This Is the Easiest and Fastest Way to Portion Homemade Meatballs.
I love to cook, but I hate boredom, so I prefer meals that don’t have a lot of repetitive movement. That’s why I’ve only made meatballs twice – I’m bored. Blending is OK, frying is OK, but portioning? Boring.
Luckily for me (and others who don’t mind being bored), Lifehacker Senior Health Editor Beth Skwarecki found a meatball portioning hack on Reddit that’s quick, easy, and dare I say elegant.
It says:
All my years in the kitchen and my partner blew me away with this meatball trick. Squeezes the meat onto a baking sheet, cuts like cakes. Portioned meat balls in seconds!
I never thought I’d call squashing meat on a pan “elegant,” but it’s pretty elegant. It might not be as accurate as weighing every little ball, but unless you work in a real kitchen at a fancy restaurant, it doesn’t matter. Simply flatten the meat so it’s level—measure the depth with a toothpick in several places if needed—then cut the meat into squares and roll those squares into balls. You can use a tape measure if you want to be more precise, but I’m going to look into it because the whole point here is to avoid boredom.
Another advantage of this method? You can see exactly how many meatballs you have before you start rolling. As a big fan of planning (and counting), I value information about the outcome of a task before it’s completed, so this is very important to me.
Will this increase meatball production in my household? Yes. I think it will. At least the novelty of squashing meat in a casserole dish and slicing it “like cakes” will make me try it at least once, and one batch of homemade meatballs is better than none.