Meatball Sliders!!!!

It's finally time for me to update this blog. I really have no excuse since I'm currently on sabbatical for 2 months. There is some CPA studying I should be doing considering my test is in 5 days - and I even stopped by wawa at 1:30AM to get coffee to keep me up - but there are other things I'd rather be doing such as telling the 5 people that read this blog that I had my first official dinner party at my sister's house.

My motivation was to recreate the famous meatball sliders from the Little Owl in greenwich village. I had the opportunity to have dinner at this restaurant about a month ago and unlike the numerous failed attempts of me getting reservations, I magically walked in with no wait on a random tuesday. It took me a long time to realize this, but if you show up at almost any restaurant in NY around 5-6 PM you're pretty much guaranteed a table, well maybe not at Momokuku Ko. I feel restaurants purposely don't book that many tables around this hour and until it reaches 7 are restaurants at capacity.

It's a shame that I never went to little owl sooner because I really loved it. It's around a nice, quiet, tree lined street surrounded by brownstones. Also, across the street happens to be an owl sculpture atop a building. There's some story behind that owl and somebody was explaining it, but I don't remember the details. Anyway, the meatball sliders along with everything else ordered for dinner was amazing. When I went, my friend and I also ordered a lobster ravioli, 2 pork chop entrees, and the chocolate souffle dessert. Rather than babble on about the food all I really need to say is that everything just tasted really good. Trust me when I say the food is good. Why else would I go out of my way to find a recipe for the sliders and attempt to make them.

The recipe I found explained how to make the meatballs & sauce and even the garlic buns. I didn't realize they were homemade until I found the recipe. I figured Little Owl probably got them from sulivan street bakery, but no..they were homemade, which made the recipe a priority on "my things to cook list" since I've always wanted to bake fresh bread. Ever since I got a dutch oven I kept telling myself, "I'm gonna make no knead bread."

Before tonight, I first thought about making the sliders a couple weeks ago. I went to wegmans - the supermarket that has everything including black truffles at $300lb - and started filing my cart with everything I needed. I picked up my ground meats, produce, cheese, cans of tomato sauce, etc., pretty much everything needed for the recipe, but when I go to the dairy section to find fresh yeast needed to make the fresh buns for the sliders, I notice the shelf it's supposed to be on is empty next to the gross nestle break and bake cookies. I probably called customer service at least 3 times asking them if it would be any place else and if they could check the back, but there wasn't any to be found. I bought everything else, but that night I ended up not making them since I feel the buns are the most important part of the slider. I did buy these frozen dinner rolls as a back up, but didn't even bother once I got home. I'm one of those persons that feels pizza is all about the dough and I wasn't about to waste my time making sliders if the buns weren't gonna be right.

Fast forward 2-3 weeks and we finally have a successful trip to wegmans. Reading the recipe, it didn't seem too bad. Even though we'd be making everything from scratch, a lot of the wait times were like "cook sauce for 30 minutes", "knead dough and let sit in bowl for 30 minutes", "cook meatball in sauce of 30 mintes"...nothing read "let dough rise for 5 hours" so I felt this would be quick. I figured since we have 6 burners and 2 ovens at my sister's house we'd be able to multitask and knock these out. I also had my friends Amy and Joe over, but even with 3 people making these we didn't eat out sliders until almost 10:15 PM. Now we probably didn't start prepping until 5:30. I also had to take my nephew Jude to his guitar lesson at my dad's house so there was a good 40 minutes I was away. I'd glad Joe came earlier then I expected and he was able to do an awesome job rolling 36 golf sized meatballs. I really think what made these meatballs are the fact that they are deep fried and the brown bits that remained in the pan after frying definitely made the sauce. You can throw all the herbs, onions, and garlic you want, but without burnt bits you won't have a good sauce.

Now the rolls came out much better then I expected. These are what prevented us from eating at 9:30 instead of 10:15 since the dough needed to rise for the millionth time before being put in the oven. There were also a lot of random steps involved such as pureeing roasted garlic and mixing it into the dough mixture, and spraying the round dough balls with water, seasoning with salt, pepper, and some grated pecorino romano cheese.

Assembly while a lot of fun, also delayed us a little bit. First you slice the freshly baked garlic rolls, second you place a meatball, third you shave a slice of perocino romano cheese, fourth top with fresh arugula, the finally top the meatball with the other side of the bun. We probably only assembled 20 or so sliders, def not all 36. I had Amy and Joe take home a good portion that was leftover. After we assembled the first three, I really thought we all did a good job and it looked almost identical to the sliders we had at Litttle Owl. The pic above is our finished product. I couldn't have made these without them and if I was on my own we'd be eating the sliders the next day. As far as taste, I don't know if they were identical, but they sure were awesome. I'll need to go back to the Little Owl for that.