Add This Nourishing Ingredient To Ground Beef For Juicier Meatballs (Hint: It's Not Milk)

Getting juicy meatballs can be pretty tricky since it requires a careful balance of liquids and solids to avoid oversaturation — but you also don't want dry, lifeless results either. However, using gelatinized stock or broth is a neat way to add a "solid" liquid, making it easy to still form the perfect meatballs without risking them drying out in the pan or oven.

The same reason milk-soaked breadcrumbs keep meatballs moist makes gelled broth so effective. As the proteins cook, that heat steadily melts the broth, infusing the muscle strands with flavor-packed moisture. Unlike soup dumplings, however, your aim isn't to include a gelatin core that spreads outward. Instead, you want to finely mince about a quarter cup of broth per pound of meat, ensuring it's evenly distributed throughout each little meatball. This has the added benefit of adding an intense, meaty flavor to your recipe, especially if you make a more flavorful broth with roasted bones.

While this trick guarantees incredible juiciness, which for ground meat can translate into tenderness, it doesn't have quite the same effect as the milk and breadcrumbs panade. Panades use swollen starch to keep the muscle fibers from contracting so much as they cook, which stock and broth just can't do. With that in mind, overworking meat is always a big mistake with meatballs, so you'll want to be extra careful to use soft, even motions to mix everything together since you won't be able to rely on a panade's tenderizing effect.

To get a properly gelatinized stock or broth, you usually need collagen extracted from bones. You can easily do this at home with some frozen scraps, but if you'd prefer to buy them instead, there are plenty of ways to doctor up store-bought broths and stocks and make them just as effective.

If you plan on making a stock at home, the key is to use the right parts of an animal. For chicken stock, your best bet is to use skin or feet. These come absolutely loaded with collagen that's a cinch to extract, only requiring a few hours of gentle simmering for an incredibly rich and flavorful gelatin. If you prefer beef or pork, joints are usually your best bet, such as knuckles or feet. Just about anything should work, but these have more of that gelatinizing collagen you're aiming for.

You may have noticed that most store-bought stocks and broths don't gelatinize in the fridge. If you truly want to avoid making your own at home, don't worry; all you need is a packet of unflavored gelatin. Start with a teaspoon and a half of mix per cup of liquid and let that set up in the fridge for a few hours. You can always reheat and add more if you want, but you don't want the recipe to be so firm that it can't melt, mince, or incorporate into the meatballs evenly.