365 Favorite Brand Name Slow Cooker Recipes & More: Barbecued Meatballs

365 Favorite Brand Name Slow Cooker Recipes & More: Barbecued Meatballs

Barbecued Meatballs are a game day and party favorite right alongside barbecued smokies! Everyone has their own variation and sauce recipe so I thought it was time I try my own.

Barbecued Meatballs

2 pounds lean ground beef

1 1/3 cups ketchup, divided

3 tbsp. seasoned dry bread crumbs

1 egg, slightly beaten

2 tbsp. dried onion flakes

¾ tsp. garlic salt

½ tsp. black pepper

1 cup packed brown sugar

1 can (6 ounces) tomato paste

¼ cup reduced-sodium soy sauce

¼ cup cider vinegar

1 ½ tsp. hot pepper sauce

First, preheat your oven to 350. Combine the ground beef, bread crumbs, egg, onion flakes, garlic salt, black pepper and 1/3 cup of ketchup in a large mixing bowl. Mix lightly but thoroughly (I opted to use my hands) and shape into 1-inch meatballs. Please meatballs on shallow roasting pans and bake for 18 minutes or until browned. Transfer meatballs to slow cooker. While meatballs are cooking, mix 1 cup ketchup, sugar, soy sauce, vinegar, tomato paste, and hot pepper sauce in medium bowl. Pour over meatballs and cook in slow cooker on low for 4 hours. Serve with cocktail picks.

This is what the book offers as far as directions go. This recipe was a little bit of a disaster for me so here are some tips so that you don’t have the same problems I did. First of all, I have never made meatballs before. You can space them fairly close together on a cookie sheet or roasting pan and not only will they not go anywhere but they won’t grow like cookies do. Giving them space is not necessary. Secondly, spray your pan with non stick spray! I can’t stress this enough. I used a shallow, non stick roasting pan and after 18 minutes they were so stuck to the pan that I had to scrape them off with a spatula and I had a few break and several rip off a layer of meat. Lastly, four hours is merely a suggestion. After 4 hours the sauce started to burn on the sides of my slow cooker and became lumpy and chunky as you can most likely tell by my picture. To top it all off my slow cooker did the job it set out to do- make meat tender. So of course getting the meatballs out of the slow cooker without breaking them was only accomplishable by tongs and sometimes even then they couldn’t be saved.

I do have to say the sauce for these meatballs was amazing. While they were cooking I had a hard time stopping myself from swiping my finger across the old mixing bowl. I would keep the recipe for the sauce and use it on smokies in the slow cooker, or just cooked meatballs. I would only put the meatballs and sauce in my slow cooker again if I was using it for warming purposes only. I never thought to wonder if meatballs and slow cookers would mesh well but as a novice meatball make I guess I didn’t know any better and neither did this cookbook. You’ve been warned- meatballs and slow cookers do not mix.