This process is not easy and you probably won't get it the first time, but
if you do, I want to know about it. Welcome to Easy Italian with Lisa
Valastro. I'm going to show you one of my family's favorites.
We call it "egg balls", but you could also call it a "meatless meatball", so let me
show you what we're gonna need for this recipe. We're gonna start with our main
ingredient which is eggs. We're gonna need some garlic, some pepper, some salt,
some extra virgin olive oil, fresh parsley, pecorino romano cheese, parmesan,
and seasoned breadcrumbs. So, I'm going to start with about 12 eggs. I have a big
family what can I tell you? We love to eat egg balls. Okay, so after we crack our
12 eggs I am going to add my parmesan and Romano cheese. I add two different
cheeses because the two different cheeses have two different flavors. One
to two cups of each. You could definitely add more cheese if you like extra cheese
flavor. We're gonna add half a cup of fresh parsley, about a tablespoon of salt
and about a tablespoon of pepper, five cloves of crushed garlic. I don't like to
bite into a big chunk of garlic so that's why the garlic press has become
my favorite tool in the kitchen. Now, once we've added all these ingredients, we are
going to mix them together and I like to use a fork, you could use a whisk, you could
use whatever you like to use in the kitchen. This is a staple item in our
house. This is what my sister and my brother and I grew up on. We weren't big
red meat eaters growing up, so this was a great substitute. I am going to add about
two tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil.
Now, we're gonna mix the olive oil in. We're going to take our breadcrumb and
we are going to slowly add it into our mixture one tablespoon at a time. So I
just added five tablespoons to my egg mixture and I'm gonna mix it nice and
slowly. You're looking for a thick cream texture, so I think I could add about
another three tablespoons of breadcrumb and we're gonna mix that up again.
Now that you have a thick, creamy consistency, we're gonna need to let this
chill for about ten to fifteen minutes in the refrigerator and I will show you
how much thicker this will get. See you in ten minutes. We've chilled this for about
10 to 15 minutes. Now comes the really important part. What we're gonna do is
we're gonna bring our sauce - this is my famous fresh tomato sauce that you can
link to find out how I made this - we're gonna bring it to a nice boil and then
we are going to reduce the heat to low. Now we're ready to make our egg balls.
What you're going to do is remove all your jewelry from your hands because you
will get sticky. You want to dip your hands in the olive oil so they're nice
and greasy. You're gonna take a spoon and you're gonna put a little mixture into
your hands and very, very gingerly make it into a round ball. This is a lot
softer than a regular meatball, you got to kind of play with it to make it round,
and then you're gonna very slowly place it into your sauce and you're going to
repeat this process till your pan is nice and full. You're kind of playing
around in the palms of your hands to make a shape of a round ball. You're
definitely playing with your food a little bit!
This definitely started as a poor man's meal. You know Sunday sauce was a
tradition. Every Sunday that's what you had to eat was Sunday sauce and a lot
of people could not afford to buy meat, so it was cheaper to make an egg ball than it
was to make a meatball. So now the only other important tip I want to tell you
when making these is that you cannot over-stuff your pot because they will
expand and they will stick together, so you just want to cover the bottom layer
of your pot. So in this pot here I fit about 20 egg balls. We are gonna cover
the pot and we are not going to touch it for 10 minutes. So now we're just gonna
raise the temperature of the flame a little bit to a medium-low so it comes
back to a very slow boil. While we do this I'm gonna go wash up. Okay, so we are
back! This is what happens after 10 minutes. Now you can take your wooden
spoon and very gently turn them around and see how they have expanded? They
actually have doubled in size. So as you could tell the egg balls have actually
come up a little bit which starts to tell you that they're almost cooked
through, so we're gonna let this cook for about 10 more minutes and they'll be all
ready for you to enjoy. Okay, guys, we are ready to eat our egg balls. Look how
delicious this looks! You could also boil some fresh pasta if you'd like and pour
this right on top of your pasta, this could be a great meal, or you could
simply just eat it just with your sauce and your egg balls. I like to finish it
off with a little bit of grated cheese, a little bit of fresh parsley... Mmm!
Delicious! Thank you for watching my video on egg balls! I hope you enjoyed it!
Make sure to like my video and subscribe to our channel! Hope you're able to make
these. Just remember let me know and enjoy!