When meat was limited and the budget was tight, people came up with inventive ways to stretch the small amount of staples they had. Every country has its own version of dinner on a shoestring budget with limited access, and Italy is no exception. Here this recipe for Bread Meatballs utilizes bread as the base to impersonate a meatball, doctoring it up with a variety of affordable and on-hand ingredients, making a dish that will dupe the biggest meat fan. 

Called Polpette di Pane, which literally translates to meatballs of bread, is a dish you won’t find on any restaurant menu and resides primarily in the homes of Italian cooks. Everyone has their own family recipe, their own adaptation of stretching leftover ingredients and turning it into the main course of a dinner. This dish is a part of the cucina povera line of cooking. Here the recipe is even more frugal than the classic meatball and doesn’t have any meat at all. Stale bread is the main base for these meatballs, but the way they’re cooked in a marinara sauce is impossible to tell!

Start by tearing up bread. White bread is the best for this; any sort of heavy sourdough or specialty wheat bread will cook up to be super dense and lead-like. Make sure to remove the crust.

Next, add in milk, and let the bread rest with the milk for a few minutes. After the rest period, squeeze the bread, removing any of the excess milk from the bread and bowl. 

Add in the eggs, breadcrumbs, Parmesan cheese, seasoning, salt, and pepper. You can be as creative as you’d like with the seasonings. You can add garlic and onion powder or even chopped-up herbs. Wrap the bowl and refrigerate it for a half hour; this allows the mixture to firm up.

You can streamline this process by using jarred marinara, but this simple marinara is a classic sauce that lets the flavor of the tomato shine. Once the sauce is brought to a simmer, take the meatball mixture out of the refrigerator and form about nine to ten meatballs. Carefully place the meatballs into the sauce and allow the meatballs to cook in the sauce for thirty minutes, turning every ten minutes or so to get proper and even cooking.

Topped with a bit more fresh basil, and it’s ready to serve! 

The Bread Meatballs are fork-tender and have a divine texture. There’s just enough flavor to give this bread a perfect disguise; it’s hard to differentiate the texture of the bread from the texture of the ground beef; it’s that good! The from-scratch sauce is simple but has just the right amount of fresh garlic and basil flavor to lighten the meatballs with a level of acidity and fragrant complexity. 

Served as is (the Italian way) or over pasta (the Italian-American way) makes this an economic weeknight meal! No one has to know the secret ingredient!