Spaghetti with Chicken Meatballs in Tomato Sauce
Ingredients
2 servings
For the meatballs
- Mixed chicken meat or a whole chicken (0.5-0.6 kg) 300 g
- Egg 1
- Sweet ground paprika 0.5 tsp
- Breadcrumbs 1-2 tbsp (8–15 g)
- Salt, black pepper to taste
For the sauce
- Canned chopped tomatoes 1 cup
- Hot pepper 1
- Garlic 1-2 cloves
- Olive oil 2 tbsp
- Sugar 1 tsp (5 g)
- Dried Italian herb mix 1 tsp
- Salt a little
For the pasta and serving
- Spaghetti 200 g
- Water for boiling the pasta 2 l
- Salt for boiling the pasta 14 g (7 g per 1 l of water)
- Parsley or green onion for sprinkling, optional
Step-by-step recipe
Meatballs
For the meatballs we use minced chicken, both dark and white meat, put through a meat grinder. Chicken breast fillet alone is a bit dry for meatballs. If you can, buy a whole chicken or half a chicken and take all the meat off the carcass. It makes excellent minced meat.
Make the mince: carefully clean the chicken meat of any leftover bones, grind it in a meat grinder and transfer it to a deep bowl so it is easy to mix.
Add one egg, salt, freshly ground black pepper and 0.5 tsp of sweet ground paprika. Mix the mince so that all the spices are evenly distributed. You can add more aromatic spices to the mince, for example savory or thyme.
Add breadcrumbs or crushed crackers and mix again. The mince is not very firm, and this makes it workable for shaping. Usually 1-2 tbsp of crumbs (8–15 g) is enough for the meatballs to hold their shape and not fall apart.
This is just ordinary white bread crumbs. At home we dry an inexpensive baguette and then grate it. You get excellent crumbs that work for the mince and also as breading for meat or cutlets.
Shape the meatballs: wet a large flat-bottomed plate with water so the raw meatballs do not stick to it. With damp palms, shape balls the size of a walnut, rolling them to make them rounder. Do not make them too big or too small. From 300 grams of meat you usually get up to 20 of them.
Tomato sauce
Canned chopped tomatoes can be replaced with ripe tomatoes, peeled. The sauce uses quite a lot of dried herbs typical of Italian cooking.
Brown the meatballs: heat 2 tbsp of olive oil in a frying pan over medium heat. When the oil starts to crackle, add all the meatballs and, turning them often, fry on all sides until a crust forms.
Add the vegetables and tomatoes to the meatballs. Peel the hot pepper and garlic, chop them finely with a knife and add to the pan. Blend the canned tomatoes or simply crush them by hand and add them too. Do not add water. Stir the tomatoes and meatballs together, add a little salt, 1 tsp of sugar (5 g) and 1 tsp of dried aromatic herbs (there are very good mixes on sale with oregano, parsley, savory and so on). Stir the sauce well and bring it to a boil.
Cover the pan with a lid, turn the heat down to the lowest setting that still keeps a simmer, and cook the meatballs in the sauce for about 15 mins, stirring occasionally so they do not stick to the pan. There is not much tomato in the sauce by volume, so watch that it does not start to burn. The meatballs are done when there is no pink left inside.
Add more spices to taste. I sometimes add Bulgarian “sharena sol”, a spice salt, and I really like the flavor. The tomato sauce becomes softer and gentler if you add a little milk, just a very little.
Spaghetti
While the sauce with the meatballs simmers, cook the spaghetti.
In a pot over high heat, bring 2 l of water to a boil and salt it: 14 g of salt (7 g per 1 l of water). Add the spaghetti to the boiling water, stir right away so it does not stick together, and cook for the time given on the package. Usually it is 8-9 mins, which gives you pasta cooked al dente. Drain the cooked pasta in a colander.
Serving
Divide the spaghetti among serving plates, put the meatballs on top and spoon the sauce over them. You can sprinkle with finely chopped parsley or green onion.
Serve the spaghetti while the dish is hot. As a fan of spicy food, I often sprinkle the sauce with a pinch of coarsely ground chili flakes.
Calories and macros
540 kcal
Serving ≈ 470 g
- Protein33 g25% of kcal
- Fat39 g67% of kcal
- Carbs10 g7% of kcal
100 g115 kcalProtein 7 gFat 8.4 gCarbs 2.1 g
Calculated from the recipe ingredients, excluding salt and spices. Data: USDA and Matvaretabellen.