In episode 099…can’t believe I’m almost to 100 episodes… we are making Gochujang Meatballs for dinner. This is a super easy meatball recipe with yummy Asian flavors and then coated in a store bought Gochujang sauce (that you can grab at Target).
Serve it up with some fried rice and roasted broccoli for a great weeknight dinner!
Transcript
Click for the full transcript.
Intro: Welcome, welcome everybody to another episode of Let’s Make Dinner, your audio library of amazing dinner recipes you can always get on the table. I’m your host, Susie Wenrich.
Susie Weinrich: All right, we are going to start this one with a little disclaimer. I’m probably going to struggle to say this word 400 times through this episode, so I almost feel like I should find another name for these.
We’re making Gochujang Meatballs today at Let’s Make dinner. I’m going to have to pause before I say it every time. We’re going to practice. Gochujang, gochujang, gochujang. You know what? I’m awful. I may even be saying it wrong. I just know that I love this sauce so much. It’s a tangy, chili pepper, slightly sweet and sticky sauce. It is so delicious. You’ve probably seen things with gochujang sauce. Oh, I said it was really good right there, gochujang. Gochujang sauce at restaurants and maybe you’ve seen some of the chili paste, the gochujang chili paste in the stores. For this recipe, we’re actually going to use a gochujang barbecue sauce. You can find it at a few different stores, but the one that we really love and that we know you can find is they have a Good and Gather gochujang barbecue sauce at Target. So I don’t know if it is actually Good and Gather or is it Market Pantry? You know, they swapped those two names, so I’m not sure which one it is, but you can find it at Target and it is super duper delicious.
So in this recipe, we’re actually gonna make a pork slash beef meatball, an Asian flavored meatball. Then we’re going to finish it with this gochujang sauce. You can actually serve this with a little fried rice on the side. You could do just a white rice or brown rice, some roasted broccoli, or, I have a wonderful recipe for an Asian style slaw that has crispy ramen noodles in it. Woo. So good.
Tips and Tricks: Just a couple recipe tips and tricks before we get into making the full recipe. Number one, you need ground pork for this recipe. Make sure that you’re buying ground pork and not ground sausage. Ground pork will just be, it will look like ground beef, but it’ll be pink and that’s what you need. It will also be super inexpensive.
You also need ground beef for making a combo of beef and pork always for meatballs. I recommend using a little bit leaner beef so that your meatballs don’t turn really greasy. So an 85% lean or a 90% lean is perfect here.
Another ingredient you need is fresh ginger, and I’ve talked about this before. There’s a product in your freezer section of your grocery store that’s frozen, minced, or grated ginger, which is so much easier to use than buying a ginger knob and then peeling it and grading it and mincing it. They’re literally just cubes of frozen ginger. Each cube, I believe, is one teaspoon. This recipe calls for three teaspoons of fresh ginger. So you just need three of those little cubes, pop ’em out and they’re ready to use. Super duper easy.
All right. But the main thing that we talked about in the beginning of this episode, we’re going to talk about it again. When you go to the store, there’s probably going to be a few different options for a gochujang sauce. You want to make sure that you’re buying a gochujang sauce and not the concentrated paste. The concentrated paste is just the gochujang chili paste. Then you would need to make that into a sauce, which is not included in this recipe. It has an already made sauce on it. Like I said before, I love the one that they have at Target. It’s either Market Pantry or Good and Gather. It’s a gochujang barbecue sauce. Right in the post you’ll actually see a picture of it. So if you want to see what that looks like, you can click through to the post. There’ll be a link in the show notes for you and you can check it out.
Okay? Otherwise, everything is pretty much straightforward for this recipe. So let’s go ahead and make your gochujang meatballs. I want to give myself a little pat on the back. I am saying gochujang very, very well.
All right, so you’re going to start by preheating your oven to 400 degrees. Then you’re gonna line a large rimmed baking sheet with foil and spray it really generously with non-stick spray. Set that aside.
Now we’re going to make the actual meatball mixture. So in a really large bowl, we’re going to start by making that panade. If you’ve been here a while, you know anytime we make a ground meat recipe, we’re going to add a panade to keep it really juicy and tender. So you’re going to add one egg, one tablespoon of soy sauce, two tablespoons of water, a quarter cup of very thinly sliced green onions, and two large garlic cloves that have been minced. Three teaspoons of minced fresh ginger, a quarter teaspoon of red pepper flakes, a quarter teaspoon of kosher salt, and two thirds cup of plain breadcrumbs. Now give that a really good whisk so that the egg is all broken down and that the breadcrumbs are all mixed into that liquid. Once that is all combined and the breadcrumbs are starting to absorb some of that liquid, you’re going to add in three quarters pound of ground pork and three quarters pound of ground beef. Then either with clean hands or with a fork, you’re just gonna lightly mix that together until everything is combined. Then you’re going to form golf ball sized meatballs. For this, I do like to use a medium sized cookie scoop so that they all come out the same size and that they all cook evenly. You’ll have probably about 20 meatballs here.
So place the meatballs on your prepared baking sheet. Then I like to give the tops of the meatballs a really generous spray with that non-stick cooking spray. That just helps the meatballs brown evenly from top to bottom. So you’re going to bake your meatballs for about 20 minutes, and I do like to flip the meatballs about halfway through the cooking time, so you get that nice browning on both sides.
While those meatballs are cooking, I recommend taking a large skillet, popping it over low heat, and pouring that gochujang sauce into the skillet and just let it warm through. Then when the meatballs are done baking, you can transfer them to that gochujang sauce. Give them a really good stir so they coat and they get all sticky and saucy, and just let them simmer and warm together for about five minutes.
That’s it. That’s your full recipe. Your gochujang meatballs are ready. Now, as I said before, I love to serve these over rice or fried rice. Top it off with maybe some sesame seeds or some green onions, maybe even some cilantro. Then either roasted broccoli or that Asian slaw that I talked about would be delicious on the side.
So that does it for this full recipe. I hope you enjoyed this and I hope you make it for dinner. Now, if you make this for dinner and you are like, that was five stars, I absolutely loved it. I would love to have you go onto the recipe and actually click down to the rating section, give it five stars, and let me know what you loved about this recipe.
Outro: So until next time, I hope this episode of Let’s Make Dinner makes your dinner time a little easier. See ya.
Double Dip: All right, so now it’s time for your double dip. Thank you so much for sticking around. Next week we’re doing something a little bit different here on the podcast. I’m actually going to go over one of the larger posts that I have on my site that is excellent for summertime. It’s a whole entire post talking about feeding a large group on vacation.
So if you have a bunch of families that get together and go on vacation, or if you have a large family reunion or any time that you have a large group of people that you’re trying to feed over multiple days, I have an entire post that goes over how to do that easily. Even like, 30 plus menus that you can use to feed a large group on vacation.
So I hope you’ll listen to that next week and maybe even go check out the post, especially if you have a vacation coming up. But then, next week, we’re going to go over how to make buttermilk cornbread and honey butter, which is a perfect side dish for any summer barbecue. So until then, I hope you guys have a wonderful and beautiful summer week ahead of you. We’ll see you then.
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Next week for the 100th EPISODE we are going over this post on How to Feed A Large Group on Vacation!!! I hope you will join me then!
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