Chicken or Pork Meatballs in a Real Pan Sauce | Recipeish | Gustus Vitae

Meatballs get treated like a red sauce problem. They aren't. Brown a batch hard in a heavy skillet, chicken or pork, and you've built the single best pan sauce base in home cooking; all that's left is to deglaze it and pour it back over the meat. Classic American Steak & Pan Sauce Seasoning handles both halves of this: the meat and the sauce, one tin, no spice drawer. Thirty-five minutes, one pan, and dinner that tastes like a steakhouse side dish got promoted.

• Yield: About 20 meatballs, 4 servings.
• Time: 35 minutes.
• Storage Notes: Four days in the fridge, and they're better on day two. Reheat gently in the sauce with a splash of stock, or microwave in a pinch.
• Difficulty: Easy.

INGREDIENTS

• 1 1/2 lb ground chicken or ground pork
• 1 large egg
• 1/2 cup panko, soaked in 1/4 cup whole milk until it looks like paste
• 1 Tbs olive oil, if you're using chicken
• About 4 1/2 Tbs Classic American Steak & Pan Sauce Seasoning, divided
• About 2 Tbs neutral oil
• 2 Tbs unsalted butter
• 1 cup chicken stock, low sodium
• 1/3 cup heavy cream
• A big handful of flat leaf parsley, chopped
• 1 red cayenne or jalapeño, sliced into thin rings, optional

DIRECTIONS

1. Soak the panko in the milk for a minute, then fold it into the meat with the egg and about 3 Tbs of the steak & pan sauce seasoning. If you're using chicken, add the tablespoon of olive oil here. Mix with your hands and stop the second it comes together; overworked meat goes bouncy. Roll into balls a little bigger than a golf ball. Chicken mix is wetter and stickier than pork, so wet your hands, and if it's fighting you, ten minutes in the fridge fixes it.
2. Brown them hard, and leave the pan alone. Oil in a heavy skillet over medium-high, meatballs in with room between them, and don't touch them for three minutes. You want a deep crust on two or three sides, not an even tan all over. Here's the whole point: every brown fleck welded to the bottom of that pan is the sauce. Cook them about 80 percent of the way through, pull them out onto a plate, and do not wipe anything. A nonstick pan will cheat you out of the fond, so use cast iron or stainless.
3. Deglaze and build. Butter into the hot pan, then the stock, and scrape the bottom with a wooden spoon until the pan is clean and the liquid is brown. Add about 1 1/2 Tbs of the steak & pan sauce seasoning and simmer 3 to 4 minutes to reduce by a third. In goes the cream.
4. Meatballs back in. Nestle them into the sauce with any juice from the plate, lower the heat, and simmer until they're cooked through and the sauce coats a spoon. Pork wants about 5 to 6 minutes and 160°F in the middle; chicken wants about 6 to 8 and 165°F. Taste for salt at the end, not the beginning: the blend brings its own.
5. Parsley over everything, chiles if you want them, and eat it straight out of the pan.

NOTES & VARIATIONS

Chicken or pork, honestly. Pork is richer and harder to overcook, chicken is lighter and takes the sauce beautifully; both work with no other changes to the recipe. The one thing to know about supermarket ground chicken is that it's leaner than pork and holds less water, which is why it gets the extra tablespoon of olive oil and a slightly longer simmer.

Don't brown chicken as long. It goes from golden to gray-brown faster than pork and there's less fat to protect it. Three minutes on the first side, two on the next, then get it out of the pan and let the sauce finish the job.

The heat is optional. Those red rings are cayenne, sliced thin and scattered raw at the end for color and a sharp little bite. Jalapeño is friendlier, Fresno is friendlier still, or you can just omit entirely.

Thicker sauce. Whisk a Tbs of flour into the butter before the stock goes in and give it thirty seconds. You'll get gravy consistency instead of a glaze.

A splash of something. Half a cup of dry white wine or dry vermouth into the pan before the stock, cooked down until it's nearly gone, adds a layer and I think worth the extra two minutes.

Make it a tray. Double the batch, brown in two rounds, and build one sauce on the combined fond with the Steak & Pan Sauce blend scaled up by half. This is a party food that requires no party.

The applications from here are endless: over mashed potatoes, over buttered egg noodles, split into rolls with the sauce soaking in, or speared with toothpicks and set out with the pan still warm. But make them once as written, straight from the skillet, and start there.