Beef meatballs with crisp pork belly and roast veg
No breadcrumbs, no flour, no potatoes. Grated onion keeps the meatballs soft, and the pork belly cubes crisp up alongside and drip their fat over the vegetables.
One portion
Against one meal out of three, at your daily targets. For fibre a full bar is the good thing; for the rest it's the opposite.
Ingredients
- 240 g Pork shoulder
- 1 pcs Eggs
- 200 g Onions
- 3 pcs Garlic
- 10 g Parsley
- 2 g Cumin
- 6 g Smoked paprika
- 440 g Pork belly
- 450 g Cauliflower
- 250 g Broccoli
- 20 g Lard
- 45 g Butter
- 20 ml Oil
- 3 g Thyme
- 3 g Salt · sodium
- 1.5 g Black pepper
How it's made
7 stepsBig screen, one step at a time, with timers. The screen stays awake.
- Oven on at 210°C. Cut the pork belly into 2 cm cubes. Melt the lard. Tip the frozen cauliflower and broccoli straight into the tray, add the pork cubes, pour the lard and oil over everything, scatter the thyme and half the pepper. Mix and spread it all in a single layer.The pork cubes go in at the start, with the vegetables: they need all 37 minutes to render their fat and crisp at the edges. The fat that comes out of them replaces the butter this recipe used to carry.
- Tray into the oven. The vegetables and the pork need a 15-minute head start on the meatballs — in that time the veg gives up its water and the pork starts rendering.Frozen veg releases water in the first few minutes. Put the meatballs in from the start and they sit in that steam and end up boiled rather than browned.
- While that roasts, grate the onion on the coarse side, straight over the mince. Add the egg, crushed garlic, chopped parsley, cumin, smoked paprika and the rest of the pepper.Grated onion replaces breadcrumbs: the water in it keeps the meat soft and binds with the protein. Breadcrumbs only absorb and dry.
- Mix with your hand just until it comes together — fifteen seconds, no more. Overworked mince goes tough and rubbery. Shape 9 meatballs with wet hands.
- Take the tray out, push the vegetables to the edges and sit the meatballs in the middle. Back into the oven for 22 minutes. Don't turn them — they brown underneath against the hot tray.
- Tray out, dot the butter over everything and scatter the salt. Toss the vegetables gently so they coat in the melted butter and the fat that ran out of the pork.
- Rest 5 minutes, then split into three boxes — three meatballs, a third of the crisp pork and a third of the vegetables in each.
The best cost-per-portion in the whole plan: three meals from a single tray and twenty minutes of hands-on work.
Pork belly, not butter. The old version of this recipe had 195 g of butter over the tray — 1400 calories you couldn’t see on the plate. Those calories now come from 440 g of cubed pork belly that browns and is visibly there. It costs about the same per calorie, but you end up with 230 g of meat per portion instead of 133.
Twenty percent mince, not five. It’s cheaper and it has the fat that keeps the meatballs juicy. Lean mince in the oven comes out dry and needs oil anyway — better to pay less and get the fat for free.
No breadcrumbs, no flour, no potatoes. Grated onion is the binder: the water in it binds with the protein in the meat and keeps the meatballs soft. Breadcrumbs are only there to stretch the meat and cut the cost.
Cauliflower and broccoli, not root vegetables. Same job on the plate — bulk and something that browns — at a fifth of the carbohydrate. Frozen costs half what fresh does and doesn’t spoil if the cooking session slips a day.
The butter that’s left is only for flavour. Forty grams at the end, just enough to bind the vegetables with the fat that ran out of the pork. The rest of the calories are already in the tray, in the form of meat.
Photo: Baked Meatballs by TheGirlsNY, licence BY-SA 2.0.