**The Art of Vegan Meatballs**

Our sauce is done, it's ready to go! I'm just going to get um some water boiling for our pasta today and I'm just gonna like salt that water. You know I always get in videos is pasta isn't vegan and a lot of times you will find pasta products that are enriched with eggs but this company actually just makes their pasta out of durum wheat and water so vegan.

Our sauce is ready, I'm going to just keep it simmering on low though until our meatballs are ready to go into the sauce. You know where it's right where you want it to be because the onions and like the peppers will have kind of like an oily yellow sheen to them and you'll see a little bit of oils kind of sitting on the top and the onions will be slightly like wilted and cooked through.

I'm just going to remove the onions from the sauce and of course our scotch bonnet pepper and I'm just finding those bay leafs and the basil. Now we're gonna move on from the sauce and um get started on frying our meatballs it is a complete meatball it is fantastic or i'll call them leap balls lentil balls i don't know so i'm just gonna get some olive oil into a small fry pan and i have it on medium heat.

We're just gonna allow that oil to heat up for a little bit so now we can just add our meatballs and I'm gonna fry in um batches here it just allows for more even cooking so I'll do four at a time when you're cooking meatballs in a sauce that could take an hour or longer where these veggie meatballs just come together a lot quicker than that.

We just are going to repeat this on all sides until our meatballs are fully browned this is looking ready to me it's got a nice crispy crunchy outer layer on a couple sides I really gave this a good squeeze accidentally with the tongs like a good squeeze and it's still staying together like i gotta give myself some snaps for that.

We're gonna just pop them in the oven for about seven to ten minutes so our meatballs are ready from the oven we don't want them to dry out too much that's why the cooking time is short. I'm just gonna place these bad boys in there turn up the heat to medium low our pasta water is boiling so I'm gonna get our pasta in there I want it to be al dente so I'm only gonna cook it for about seven minutes.

So, this is the moment of truth when we determine if our pasta is ready. Do you guys believe in the "sticking to a wall" method or no? I don't think it's ready, it's going right behind you go for it. Oh wait holy crap it's ready and it looks like a fish that's pretty great so I've just ruled out that pasta trick then it's a lie and still folks holding their full structural integrity that's what i'm talking about.

Pasta should be perfectly ready now move the pasta over give this a good mix and you can see there's some chunks in the sauce I really like that just gonna start plating this we're just gonna put that right at the center just give it a nice little little twirl I just want some of that chunky tomato in there it's my favorite.

And then we're just gonna grab like three meatballs I'm just gonna sprinkle some cashew parm on you can see it kind of brings that realness to life. We've got really nice finishing salt that's like slightly sweet and then we're just gonna go in with some torn basil I really like plating and making things look really beautiful.

Thinking about the color balance and food and everything like that, i guess that's why my friends call me bob ross of cooking they say i go a little overboard but i like to have fun. And there you have it, see how the structure holds up oh yeah look at that just gonna put it at the edge so you can see the inside of that meatball it's still completely structurally sound which is awesome.

You get an aftertaste of lentils, it's not even the most forward flavor, it's really the spices that are making the dish and they balance out perfectly with the pasta. Yeah I don't know this is this is pretty freaking good for a lentil meatball i would say for meatball chris if you're watching i would like you to reverse engineer this meatball, i want to see if you could do it.

i'd be interested in seeing that Chrissy um texted me a photo um on friday it was my birthday and she wished me a happy birthday which was just wonderful but do i think i could reverse engineer Chrissy's vegan meatballs? I think i could well i don't know actually, i actually have no idea

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyou can have your meatball cooked and ready to go in like 15 minutes got a nice golden brown color to it i would hope chris morocco would be fully impressed with this vegan meatball today's recipe was actually inspired by chris morocco's ba best meatball and i wanted to just show how you can make that with a little bit of a meatless twist the first thing i'm going to do is quarter and peel this onion here and i'm just using a sweet onion i really like the flavor a yellow onion works well for this recipe as well smash two cloves of garlic i really just want large pieces so that i can remove the garlic from the sauce at the end of cooking now my favorite we've got our scotch bonnet pepper which is a pepper that is used a lot in jamaican cooking that's going to give it a really nice spicy level to the sauce but also it adds like a subtle sweetness and a really nice bold flavor anytime i can add a little bit of my cultural flair to a recipe i tried to do that you could also swap out with a habanero pepper they're pretty much very similar i'm going to cut that in half we're only going to utilize half because it's a very spicy pepper you always try to match your peppers to your sugar uh you know i don't always match my peppers to my shirt but when i do i use scotch bonnet there's a lot of like seeds in there those seeds are extremely spicy so you're going to want to de-seed that i don't deal well with overly spicy things i like a medium spice that's that's i'm a medium spice girl that's about it once you have all of your ingredients prepped and ready you can get started on the sauce so let's do that today i'm using whole peeled organic san marzano style tomatoes i'm just going to start breaking those tomatoes up with my hands oh that was bad the thing is i knew that was gonna happen i almost wore white i almost wore white that would have been tragic so if you don't want to get too messy you could use a potato masher that works really well for breaking down whole tomatoes but at this time i'm gonna go wash my hands because they are i'm gonna turn this on to medium heat and i will now add five tablespoons of plant butter it's usually made out of like coconut oil almond oil blend um i'm using this like flora brand that's really good tastes very similar to real butter so i i actually really like it you literally can just plop your tomatoes and everything else in here again this is an easy sauce it's meant to be everything goes in we're gonna throw our basil in there as well and a bay leaf this sauce is gonna be very very rich almost like creamy which is unique for a tomato sauce i'm just adding like two teaspoons of kosher salt i'm also just gonna do a couple cranks of black pepper for added flavor and give this a good stir once over and i'll stir it occasionally until that butter melts i'm just going to kind of leave that and forget it for the next 35 minutes so now we're gonna make some cashew based parmesan which i know sounds crazy but it's actually extremely simple to make and very delicious i'm gonna grab my food processor we brought it back to the 80s here i'm going to include cashew parmesan in the meatball recipe because that's what chris does he well he uses real parmesan but i i'm gonna use this to kind of bring out the flavors a little bit more nutritional yeast has like a cheesy undertone to it so a lot of vegans will use it to enhance the flavor of any kind of dairy-free cheese substitutes that they try to attempt or it's even really good on popcorn and things like that so it's just a really good pantry staple in my opinion all right so let's get started i've got a cup of cashews throwing that in the food processor we've got two tablespoons of nutritional yeast quarter teaspoon of garlic powder teaspoon onion powder and a teaspoon of salt here we're gonna pulse this for about 30 seconds and it's gonna get a very fine powder all right perfect you'll notice sometimes when you're trying to make cashew parm that like a buttery type of substance will start to form on the bottom it didn't get to that point yet but it's just like a fine crumble that could have gone to that point if i had pulse for another minute or two it's quite interesting it's like you can make your own cashew butter at home with a food processor for this recipe we're going to use lentils as the main frame for the meatball it's a really awesome way to incorporate a meatless option into your diet so the first thing we're going to do here is using fresh bread cut off the crust and never throw out the crusts you can always make your own torn croutons from scratch you can cut them into cubes and then season them with salt pepper oregano and some olive oil pop them in the oven at 400 degrees and then you have croutons for a salad we have three slices of bread here chris actually soaks his bread in water i'm soaking my bread in unsweetened full-fat oat milk anywhere i can add a little bit more fat content or a little more oomph to a vegan dish i will always try to chris says he brings it out after soaking in water feels so weird honestly doesn't feel right it's it's shocking it's almost like a little sponge now i'm just cutting that bread into cubes i have my oven preheated to 350 degrees preheating before you get started on the meatballs is the best way to again to optimize efficiency because by the time the meatballs are done and ready to go you can pop them into the oven so i'm just prepping the garlic now we're just using two cloves today you want a fine mince for this recipe you want the garlic to evenly disperse throughout the meatballs the next thing we're going to do is just roughly chop the parsley you don't want to bruise the herb but we do want to make sure that the pieces are small enough to disperse within the meatball what we're going to do now is add our aquafaba which let me just tell you aquafaba is like magic bean juice liquid it is the byproduct of any legume being cooked for an extended period of time so if you have a can of chickpeas in your pantry it's a really great egg replacer it works as a great emulsifier you can make vegan mayo out of it actually it also really works well as a binder so that's why we're using it for our binder as the egg in this recipe so i'm adding a third cup of that cashew parmesan that we made earlier we're gonna add two cups of cooked lentils we are using green lentils you can also use brown lentils give this all a gentle mix make sure that aqua faba kind of gets onto everything i have a mortar and pestle here using three quarters of a teaspoon of fennel and i'm just gonna go ahead and crush that that'll just open the seeds right up oh my god you can just can you smell that well obviously obviously you can't smell it but so to this i'm gonna add two teaspoons of kosher salt an eighth teaspoon of nutmeg also adding some marjoram and margarine is a really nice seasoning it's in the same family as oregano but it's slightly more floral it adds like a nice savory note to the dish i'm gonna add some oregano and some crushed red pepper flakes for added spice and flavor give that another mix once over just a small one and then i'm gonna just slowly add some of these bread crumbs i have about three quarters cup depending on how much liquid is in your lentils you might need more or less and i'm going to use my hands to just combine the mixture and it's feeling a little wet to me so that's why we use it as like an additional binder it kind of feels like i'm playing in kinetic sand it's like one of those weird like experiences right now i kind of like it but you see it's coming into like this one cohesive ball in order to form the meatballs and not get so much residue on your hands in that process i'm just gonna lightly oil my hands a little bit of olive oil and we're just gonna take a chunk and kind of just ball that this should make like eight or nine large meatballs or 12 to 14 smaller ones so these are honestly like the most structurally stable vegan meatballs that i've ever had again that aquafaba and the breadcrumb add beautiful binding properties just gonna pop them in the freezer to let them set and firm up a little bit more our sauce is done it's ready to go i'm just gonna get um some water boiling for our pasta today and i'm just gonna like salt that water you know i'm just gonna heavily salt it let me get that burner on a question i always get in videos is pasta isn't vegan and a lot of times you will find pasta products that are enriched with eggs but this company actually just makes their pasta out of durham wheat and water so vegan oof our sauce is ready i'm going to just keep it simmering on low though until our meatballs are ready to go into the sauce you know where it's right where you want it to be because the onions and like the peppers will have kind of like an oily yellow sheen to them and you'll see a little bit of oils kind of sitting on the top and the onions will be slightly like wilted and cooked through so i'm just gonna remove the onions from the sauce and of course our scotch bonnet pepper and i'm just finding those bay leafs and the basil now we're gonna move on from the sauce and um get started on frying our meatballs it is a complete meatball it is fantastic or i'll call them leap balls lentil balls i don't know so i'm just gonna get some olive oil into a small fry pan and i have it on medium heat and we're just gonna allow that oil to heat up for a little bit so now we can just add our meatballs and i'm gonna fry in um batches here it just allows for more even cooking so i'll do four at a time when you're cooking meatballs in a sauce that could take an hour or longer where these veggie meatballs just come together a lot quicker than that we just are going to repeat this on all sides until our meatballs are fully browned this is looking ready to me it's got a nice crispy crunchy outer layer on a couple sides i really gave this a good squeeze accidentally with the tongs like a good squeeze and it's still staying together like i gotta give myself some snaps for that we're gonna just pop them in the oven for about seven to ten minutes so our meatballs are ready from the oven we don't want them to dry out too much that's why the cooking time is short and i'm just gonna place these bad boys in there turn up the heat to medium low our pasta water is boiling so i'm gonna get our pasta in there i want it to be al dente so i'm only gonna cook it for about seven minutes all right so this hello do you guys believe in the in the pasta being ready when it sticks to a wall method or no i don't think it's ready it's going right behind you go for it oh wait holy crap it's ready and it looks like a fish that's pretty great so i've just ruled out that pasta trick then it's a lie and still folks holding their full structural integrity that's what i'm talking about pasta should be perfectly ready now move the pasta over give this a good mix and you can see there's some chunks in the sauce i really like that just gonna start plating this we're just gonna put that right at the center just give it a nice little little twirl i just want some of that chunky tomato in there it's my favorite and then we're just gonna grab like three meatballs i'm just gonna sprinkle some cashew parm on you can see it kind of brings that realness to life we've got really nice finishing salt that's like slightly sweet and then we're just gonna go in with some torn basil i really like plating and making things look really beautiful thinking about the color balance and and food and everything like that i guess that's why my friends call me bob ross of cooking they say i go a little overboard but i like to have fun and there you have it see how the structure holds up oh yeah look at that just gonna put it at the edge so you can see the inside of that meatball it's still completely structurally sound which is awesome you get an aftertaste of lentils it's not even the most forward flavor it's really the spices that are making the dish and they balance out perfectly with the pasta yeah i don't know this is this is pretty freaking good for a lentil meatball i would say for meatball chris if you're watching i would like you to reverse engineer this meatball i want to see if you could do it i'd be interested in seeing that chrissy um texted me a photo um on friday it was my birthday and she wished me a happy birthday which was just wonderful but do i think i could reverse engineer chrissy's vegan meatballs i think i could well i don't know actually i actually have no ideayou can have your meatball cooked and ready to go in like 15 minutes got a nice golden brown color to it i would hope chris morocco would be fully impressed with this vegan meatball today's recipe was actually inspired by chris morocco's ba best meatball and i wanted to just show how you can make that with a little bit of a meatless twist the first thing i'm going to do is quarter and peel this onion here and i'm just using a sweet onion i really like the flavor a yellow onion works well for this recipe as well smash two cloves of garlic i really just want large pieces so that i can remove the garlic from the sauce at the end of cooking now my favorite we've got our scotch bonnet pepper which is a pepper that is used a lot in jamaican cooking that's going to give it a really nice spicy level to the sauce but also it adds like a subtle sweetness and a really nice bold flavor anytime i can add a little bit of my cultural flair to a recipe i tried to do that you could also swap out with a habanero pepper they're pretty much very similar i'm going to cut that in half we're only going to utilize half because it's a very spicy pepper you always try to match your peppers to your sugar uh you know i don't always match my peppers to my shirt but when i do i use scotch bonnet there's a lot of like seeds in there those seeds are extremely spicy so you're going to want to de-seed that i don't deal well with overly spicy things i like a medium spice that's that's i'm a medium spice girl that's about it once you have all of your ingredients prepped and ready you can get started on the sauce so let's do that today i'm using whole peeled organic san marzano style tomatoes i'm just going to start breaking those tomatoes up with my hands oh that was bad the thing is i knew that was gonna happen i almost wore white i almost wore white that would have been tragic so if you don't want to get too messy you could use a potato masher that works really well for breaking down whole tomatoes but at this time i'm gonna go wash my hands because they are i'm gonna turn this on to medium heat and i will now add five tablespoons of plant butter it's usually made out of like coconut oil almond oil blend um i'm using this like flora brand that's really good tastes very similar to real butter so i i actually really like it you literally can just plop your tomatoes and everything else in here again this is an easy sauce it's meant to be everything goes in we're gonna throw our basil in there as well and a bay leaf this sauce is gonna be very very rich almost like creamy which is unique for a tomato sauce i'm just adding like two teaspoons of kosher salt i'm also just gonna do a couple cranks of black pepper for added flavor and give this a good stir once over and i'll stir it occasionally until that butter melts i'm just going to kind of leave that and forget it for the next 35 minutes so now we're gonna make some cashew based parmesan which i know sounds crazy but it's actually extremely simple to make and very delicious i'm gonna grab my food processor we brought it back to the 80s here i'm going to include cashew parmesan in the meatball recipe because that's what chris does he well he uses real parmesan but i i'm gonna use this to kind of bring out the flavors a little bit more nutritional yeast has like a cheesy undertone to it so a lot of vegans will use it to enhance the flavor of any kind of dairy-free cheese substitutes that they try to attempt or it's even really good on popcorn and things like that so it's just a really good pantry staple in my opinion all right so let's get started i've got a cup of cashews throwing that in the food processor we've got two tablespoons of nutritional yeast quarter teaspoon of garlic powder teaspoon onion powder and a teaspoon of salt here we're gonna pulse this for about 30 seconds and it's gonna get a very fine powder all right perfect you'll notice sometimes when you're trying to make cashew parm that like a buttery type of substance will start to form on the bottom it didn't get to that point yet but it's just like a fine crumble that could have gone to that point if i had pulse for another minute or two it's quite interesting it's like you can make your own cashew butter at home with a food processor for this recipe we're going to use lentils as the main frame for the meatball it's a really awesome way to incorporate a meatless option into your diet so the first thing we're going to do here is using fresh bread cut off the crust and never throw out the crusts you can always make your own torn croutons from scratch you can cut them into cubes and then season them with salt pepper oregano and some olive oil pop them in the oven at 400 degrees and then you have croutons for a salad we have three slices of bread here chris actually soaks his bread in water i'm soaking my bread in unsweetened full-fat oat milk anywhere i can add a little bit more fat content or a little more oomph to a vegan dish i will always try to chris says he brings it out after soaking in water feels so weird honestly doesn't feel right it's it's shocking it's almost like a little sponge now i'm just cutting that bread into cubes i have my oven preheated to 350 degrees preheating before you get started on the meatballs is the best way to again to optimize efficiency because by the time the meatballs are done and ready to go you can pop them into the oven so i'm just prepping the garlic now we're just using two cloves today you want a fine mince for this recipe you want the garlic to evenly disperse throughout the meatballs the next thing we're going to do is just roughly chop the parsley you don't want to bruise the herb but we do want to make sure that the pieces are small enough to disperse within the meatball what we're going to do now is add our aquafaba which let me just tell you aquafaba is like magic bean juice liquid it is the byproduct of any legume being cooked for an extended period of time so if you have a can of chickpeas in your pantry it's a really great egg replacer it works as a great emulsifier you can make vegan mayo out of it actually it also really works well as a binder so that's why we're using it for our binder as the egg in this recipe so i'm adding a third cup of that cashew parmesan that we made earlier we're gonna add two cups of cooked lentils we are using green lentils you can also use brown lentils give this all a gentle mix make sure that aqua faba kind of gets onto everything i have a mortar and pestle here using three quarters of a teaspoon of fennel and i'm just gonna go ahead and crush that that'll just open the seeds right up oh my god you can just can you smell that well obviously obviously you can't smell it but so to this i'm gonna add two teaspoons of kosher salt an eighth teaspoon of nutmeg also adding some marjoram and margarine is a really nice seasoning it's in the same family as oregano but it's slightly more floral it adds like a nice savory note to the dish i'm gonna add some oregano and some crushed red pepper flakes for added spice and flavor give that another mix once over just a small one and then i'm gonna just slowly add some of these bread crumbs i have about three quarters cup depending on how much liquid is in your lentils you might need more or less and i'm going to use my hands to just combine the mixture and it's feeling a little wet to me so that's why we use it as like an additional binder it kind of feels like i'm playing in kinetic sand it's like one of those weird like experiences right now i kind of like it but you see it's coming into like this one cohesive ball in order to form the meatballs and not get so much residue on your hands in that process i'm just gonna lightly oil my hands a little bit of olive oil and we're just gonna take a chunk and kind of just ball that this should make like eight or nine large meatballs or 12 to 14 smaller ones so these are honestly like the most structurally stable vegan meatballs that i've ever had again that aquafaba and the breadcrumb add beautiful binding properties just gonna pop them in the freezer to let them set and firm up a little bit more our sauce is done it's ready to go i'm just gonna get um some water boiling for our pasta today and i'm just gonna like salt that water you know i'm just gonna heavily salt it let me get that burner on a question i always get in videos is pasta isn't vegan and a lot of times you will find pasta products that are enriched with eggs but this company actually just makes their pasta out of durham wheat and water so vegan oof our sauce is ready i'm going to just keep it simmering on low though until our meatballs are ready to go into the sauce you know where it's right where you want it to be because the onions and like the peppers will have kind of like an oily yellow sheen to them and you'll see a little bit of oils kind of sitting on the top and the onions will be slightly like wilted and cooked through so i'm just gonna remove the onions from the sauce and of course our scotch bonnet pepper and i'm just finding those bay leafs and the basil now we're gonna move on from the sauce and um get started on frying our meatballs it is a complete meatball it is fantastic or i'll call them leap balls lentil balls i don't know so i'm just gonna get some olive oil into a small fry pan and i have it on medium heat and we're just gonna allow that oil to heat up for a little bit so now we can just add our meatballs and i'm gonna fry in um batches here it just allows for more even cooking so i'll do four at a time when you're cooking meatballs in a sauce that could take an hour or longer where these veggie meatballs just come together a lot quicker than that we just are going to repeat this on all sides until our meatballs are fully browned this is looking ready to me it's got a nice crispy crunchy outer layer on a couple sides i really gave this a good squeeze accidentally with the tongs like a good squeeze and it's still staying together like i gotta give myself some snaps for that we're gonna just pop them in the oven for about seven to ten minutes so our meatballs are ready from the oven we don't want them to dry out too much that's why the cooking time is short and i'm just gonna place these bad boys in there turn up the heat to medium low our pasta water is boiling so i'm gonna get our pasta in there i want it to be al dente so i'm only gonna cook it for about seven minutes all right so this hello do you guys believe in the in the pasta being ready when it sticks to a wall method or no i don't think it's ready it's going right behind you go for it oh wait holy crap it's ready and it looks like a fish that's pretty great so i've just ruled out that pasta trick then it's a lie and still folks holding their full structural integrity that's what i'm talking about pasta should be perfectly ready now move the pasta over give this a good mix and you can see there's some chunks in the sauce i really like that just gonna start plating this we're just gonna put that right at the center just give it a nice little little twirl i just want some of that chunky tomato in there it's my favorite and then we're just gonna grab like three meatballs i'm just gonna sprinkle some cashew parm on you can see it kind of brings that realness to life we've got really nice finishing salt that's like slightly sweet and then we're just gonna go in with some torn basil i really like plating and making things look really beautiful thinking about the color balance and and food and everything like that i guess that's why my friends call me bob ross of cooking they say i go a little overboard but i like to have fun and there you have it see how the structure holds up oh yeah look at that just gonna put it at the edge so you can see the inside of that meatball it's still completely structurally sound which is awesome you get an aftertaste of lentils it's not even the most forward flavor it's really the spices that are making the dish and they balance out perfectly with the pasta yeah i don't know this is this is pretty freaking good for a lentil meatball i would say for meatball chris if you're watching i would like you to reverse engineer this meatball i want to see if you could do it i'd be interested in seeing that chrissy um texted me a photo um on friday it was my birthday and she wished me a happy birthday which was just wonderful but do i think i could reverse engineer chrissy's vegan meatballs i think i could well i don't know actually i actually have no idea\n"