If you want a dish that is absolutely delicious and filling these Baked Meatballs are it! Giant, full of flavor and perfect for the whole family!
We love pasta nights at our house. It is one of our favorite nights during the week, and actually probably happens more than once.
These Baked Meatballs can be eaten with pasta or all on their own. We usually serve them with spaghetti because who doesn’t love spaghetti and meatballs.
Normally I would make my homemade Spaghetti Sauce, but since that has meat in it, we take a little cheater route and use jarred sauce in this recipe.
You are absolutely free to make your own sauce, you can use mine, just omit the meat mixture from it and you will be fine.
WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS:
- This is a filling meal and serves a whole family.
- The meatballs themselves are made in one pan and everything else is baked in another.
- A lot goes a long way and they don’t use any super weird ingredients, just normal pantry stuff.
When you first look at this Baked Meatball recipe you’d think that is hard, but trust me it is not. We are all about keeping things simple around here.
HOW TO MAKE BAKED MEATBALLS, STEP BY STEP:
- In large bowl add your ground beef, onion, eggs, breadcrumbs, garlic, milk, italian seasoning, parsley, salt, pepper and parmesan cheese.
- Using your hand or a spoon mix it all together gently just until it is combined, you don’t want to over mix.
- Using an ice cream scoop or your hands portion your meat mixture out into 15 equally sized meatballs and place in 9″x13″ baking dish..
- Bake at 375 degrees F for 25-30 minutes.
- Remove from oven..
- Top with 4 cups of spaghetti sauce and one cup of cheese.
- Place back in oven and bake for another 20-25 minutes until meatballs reach internal temperature of 160 degrees F and cheese is melted and golden.
See how easy this is? This Baked Meatball recipe really should be added to your mealtime rotation. It is for ours, at least once a month.
The kids absolutely love these meatballs and so does my husband and we just can’t get enough of them!
WHAT MEAT IS GOOD FOR MEATBALLS?
So for our recipe we like to use equal portion of lean ground beef and ground Italian sausage.
You can use any kind of Italian sausage the that you like, sweet, milk or spicy, it all depends on what flavor you really want over all for your dish..
You can also use just all ground beef I you’d like. We recommend the leaner the better because it produces less fat overall, but regardless you will have some fat on top of your finished dish.
You can skim this off if you’d like or you can choose to fully bake your meatballs on a baking pan and drain the fat then throw in the oven for about 10 minutes to heat up sauce and melt cheese.
WHAT TO SERVE WITH THIS DISH:
Like I stated before and you can see in the photos we like to serve ours over spaghetti or any other pasta but there are many different things that go well with this.
If you don’t want to go the “pasta” route you can use veggie noodles, mashed potatoes, etc. It is also good served with a side salad and some garlic bread.
HOW TO STORE:
If you are wanting to form the meatballs ahead of time and bake later, then you mix up per instructions, roll into balls and then place on baking sheet in freezer.
Once frozen you will remove and then you will transfer to an airtight plastic bag or Tupperware and this should keep in the freezer for about 1-2 months.
If you are wanting to refrigerate these Baked Meatballs you can remove from sauce or add meatballs and sauce to an airtight container like a ziptop bag or Tupperware.
These should keep in the refrigerator for about 4 days.
WHAT TEMPERATURE TO BAKE MEATBALLS?
This is really debatable among recipes, some people cook at higher heat for shorter times. We do a lower heat for longer times..
The reason we do this is that it keeps the meatballs firm but still tender and not tough so we have always cooked ours at 375, but it makes for cooking the dish longer.
You can bake at 450 degrees F for about 15-20 minutes, add your sauce and then bake for an additional 10-15 minutes or until the internal temperature reaches 160 degrees F.
I stated above that these will produce some grease when bake in a pan and you can bake on a baking sheet and drain the grease if you’d like that.
In my personal opinion, just like I doo with my spaghetti sauce is not drain the grease as I feel that it adds flavor, but you can also certainly skim the grease off the top.
TIPS AND TRICKS:
- Use the leanest beef you can find, this will produce the less amount of grease possible.
- You can use a mixture of ground beef and Italian sausage like we do or you can use all ground beef.
- Do not overtax the meatball mixture, this will cause it to get tough.
- We use canned sauce for this recipe, you can use your own homemade but you will need 4 cups to bake these meatballs in.
- We top our meatballs with shredded parmesan, feel free to switch it up with italian blend or parmesan.
This is such a simple Baked Meatball recipe and it really is one of our favorite. It has been in our family for ages and we just continue to make it.
If you want a filling family dish that serves a crowd and can be cut down or doubled these Baked Meatballs are just what you need!
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If you’ve tried these BAKED MEATBALLS or any other recipe on my site, let me know in the comment section how it turned out, we love hearing from our readers! You can also follow along with me on PINTEREST, FACEBOOK and INSTAGRAM to see more amazing recipes and what shenanigans I’m getting into!
Baked Meatballs
Ingredients
- 1 lbs ground beef
- 1 lb ground italian sausage
- 1 small onion diced
- 2 eggs
- 1 cup breadcrumbs
- 1 clove garlic minced
- 1/2 cup milk
- 1 tsp italian seasoning
- 1 tsp parsley
- 1/4 cup parmesan cheese
- Salt & pepper to taste
- 4 cups spaghetti sauce
- 1 cup mozzarella cheese
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 375.
- In large bowl add your ground beef, onion, eggs, breadcrumbs, garlic, milk, italian seasoning, parsley, salt, pepper and parmesan cheese.
- Using your hand or a spoon mix it all together gently just until it is combined, you don’t want to over mix.
- Using an ice cream scoop or your hands portion your meat mixture out into 15 equally sized meatballs and place in 9"x13" baking dish, bake for 25-30 minutes.
- Remove from oven and top with 4 cups of spaghetti sauce and one cup of cheese.
- Place back in oven and bake for another 20-25 minutes until meatballs reach internal temperature of 160 degrees F and cheese is melted and golden.
Notes
- Use the leanest beef you can find, this will produce the less amount of grease possible.
- You can use a mixture of ground beef and Italian sausage like we do or you can use all ground beef.
- Do not overtax the meatball mixture, this will cause it to get tough.
- We use canned sauce for this recipe, you can use your own homemade but you will need 4 cups to bake these meatballs in.
- We top our meatballs with shredded parmesan, feel free to switch it up with italian blend or parmesan.
Nutrition
Tornadough Alli is not a nutritionist or dietitian, and any nutritional information shared is an estimate. If calorie count and nutritional value is important to you, we recommend running the ingredients through whichever online nutritional calculator you prefer. Calories and values can vary depending on which brands were used.
Jaime
Making this tonight and just realizing the instructions don’t make sense. It says I’ll need 1/4 cup Parmesan but then in the instructions it says to add a cup of cheese. Which is it? Is it 1 cup of Parmesan? A different kind of cheese?
Tornadough Alli
I just looked at it and I have no idea why it wasn’t included in the ingredients list. The Parmesan goes into the meatballs. Then bake and top with 4 cups spaghetti sauce and then I cup mozzarella cheese. I apologize I will fix that!
Brittany
What brand of tomato sauce are you using on these yummy meatballs??
Tornadough Alli
We just used Walmart store brand for these, you can use any of your favorite sauce 🙂
Abby Levine
These sound soo good. just a couple of questions. Plain or seasoned breadcrumbs? Under nutrition it doesn’t say how many meatballs, for medical reasons i need to increase my protein intake-it’s got high protein but i don’t know how many to have to hit that 36g mark. thanks for sharing your wonderful recipes
Tornadough Alli
So this is per 5 servings so each serving would be 3 meatballs, so 3 meatballs according to the nutrition says its about 36 mg of protein. These are just estimates based on our API that our recipe card provides.
Tornadough Alli
Also this was used with plain breadcrumbs, but we substitute italian all the time.
Mike Didier
This recipe sounds and looks very tasty. Remember 2 or 3 of these meatballs inside a quality
italian bread would make a great meal as well and portable also.