know what?
No, it's good. It's good.
I like it a lot.
I know I gotta make myself happy,
but I'm really here to try to make Frank happy, honestly.
I hope he eats my pasta dish and thinks wow,
he might be okay.
So, [laughing] I already think Jon's okay.
I don't know about his food.
And this is what I'm gonna do.
I'm not gonna compromise,
I'm gonna take each meatball and break it in half
and roll it into the size that I like.
That is the size that I like.
That's what I'm going with, right?
My wrists have never like, rotated this fast before.
Okay. Next move.
Next step for this is to get my meatballs on the fire.
All right, skillet time.
Skillet on. I'm gonna use extra virgin.
I think my meatball sauce should have some fat on it.
I'm gonna grab my tomatoes and I'm gonna grind up my tomato.
These are whole peeled San Marzano tomatoes.
So I'm gonna rinse my cans out.
What the water does is it allows our sauce to cook longer
without reducing too fast.
[blender whirring]
Tongs. Nice.
Okay, these will be great.
So while that's heating up,
it's time for me to take 25 minutes to figure out
how to attach this pasta maker.
And this thing?
Dang. Boy, do I not know what this is for?
This looks like, yep. All right.
so that's set up.
It is time to cook the meatballs.
This might be a little,
you might hear like a little [imitates sizzling]
[Jon and film crew laughing]
Is this heating up?
Maybe it had to be a little hotter.
We are not necessarily cooking these
all the way through at this point.
We're just getting a little brown.
It's gonna add flavor.
Here we go.
[meatballs sizzling]
There we go.
This is a little something.
All right, here we go.
Meatballs going on to the cast iron skillet.
We always wanna brown things.
We don't wanna just throw a bunch of stuff in a pot
and hope that it's gonna taste good.
It's not really brown right now, it's more of a gray,
but I'll take it.
While my meatballs are browning
we're going to cut some of my aromatics.
Okay, I feel like I think I can start
to put together my pasta.
I like to add onions and basil.
And a lot of times people add sugar to their sauce
because they feel like their sauce is too acidic.
You can use onion for that.
I'm gonna put some garlic in here, but not a ton of garlic.
Just give it a whack.
And I'm not too worried about it being fine.
This is the organic unbleached extra fine flour.
Tipo OO. [chuckling]
It's not pronounced oo, no. Double zero.
Maybe I could have put some eggs in this meat blend
to bind it a little better?
Maybe it would've been nice?
Who knows?
Right, well here's my meatballs coming out brown.
If you look in my pan or my pot,
I have some really nice brown crusties on the bottom
and that's what I want for my sauce.
Okay, lemme turn this off.
I'm gonna wait a little to put them in the sauce.
I don't know why. Just a hunch.
I think our meatballs are looking pretty good.
We wanna get this done today, not tomorrow.
My onions go in.
I'm gonna put a little fennel seeds in.
And also, right now, remember I saved that pig skin?
That's going in.
It makes those tomatoes nice and round and mellow.
Just a little bit of salt.
Onions are getting there.
I can smell them. They smell delicious.
I'm gonna get a little more of my parsley,
a little bit of that oregano.
And I'm gonna get a nice chunk of basil.
Can I have a little butcher twine?
And this is gonna be my bouquet garni to flavor my sauce.
I'm gonna add my tomatoes.
All the tomatoes go in at once.
[tomatoes slushing]
Herbs go in.
I'm gonna add a little bit of chili flake.
My Parmesan rind. Another nice hit of salt to this.
I'm not gonna add my meatballs back to this
until it comes to a simmer.
All right, so here's flour.
It's gonna go on the countertop.
I don't know how much I need.
I'm gonna open up a little hole right here.
I feel like it'd be nice to have some salt in the mixture.
The only thing that I'm having a problem with
is that milk.
And I really don't know if I should add it at this juncture.
I would never add milk to my pasta dough.
Let's put in the eggs. Two eggs.
My goal here is just to mix everything together
and make a dough.
See, this is the part I knew from the very beginning
I was gonna have trouble with,
'cause I know what it looks like before
and I know what the dough looks like,
but I just don't know how to get from place to place.
[Film Crew Member] [indistinct]
Oh, thank you.
[bench scraper scraping]
[Film Crew Member] Wow!
I'm gonna have to add, I think, a little more egg.
I haven't used the milk.
I never add milk to my pasta dough.
Water? Water.
It's gonna be water.
Not milk.
I wouldn't take water and dump it on.
I'd get my hand wet and I knead it with wet hands.
It's time to kick it into high gear.
Okay, t's becoming a lot more malleable.
Not looking good. Not looking good at all.
More flour. More egg.
Oh, Frank is gonna be so mad when he sees all this water.
Oh God, egg fell off.
Get back in there. Get back in there.
Okay. What are you doing?
Go to your home! Okay, okay.
My strategy is to just try to just put, oh,
try to push it on as much as I can,
make this dough yellower.
Oh yeah. It's looking way yellower, guys.
I have, at least in my perspective,
I have completely saved this dough ball.
Feels like a dough ball. Looks like a dough ball.
Hopefully, it tastes like a dough ball.
So if I was getting overconfident
saying I'd have it done in five minutes, right?
My pasta's a little on the soft side,
so I'm gonna flour it generously.
This machine is what I have at home and it works.
It's a grandma style machine, so.
And I crank it through, right?
[sighs] I'm gonna try to like, roll this out
to be like a spaghetti-like long shape.
I feel like just instinct is to make it longer.
[rolling pin clanking]
Sorry, it's a small workspace.
I'm just trying to just bang it everywhere.
So the pasta maker has settings, has zero through nine.
And believe it or not, zero is the thickest.
I'm gonna go to seven.
I'm gonna do like, three or four sheets,
maybe three sheets like this.
Now that my sauce, you can see is starting to bubble, -
[Jon] Sauce is looking, ooh, that's looking nice.
[Frank] meatballs in.
I'm not gonna put the lid on.
It doesn't need the lid at this point.
I'm gonna leave this uncovered.
Normally when I do this,
the handle falls off like, six times.
I gotta pick it up off the floor.
So we want it to dry just a little.
I have my pasta cutter.
I make some cuts.
[machine whirring]
Oh, something's coming.
[machine whirring]
We have pasta.
Don't know how long it's gonna be.
[machine whirring faster]
So this is just off of one piece of dough.
Y'all, this ain't looking half bad.
The only problem is it's sticking together.
Oh! That's what the thing's for.
Oh my God. Yeah.
Wow! Okay.
Okay. Well.
Oh my god. Okay.
All right, here we go.
Let's just keep, let's keep moving.
All right, here we go. Here we go.
In the zone. Looking pretty good.
Pasta's looking all right.
Just look at this. It's a noodle.
We invented this new method of just throwing flour
as it comes out.
It's the flour toss method.
The what?
[Film Crew Member] The flour toss method.
I've never heard of that method.
I don't know what it is.
It sounds like something a child would make up.
All right.
That was a rough process.
I'm happy it's over.
All right, it's time for a test meatball.
If you're gonna do the tester on this,
make sure you test them before you cook all the meatballs.
It could take a lot of time to recook all your meatballs.
I mean, it's meaty all right.
Tastes good, but it needs salt.
You can add a little heavier towards the end
if you need more.
So let me get my pasta sheet and I'm gonna run it.
So I let it lay there.
Make sure you get it all over the floor.
And I'm gonna dust it really well with flour
so it doesn't stick to itself.
I think that's good on my pasta, okay.
My sauce looks like it's gonna be good.
I'm not gonna let it cook that much longer.
What things have I not used?
Basil, bread, milk, and the cheese.
I'm gonna put a lot of Parmesan in the sauce
for a nice little gift for Frank.
I don't think that cheese in the sauce
is something that you really want.
It gets oily and greasy and weird.
Water's boiling. Water's salted.
Pasta goes in.
Fresh pasta doesn't take long to cook.
So this is gonna be a real quick boil.
What I'm gonna do here is super Italian
and I'm gonna get some of my sauce,
I'm gonna put the sauce next to the stove.
Does anyone know how you know your pasta's cooked?
[Film Crew Member] Throw it at the wall.
You do not throw it at the wall.
That is something I get from my kids in middle school.
You know your pasta's cooked
when you taste and it tastes good.
Let's give it another half a minute.
Tasty. Not so much.
What I like to do with my spaghetti and meatballs
is to add just enough sauce to coat my pasta.
You don't need a colander for this.
So I'm gonna let this cook in the sauce
for like, one or two minutes.
I also want some of that salty pasta water in my sauce.
Give it a little flip. Make sure you get it everywhere.
[Jon] All right. Just clear out all this water.
My sauce is just a little on the watery side.
I'm gonna add a little more sauce to my pan
and let it reduce.
A little olive oil.
Flavor. Shine.
A little bit of basil.
All right, now it's time to plate.
So what I'm gonna do is take my pasta,
take a nice big tong full of it,
sauce it up a little and add some meatballs.
I like it just around the sides
Method I'm thinking.
Try to make it look like somebody competent did this.
A little bit of that Parmesan on top.
No big tomato,
although we thank them for their service.
[Frank] Don't be afraid to add a little basil
Now to put on 20 meatballs.
Basil on top and some bread and cheese of course.
Phew. I can't believe I did it.
[chuckling] I'm done.
A lot longer than I thought it was gonna take.
'Cause I had no idea where to put it,
nice little glass of milk for Frank.
This went badly,
but honestly, not as badly as it could have gone.
Spaghetti and meatballs a la Frank.
Spaghetti and meatballs. And a little milk.
[lively jazz music]
All right. Well.
How are you feeling there, Jon?
Oh, it looks great, Frank.
Oh my God! Thank you.
[Jon] It looks pretty good.
Yours looks like it looks pretty good.
It's spaghetti and meatballs.
[Frank] It's spaghetti and meatballs.
[Jon] To the best of my ability.
A couple of things I don't understand is what's with
the glass of milk? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So what did you do with the milk?
What did you do with the bread?
The bread gets soaked in the milk.
You squeeze the milk out.
You put it in the meatballs to make 'em tender.
Whoa!
Yeah. Okay.
So I married an Irish woman
and she drinks a glass of milk
with her spaghetti and meatballs.
I always feel a little like,
a little disgust. Wow!
But this would make her very happy.
That's so great.
I was really channeling your wife today,
bringing in that energy.
What did you do with the fennel seeds?
I put 'em in my sauce.
In your sauce.
I don't like fennel seeds in tomato sauce.
Yeah, I kinda did
a little sprinkle. I went like this.
I put like one or two in. Me too!
[both laughing]
I'm like, don't put too many.
I tasted it, I was like, I don't like that.
Not gonna put that much in.
And once you had your grinded meat, what did you do?
So a good meatball to me has eggs.
Eggs. It has breadcrumbs.
It has cheese in it.
If you just use meat, meatballs tend to get crumbly and dry.
And those extenders actually make them springy and soft
and actually make them less dry.
Well, with all that in mind,
please try my crumbly, meaty meatballs.
[both laughing]
Okay.
Oh, by the way, Frank, I got you one too.
Oh!
I figured it might... It's gonna make
my wife happy.
Just for your wife. I am not doing it.
[both laughing]
Try the meatball. Meatball, very dense.
It's a little crumbly in your mouth, right?
A little crumbly.
Would have really been helped
by all the other things that you put in yours.
When you taste mine,
you're gonna see it has a better mouth feel.
I like the sauce. The sauce tastes really nice.
Pasta's a little clumpy. Yeah, it is clumpy.
I'm not drinking the milk. I'm sorry.
Oh, okay. I'll have a little sip.
[Jon laughing]
Cheers.
[glasses clink]
Just a little sip.
Oh my God. It's not... It's definitely milk.
Well, Frank, I would love to try yours now.
It looks fantastic.
[Frank] All right.
Should I drink the milk before eating it
or should I drink it after
as kind of a accoutrement? I think we should
just dump the milk.
[both laughing]
Okay.
I hope my wife isn't mad at me
'cause I told the world that.
She might wanna give me trouble for that.
[Jon] Lovely meatball.
So what do you think?
Like, if you taste the meatball
they have a little bit more of a smooth texture.
More moist.
There's more going on. It's a nice chew to it.
I probably could have put a little more salt in them.
I was kind of questioning myself.
And then my pasta, it's dressed nice.
My sauce was a little thin, so we reduced it a little.
Really good, Frank.
Thank you.
Well Frank, it looks phenomenal.
Tastes great. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you very much. I would love to eat
at your home anytime.
I'll bring some milk
for myself and your wife - My wife.
to enjoy while we eat your pasta.
Thank you. Thank you so much.
It was a good challenge and I think that
you could definitely improve that with just a few tweaks.
I will drink to that, Frank.
I will not. Great.
[Frank laughing]
[Frank] And the milk is warm too.
[Jon] The milk is warm.
[both laughing]
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