Making Spaghetti Sauce and Meatballs for 30 people! Wheeew! Not an easy task, but well worth it! I wanted to have some detailed descriptions of the photos you see in the above Spaghetti Sauce, Meatballs and Braciole slide show. First off you will notice in these photos that there are three pots of sauce, two large pots and one small one. This is because we had some guests coming that are allergic to gluten and are on a Gluten-free diet so I had to make a separate pot of sauce for them that only had braciole made with no bread crumbs. Did not want to make the meatballs with no breadcrumbs. You will also see in the photos that when I was making the braciole, I had to pieces of braciole meat off to the side, that is because I was making those without the bread crumbs.
So what I did to make my recipe work for this many people is use two pots of sauce making the recipes twice. However, I did double up on the meatballs recipe for each pot which ended up making about 42 meatballs! I also made a little bit more than double the braciole recipe producing 21 braciole's. I made them a bit on the small side so I could make more of them.
I made a will short video when I was making the meatballs for this party. I was attempting to show how I like to form the meatballs. I role them very tight, almost flat as a pancake and then apply less pressure and keep rolling. Well, I have placed the video below so you can see the process. You will also see in the video the massive bowl of meatball mix! That was a lot of MeatBall Mix!!! You can also see a very messy table! I felt like I was on the top chef show the day I was making all this sauce. Running around like crazy trying to get both pots of sauce cooking with the meat so they would be done before the party started. I was shooting for about 4 hours of cooking time for the sauce with the meats. When you cook Braciole, you want the sauce to cook for at least 3-1/2 hours, preferably 4 hours.
A note about trying to make all this work with the 2 pots on one stove with only 2 large burners. The trick is you need to brown all the meats before you start making the sauce. I usually like to take the browning meat straight from the hot pan into the sauce btu in this case I make an exception and brown all the meatballs and braciole first and set them aside to add to the sauce later when I am at the point where both sauce pots have the olive oil, garlic, pasta and diced tomatoes simmering. So I prepared the braciole's the night before the party and put them in the fridge. Then early the next morning I made all the meatballs. Then browned all the meat, set them aside, got the sauce going in three pots, added the meat to the sauce and let it simmer for 4 hours. You have to keep carefully stirring throughout the whole process, however. Important note: When you are making a sauce with a lot of meats in it you need to have moments of the cooking where you do not stir for a while, maybe 15 minutes or so, long enough to let grease pools for on the top of the sauce. You then remove this grease with a table spoon and then stir some more. I ended up removing about 3 cups worth of grease from each pot. You will do this about 3 different times throughout the cooking process.
Let's see... What else is there that's important about this huge cooking event. Oh yeah.. You will see a laptop on the table with speakers.. This was extremely important. As I said, I was running around like crazy trying to get everything done on time and I needed energy. Pandora Radio really helped me out! I started out with some good Italian music but then switch over to high energy electronic music to get me through. Kraftwerk Radio on Pandora really came through for me and helped me press on :-)
If I think of some more important steps in this process of cooking Spaghetti Sauce, Meatballs and Braciole like grandma did for a large crowd of people I will revisit this page and add some more secrets.
Happy cooking, Happy times and share the LOVE!
Ciao, Anthony
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