help...meatballs often pink inside!

I could use some advise on making my meatballs. We currently mix ground beef, veal, and italian sausage (4/1/1) ratio along with grated romano, salt, pepper, granulated garlic, ground nutmeg, fresh parsley, orgegano, breadcrumbs and easy eggs. mix together, ball in 1.5 oz balls and bake in oven at 375 for 20 minutes, then pour a crushed tomato/water (50/50 ratio) mix over the meatballs and bake until 180 degrees…usally takes about an hour. with them cooking to 180, I cant see how they could be a little pink in the center. this does not happen every time, but often enough to get concerned. you can tell a customer all day they cooked to 180, but they dont care…pink is pink…ouch!

a chef friend told me the pink could be coming from the italian sausage bleeding, but I used pork sausage today, and they were still borderline…

any recommendations?

thanks in advance
pizzahead

Mmmmm… “medium rare”. Just the way I like it!

Try baking these meatballs on a rack (the grates that cover a sheet pan)…We have learned that we get a better cook all the way through by letting the bottoms get (heat) not hot metal. Good luck

Pakula…do you cover them in sauce?

not while cooking…Only after fully cooked, they sit in a steam table with sauce…real italian meatballs have a crust on the outside and soft on the inside…try brushing the meatballs with oil before you cook, that makes for a nice crust

This used to happen to us a few times a year, except the pinkness started at the outer crust and went all the way through…no matter how long you cooked them. After much investigation, even going so far as to Washington State University, the answer we got was it might have been the sulfite levels in drinking water the cattle drank. Having said all that…our procedure used to be to mix the meatball dough and let sit a day before portioning and baking…now we do it all in one day, and since we started doing this, we never had the problem again.

John