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Hello! Today we are going to be making meatloaf which is a big American family tradition,
one of our most traditional foods
in the United States.
Meatloaf has actually been a food that people have made for
as long as people have had leftover food to put
and make something out of. Meatloaf is a wonderful thing
to be able to make
just anytime
as long as you have a couple of main ingredients around your home.
Of course, it is called meatloaf so you have to have some kind of ground meat. You can have beef, it can be pork
it's whatever you have.
Usually for a good size loaf for a family of four,
you probably want at least a pound of ground meat.
To bind it together, to keep it all stuck together, you want to have
one egg
and you want to use a little bit of milk
that will keep the meat together and make it into the loaf
that you will see in just a little while.
Beyond that
you can pretty much add
whatever you want to to your meatloaf
Some people add lots of spices and lots of things.
Some people
basically keep it to the meat and the binders. I prefer to add in
a little bit of starch.
So you can choose
to add in bread,
or if you have a soda cracker
-- you can add that in. Some people actually even add oatmeal.
But today I'm going to use the bread.
I also enjoy
just a little bit of onion flavor, so I'm going to be adding one chopped
fresh onion today, and
salt and pepper. But really
if you are making this recipe and you wanna go crazy, if you have
a favorite spice --
feel free to add those as well!
The first thing you want to do when making your meatloaf is make sure you wash your hands. And then after that
you want to turn your oven on to a 180 degrees Celsius or
350 degrees Fahrenheit. That will preheat,
and it should be ready by the time you have your meatloaf all prepared.
So, first thing you need to do is to take your meat and to put it into your bowl. Some people don't like the feeling of raw meat,
some people don't mind it -- I don't mind it,
so I'm going to mix this with my hands
but you are welcome to use a spoon if you would rather.
My grandmother when she was making this always said that if you add it ...
you mix the meatloaf with your hands and you are adding sort of, you know,
a touch of your own self. And so, that's your choice.
There is no wrong way
to add things to meatloaf. So,
I'm going to start
with the ingredients that I like the best, which are the starches,
so, I'm going to take my bread. And this is kinda older bread, it's a little crusty.
it's a little crusty. You can use new bread, you You can use new bread, you can use breadcrumbs..
But I'm just going to
chop up this old crusty bread. And you can
make it in big pieces or little pieces...
I'm just gonna kind of cube it, it does not really matter.
That's the great thing about meatloaf, there is just no wrong way to make it -- it's only how you prefer it.
So, just take your bread, into
smaller pieces.
And if it's really crusty like mine you might actually want to
cut it in those smaller pieces.
And again, there's not an exact amount. I would guess that in the end when I'm doing bread I'm probably going to put in about a
cup of bread,
if it's
going to be in these big pieces. If it's bread crumbs,
it's probably going to be about half a cup.
So, I think that's enough.
That's about
three or four slices.
So then
next
after you add bread, then you need to cut up your onion.
This is a fairly small onion. Again, if you like a lot of onion,
go for a bigger onion. If you like
just a little bit of onion flavor, go for the smaller onion. You can even
use dried onion if you happen to have dried onion in your house. Other spices
that go well with meatloaf would be
garlic
sage
oregano -- so anything you have in the house, if it is your favorite spice, don't hesitate to put it in the meatloaf, it will probably just make it better.
And you can cut these thin or thick. I like my meatloaf to
have
a little bit of texture.
I kinda feel like if you are not
adding anything in there that has texture, it's just like a hamburger.
So I like to have sort of a
thickly chopped onion. My husband prefers it when I cut the onion just a little bit thinner.
So, if you know that someone comes over
who is a little bit picky about
thick chunks then go ahead and cut it thinner
but otherwise
a coarse chop is fine.
And again, just take it and put it into your meatloaf.
Now, if you forget this step,
your meatloaf isn't going to really stick together very well, you're going to end up with more of a
Sloppy Joe than a meatloaf, so make sure you put in your egg.
And of course
this as well -- your milk.
And your egg and your milk are going to be your liquid, and, as you're stirring it up afterwards
you might realize that you did not put enough milk.
I just put a quarter of a cup.
We'll see, I might add a little bit more later. The joy of cooking is that you can kinda make things up as you go along.
Final step here
for actually adding things is going be my spices.
I'm just putting in salt and pepper; this is more a traditional way to do it. But again - you have a spice that you like,
go crazy. I would guess, if I were to actually measure
what I am putting in here, it's probably about a half of teaspoon
of both salt and pepper.
I personally like
to add salt to my meatloaf after its cooked,
when I'm eating it so I don't put in
too much while I'm making it, so you can add more later for your taste. Now, this is the messy part.
Again, feel free
to grab a spoon if you want. I'm going to use my hands so I'll going to grab a couple of
paper towels first
because my hands are going to get messy. But basically this is what you do.
You just want to mix it up
so that you have a nice
even mixture
throughout the bowl.
You don't want to have
too much onion on one part,
you don't want to have too much
of the bread on one part,
you want it just, go together.
it's very similar to if you are making
any kind of like
a hamburger that has "stuff" in it.
But as you can see it's just getting mixed in
and this part is,
again, kind of gooey, but it's kind of fun, too.
And, so there, basically that is all you have to do in order to make a meatloaf -- is just mix it together like this. And so then,
that's your meatloaf. Now all you have to do is put it in the pan and bake it.
Now that you have your meatloaf
prepared it's time to put it into your pan and into the oven.
So you want to prepare your pan. I prefer a glass pan. You can do it in an aluminum pan, it doesn't really matter.
My grandmother actually used to start this in the microwave, so,
it's all up to you. What you want to do is you do want to make sure you kind of
grease your pan a little bit, so I have a little bit of butter and I'm just
rubbing the butter into the pan. No big deal.
It does not have to be a heavy coating. If you prefer like a Pam spray
or something like that you can but you just
want to grease this a little bit because with the binding that you have in there
it does get a little bit sticky.
So, once you have your pan prepared, then you are going to put your meatloaf in the pan.
prepared,
then you are going to put your meatloaf in the pan.
And you have two choices. You can either take it as it is and have one
big loaf or I prefer to cut it into two smaller loaves. The reason is
it cooks
more evenly and a little bit quicker
and
the other thing is
you can put different things
on top. Some people like to put things like
ketchup or barbecue sauce on top of their meatloaf while
it's baking and other people don't. So I prefer to make it
into two separate little loaves that you can kinda have
however people
who are going to be eating it want it.
So, again,
just using your hands... I suppose you could do this with a spoon, but I never have..
You take and you just form
your meatloaf into a loaf
so it's going to look like a little bread loaf.
You want to make sure that it is
as uniform as you can get it.
What I mean by uniform is that you don't have like a thin edge here and a fat edge over here, because it's going to cook better if you make it uniform.
And so
you just take your loaf and you just kinda make it and put it in your pan. And your onion
and your bread might be falling out...
that's fine, just stick them back in there,
that's not going to be a problem.
And then you just make your second loaf.
And you do the same thing.
And you want to try to make these as equally sized as possible. It's kind of hard, because it's a little bit hard to tell
what size they are end up being but...
and again just as uniform as possible...
It's OK if they touch the sides
and it's OK if they touch each other.
But you
just want to have
two uniform loaves.
And if you have extra stuff around the inside,
especially like the big pieces of onion, you can just stick them in the bottom
then you will have some nice pieces of roasted onion as well when you are done with your meatloaf.
As I mentioned, some people like to have their meatloaf with ketchup
and some people don't, so I'm just going to put ketchup on half of this. And again,
it does not have to be a big thing of ketchup,
but just
a light sprinkling over the top. And some people really like that, some people really don't.
So, now you have sort of the plain variety and the regular variety.
Once you have your meatloaf
put together, it looks like this,
it's ready to go into
your preheated oven.
Again, that was 350 degrees Fahrenheit
or 180 degrees Celsius.
So once your meatloaf is ready and your oven is preheated
you're just going to
put it inside on the middle rack and just put it about halfway back, and
then you are going to set your timer. It depends on your oven
how long this is going to take.
I always think meatloaf takes so much longer than it really should take.
But I'm going to start this out for at least an hour. So just I'm going to set my timer for an hour
and I'll probably check it
at about fifty minutes, but
I'm guessing it's going take about an hour to cook. So we'll see you in an hour.
So after about an hour in the oven
you should see that the meat's color has changed, it should now look all brown and
the way to know if this is actually done is you just have to cut into it.If you have a fancy meat thermometer
you can use that, but the easiest way is just to cut into it.
And if you notice that there is no pink inside, it's done!
It's ready to eat.
Meatloaf can be served
a variety ways.
You can cut it up
and put it straight on a plate like that.
You can cut it and put onto a sandwich,
especially even the day after.
Meatloaf is great warm, right from the pan and then
the next day you can
take it out, cut it up and serve it on a sandwich
with lettuce, tomato,
mayonnaise, whatever you like on your sandwiches.
Great side dishes for meatloaf:
potatoes, anything with potatoes, especially fried potatoes
are really good;
green beans or any other kind of a vegetable.
I hope you have fun,
I hope you are able to make your own meatloaf. Leave us a comment
and let us know how it turned out!