One Pot Italian Meatballs with Orzo Recipe

One Pot Italian Meatballs with Orzo

Today we’re continuing the one pot series. We’re making Italian meatballs with orzo. This is a great one.

Okay, so let’s go over the ingredients. This is a two-part recipe, but it’s very easy. We have a sauce component and we have a meatball component.

Why You’ll Love This

This is a great dish. It’s very easy to make.

Really quick, easy meatball, but really flavorful.

Orzo is a great pasta for these one pot meals.

These are always really good. You got like pasta, you got meat, and it’s just been one pot. Like it’s like almost no work.

Ingredients

• 1 pound of ground chuck
• 2 teaspoons diamond crystal kosher salt
• Half a teaspoon of black pepper
• 2 cloves of garlic that are grated into a paste
• A third of a cup of flat leaf Italian parsley that is minced
• Three quarter cup of Italian seasoned breadcrumbs
• Three quarter cup of grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
• 1 egg
• 1 large onion that is diced
• 28 ounce can of plum tomatoes, crushed
• Three and a half cups of low sodium beef stock
• 1 teaspoon of crushed red pepper flakes
• 1 pound of orzo
• Half a cup of fresh basil
• 1 cup of ricotta cheese
• Extra virgin olive oil (a quarter cup)

Instructions

1. Just spread the ground chuck out a little bit like this, and then let’s just get our salt and pepper on there.
2. Mix the garlic into the meatballs.
3. Dump in all the rest of these ingredients.
4. I’m going to try to mix around.
5. I’m going to put on the gloves.
6. Just put a little bit of water on your glove every two or three meatballs and just grab about this much.
7. If you have cracks and crevices in your meatball, they might open up a little bit. You could just take a touch more water on there and that’ll just kind of close up the cracks and just roll like this.
8. Roll all of these up.
9. Use that water. It’ll close up any gaps if you have them.
10. Set these off to the side.
11. Heat up the pot to medium.
12. Coat this with extra virgin olive oil.
13. Let the oil get a little hot.
14. Cook this for about a minute or two.
15. Put the diced onion in.
16. Put on a pinch of salt to help these release the water a little quicker.
17. Keep the heat. So we’re cooking these not till they get brown, but till they get soft and translucent.
18. Lower the heat if you need to.
19. Add that teaspoon of crushed red pepper flakes in here and mix it around, get it in the oil, kind of bloom that out.
20. Take the crushed tomatoes and add them right in.
21. To get the excess out of here, pour some stock in here.
22. Bring this to a simmer.
23. Chop a quarter cup of basil.
24. Add the basil.
25. Give this a taste test and adjust.
26. Put in some pepper too.
27. Mix that in.
28. Put all that basil in.
29. Add the orzo.
30. Mix this in first.
31. Lower it a little bit.
32. Mix this. So it just like we’re coating the orzo with all that oil. So everything won’t clump together.
33. Add our meatballs in. Drop them in.
34. Mix this around just a touch.
35. Cover this.
36. Try a diffuser.
37. Go back with it. And this low heat.
38. Set the timer right now for 15 minutes and that’s when we’re going to check it.
39. Check the orzo.
40. Check again in three minutes.
41. Take this off.
42. Turn this off.
43. Take this off the heat.
44. Do a tiny bit of a mix, like a little bit of a fluff.

Cooking Tips

Two cloves of garlic is good for this amount of meat.

If you don’t have Italian seasoned breadcrumbs, you can use regular plain breadcrumbs too. We’re making a very quick, easy meatball here. We’re trying to make things as uncomplicated as we can for these one pot meals, but that preserve 99% of the flavor.

After we mix it up, if we need a second egg, we’ll add it in, but we’ll be able to tell by the consistency of our meatballs.

I want like a lot of like oniony texture in here.

You can use whole plum tomatoes. You can blend or pulse them, or you could hand crush them. Anything like that is fine. Just make sure it’s 28 ounces of tomato.

We need all this extra liquid to be able to cook our orzo. It’s going to drink it up. It’s going to absorb it. We don’t want it to be super dry at the end.

If you don’t like something spicy at all, just feel free to omit it completely.

Always think of meat whenever you’re making any type of meat dish, whether it’s a steak, pot roast, anything, always think of like, okay, just as a percentage.

You get to decide how much you want to put in it.

We’re not doing anything like, like with added moisture in here, the chuck is going to give us enough moisture.

It’s different on any given day. Like it has to do with the moisture and the air. And it’s just, that’s why. And the meat itself, the meat, the meat itself. Yeah. And so that’s why I think it’s, you know, you always kind of, communicate that you should just use a recipe as like a jumping off point. Definitely. As needed. Absolutely.

Having relatively small meatballs, you don’t need to go super small. It allows everybody to get some when you’re serving this. Also, if you had like giant meatballs in here, wouldn’t you run the risk of them not cooking?

You can make these the night before you can make them in advance. You can even throw this in the freezer and then they’ll harden up and then you can throw them all in a bag. And then they’ll keep separated that way and then keep that ready to go and then pop it out, you know, an hour before when you’re going to make this recipe and then you could do, do it even quicker.

You can use anything that is five quarts or more.

You want to make sure that you have a tight fitting lid, but again, you can use an eight quart Dutch oven, a five and a half quart Dutch oven. You can even use a heavy pot. Those would all be fine for this.

We want to just keep the heat. So we’re cooking these not till they get brown, but till they get soft and translucent to lower the heat if you need to.

Make sure you’re using hot red pepper flakes sold in the U S and not cayenne pepper. If you use the teaspoon of cayenne pepper, it would definitely would be super spicy and probably ruin the dish unless you love spice.

You can use a plate diffuser. I actually have one over there. I think I’m going to use it for like the first time in this type of recipe, but you can only use those diffusers when your heat is on low and that’s how we’re going to cook it.

A lot of hardcore Italians will just drop their meatballs straight in sauce. They’re not frying them. They go right in the sauce and you actually get the softest meatball when you do it this way. Do not think they’re not going to cook. These things are going to be cooked in five minutes. This orzo is going to take 15 to 20 minutes. So meatballs will stay fine, but I know that might be, you might be thinking, well, these are going to be raw. They’re not going to be raw. You’re essentially like steaming them.

The sauce is much saucier here, much less evaporation. Now this is a, probably a tighter, heavier lid.

Be careful with this diffuser plate too. It’s going to be very hot.

You are going to get a different consistency depending on what type of pan you use.

Depending on the size of the Orzo too, I mean, I know it’s still a pound is a pound, but it’ll affect cooking.

Serving Suggestions

We can dollop ricotta cheese on top of it. You can add even more of this, serve this at the table at the end for people too. And that’ll add a little bit extra creaminess to it.

I like to kind of get most of the meatballs like up top. So it looks more appetizing for everybody.

I love to just put some pieces of basil like this, you know, some, maybe not the absolutely largest leaves, but some of these smaller ones, it looks really good. It’s just to get them all around, you know, because we love like, you know, real food and all that. And at the same time, presentation definitely makes something more appetizing.

You can use a spoon for your ricotta, or you can just use a pastry bag like this. I like to just do a few, just like so. I think that looks darn good. But again, if you don’t want to do that, you can just serve it and then people put on their own.

And then also grated cheese too. I think just, you know, a lot of grated Parmesan cheese or whatnot.

So I hope you saw how easy this one was to make. It’s a relatively quick dish.

You got like pasta, you got meat, and it’s just been one pot. Like it’s like almost no work. The ricotta is really nice with it. It’s good. It’s like, it’s like a creamy pasta kind of, you know, like it’s not really a cream.