Cheese and Pears

Archive for the ‘Meat and Seafood’ Category

Ground Lamb Recipes: Lamb Meatballs

Posted on Apr 17, 2011 03:23:50 PM

This one may be the least Italian recipe of this Italian food blog, but the truth is hem… when I bought this lamb mince, I thought it was turkey mince (in my defence they have a similar color, although lamb meat is slightly pinker).

Anyway, I had never done mince meatballs before, so why not start with a ground lamb recipe.

400gr lamb mince
5 cloves of garlic, finely sliced
a handful of mint leaves (about 20), chopped
5-6 sprigs of rosemary, chopped
one egg
55gr (2 oz) of grated pecorino cheese (or parmesan)
breadcrumbs
salt and pepper

Add all the ingredients except for the breadcrumbs to a bowl and mix with your hand, until it’s all well amalgamated. Cover with cling film and (if you have enough time ) let the lamb marinate in the fridge for a couple of hours.

When it’s time (about 45 minutes before serving them), preheat the oven at 200ºC (392ºF) and line a baking tray with oven paper.

Pour the breadcrumbs on a dish. Make sure they are really finely ground, so use a pestle and mortar of fingertip grease if necessary. Form the meatballs with the palms of your hands, roll them in the breadcrumbs and line them in the tray (I made 18 with those 400 grams – the 18 in the picture plus one for tasting-  but we all have our ideal size when it comes to meatballs I suppose…)

Put the lamb meatballs in the oven and set the countdown timer to 20 minutes (don’t you have one? Seriously? Get yourself this cool kitchen timer from Amazon then. Forget the mechanic ones, digital is the way to go), when you will have to turn them so that they cook evenly.

At that point, if  the lamb mince meat is not of sublime quality, like the one I used, you will probably see the lamb meatballs getting their feet wet in a puddle of fat (nice image huh?). What I did was to transfer the meatballs onto a new oven paper sheet, with the bottom part up, and sprinkled some extra breadcrumbs on them. But if your meat hasn’t sweated too much or if lamb grease is your friend, you can skip this passage.

I cooked for 20 more minutes, and that’s how I nailed this easy lamb recipe (bragging intended).