Sausage meatballs over garlic-herb orzo
Two ingredients make the meatballs. The fennel does everything else.
At a Glance
Story
Sausage is already seasoned, emulsified and fatted, so meatballs made from it need nothing but a binder. Panko and nothing else. No egg, no milk, no herbs, no onion. Every addition past that point is diluting something a butcher already got right.
Ingredients
- 4 oz orzo
- 10 oz hot Italian sausagecasings removed
- ¼ cup panko breadcrumbs
- 1 fennel bulbcored and medium diced
- 2 scallionssliced, whites and greens kept apart
- 1 × 8 oz can tomato sauce
- 1 tbsp sherry vinegar
- 1 oz butter
- 2 cloves garlicfinely chopped
- 1 tbsp parsleychopped
- ¼ cup grated Parmesan
- olive oilsalt, pepper
Method
Fennel with sausage is not a new idea and there is a reason nobody has improved on it. The sherry vinegar hitting the hot pan is the step that makes the sauce taste like it simmered longer than it did.
- Salted water on to boil. Core and dice the fennel, keeping any fronds.
- Mix the sausage and panko gently and shape into 10 tightly packed balls. Brown them in a large pan over medium high, turning and shaking the pan, 5 to 7 minutes, until coloured all over. They will not be cooked through.
- Orzo into the water, 8 to 10 minutes to tender. Drain and return to the pot with the butter, garlic and parsley, stirred until the butter goes.
- Fennel into the meatball pan. Season, 2 to 3 minutes. Scallion whites, another 1 to 2 minutes.
- Sherry vinegar in, and scrape the base hard while it hisses and disappears, under a minute.
- Tomato sauce. Simmer 3 to 4 minutes, until thickened and the meatballs reach 160°F.
- Orzo into bowls, meatballs and sauce over. Parmesan, scallion greens and any fennel fronds you saved.
A heel of bread to swipe the bowl. Nobody needs telling twice.
More to cook
Achaar beef with curry-spiced rice
Sweet raisins in the rice, sour pickle in the beef, and a cool green sauce to referee.
Gnocchi baked with corn and a goat cheese heart
A whole round of goat cheese goes in last and collapses into the sauce.
Baked gnocchi under a monterey jack lid
The gnocchi never touch a pan. They go in raw and come out plumped.
Sausage and gnocchi baked under mozzarella
Calabrian chile and capers doing the heavy lifting while the oven does the work.
Curry peanut noodles with whatever protein you have
Four things whisked in a bowl, done before the noodles are.
Greek chickpea and couscous bowls
Chickpeas fried hard until they pop, which is the point and also the hazard.
Korean pork and rice cakes
Chewy, glossy, and faster than deciding where to order from.
Lime-glazed chicken with dates and labneh
The dates go in with their soaking water and turn the pan sauce sticky.
Pierogies baked under smoky sausage
Everything goes in cold and comes out molten. No stirring, no supervision.
Hot sausage and sweet corn pasta
Corn cut straight from the cob, and hot sauce stirred in at the very end.
Half-hour pork ragù with currants and clove
A ragù in thirty-five minutes, sweetened with fruit and spiced like a Christmas ham.
Fifteen-minute tortellini in a creamy romesco
The tortellini cook in the sauce they are served in, so there is one pan.
Shrimp and basil fettuccine in a yellow tomato sauce
Yellow tomatoes make a sauce that tastes of tomato without the red bark.
Shrimp and charred vegetable couscous
Leave the vegetables alone in the pan and they brown. Stir them and they steam.
Beef noodles, sweet then immediately not
The sauce is three jars you already own, whisked in the time the water boils.