Mexican-style Meatballs
€6.30 │ €1.58 per portion │ Serves 4 │ 30-45mins │ Mexico
A rich, smoky, and spicy tomato sauce tops meatballs with cantina-style fried potatoes. These Mexican-style Meatballs are easy to make and made to impress.
Explore our recipe and recommendations, ready to suit any week's meal plan.
What to serve it with?
Serve Mexican-style Meatballs with fresh sides to balance the fried ingredients. A pico de gallo, avocado salad, sweetcorn salad - these are easy sides which can help complement the dish!
How to use in a meal plan
Good home economics is using ingredients smartly - and that saves money and cuts food waste. A meal plan is a great way to do this.
Mexican-style Meatballs are a delicious way to use all the ingredients. If you have leftover meatballs, potatoes that need to go, or have opened chipotles in adobo sauce (for example, if you made tacos de tinga recently), this is a great dish.
The dish is also uniquely spicy and smoky, thanks to the peppers, which helps add new flavours into your week's meal plan.
Leftovers
Spoonfeed meal plans save you money by using the economy of scale. Making dinner also your leftover lunch avoids spending money and extra time cooking!
Mexican-style Meatballs are great leftover - just keep the potato and sauce separate to avoid making the potato too wet and the sauce too dry the next day. Heat up in the microwave or the oven.
Utensils
- Saucepan + lid
- Sauté pot + lid
- Frying pan/air-fryer
- Spatula
- Serving spoon
Ingredients
- 1kg potatoes
- 400g meatballs
- 400ml crushed tomato
- 1 white onion
- 3 cloves garlic
- 2-3 tbsp chipotles in adobo sauce
- 1 beef/vegetable stock cube
- 1 tsp cumin
- 1 tsp hot paprika + 1/2 tsp sweet paprika
- 1 tsp dried parsley/coriander
- 4 tbsp sour cream (optional)
- 1 tsp crystal/shaved salt (optional)
- Olive oil
Smoky and spicy chipotle peppers, canned with a rich adobo sauce, provides the essential flavour for this dish. Find it at Latin stores, big supermarkets with world food aisles, and even Asian food shops. The most common brand is La Costeña. We buy a 186ml can for €2.30.
+€0.91 +15min
Make the meatballs yourself. Add to 500g mince meat 1/2 diced onion, 1 tbsp fresh parsley, and 3 tbsp breadcrumbs. Bind with 2 eggs and form balls. Coat in flour, then fry in olive oil until medium-cooked inside. Set aside.
Method
- Roughly chop potatoes into medium-small sized cubes. Put in a saucepan and cover with cold water, bringing to a boil. Once boiling, keep on a simmer for 6 minutes or until slightly soft. The potato should still be firm and hold its shape. Drain and set the potato aside, letting the steam evaporate from it.
- Prepare meatballs, either by frying homemade as per the recipe above or frying meatballs in the sauté pan with a splash of olive oil until browned. Set aside.
- Dice onion and garlic. In the same pan, sauté onion in olive oil on medium-heat until translucent. Add garlic and mix well for 1-2 minutes. Mix in 1/4 can of crushed tomato and the chipotle peppers in adobo. With your spatula, try to break up the peppers. Add in the rest of the crushed tomato and then add your hot paprika, cumin, and dried herbs. Bring the sauce to a low boil, then immediately lower to heat to a simmer. Add the stock cube with 100ml boiling water and the meatballs, mixing well, then cover with a lid for 15 minutes.
- While the sauce cooks, fry your potato. Either add your cubed and parboiled potato to the air-fryer until golden brown or fry in a frying pan with a good amount of olive oil. Fry in batches to ensure even cooking. Once all the potatoes are cooked, sprinkle in sweet paprika, toss the potatoes to cover them with the paprika and return to the frying pan for 1 minute.
- Serve the potato first and the meatballs with sauce on top, finishing with 1 tbsp of sour cream per serving and some crystal/shaved salt.
- Enjoy!