The Hearty Breadcrumb Swap That Makes Meatballs Irresistible

There's an art to making a good meatball. You need to have quality meat as well as flavorful seasonings. To ensure your meatballs stay moist and don't shrivel up and dry out, you also need a good panade. Whether or not you know the name, a panade is a staple of meatball making — usually a mixture of breadcrumbs and milk or stock, sometimes with eggs as well. Breadcrumbs aren't just filler in meatballs. They help retain the moisture that could be lost as the proteins tighten during cooking. You need that bread for a delicious, moist, flavorful bite. But it doesn't just have to be bread. Why not try stuffing?

Obviously, you want to have a juicy meatball that holds together when it's cooked, and a panade accomplishes that even with plain breadcrumbs. We recommended this stuffing hack for better homemade meatballs once before and it's worth a closer look. A box of stuffing may seem like an odd choice, but what is it if not dried bread with seasoning? It's exactly what you want in your meatballs.

Stuffing mixes like Stove Top Stuffing tend to have very strong seasoning included because you're adding water and allowing it to expand before serving it as a side dish. In your meatballs, it will absorb all of those juices that would otherwise be lost, concentrating the meat flavor while complementing it with the pre-added seasoning. Basically, you're giving yourself a shortcut to exactly what you wanted, possibly with a flavor profile you hadn't thought of before.

There's more than one way to add stuffing to your meatballs. If you're going to use a box of dry stuffing, just add warm water first to rehydrate it. Mix it until it reaches a consistency similar to what you would make with breadcrumbs. You don't want to add the stuffing completely dry, but you don't need to mix it into a fully prepared stuffing either.

The other method is to have a little more control over the flavor by using homemade stuffing. If you have some leftover stuffing after a holiday dinner, that fresh version with onion, celery, and maybe some mushrooms or sausage mixed in can add a new dimension to chicken or Thanksgiving-inspired turkey meatballs. It can even work with beef and pork.

If your homemade stuffing is a little bit dry, you can just treat it like you would the store-bought stuff. Let it soak in a bowl with some milk or even just a few tablespoons of water per cup to get it to the right consistency. It won't take as much liquid as a box of dried mix will, but it might still need a helping hand, especially if it baked a little dry and wasn't inside the turkey during the first cooking. Then you can follow your favorite meatball recipe as normal using it in place of your bread crumbs.