yay, tacos!

Meatloaf seems to have a bad rep and I’ve never really understood why. I’ve always loved meatloaf. Maybe it’s because my mother made a good one. We’ve had a recipe for meatloaf that we got from some site, and it’s served us very well over the years. Still, I’m more than willing to try out a new one.

This dinner took a long time to make – a good hour and a forty minutes – but Emily and I were both in the kitchen cooking separate dishes for the first 30 or so minutes. Some of the steps could be replaced with store bought ingredients, but where’s the fun in that?

Not looking particularly appetizing there.

In Alton’s terms, we first assemble the dry team: homemade croutons (just toasted bread) and some dried herbs. Pulse it all in a food processor until it’s a fine powder.

The flavor portion of the meatloaf - herbed bread crumbs

Next up is the wet team: onions, red bell pepper and fresh garlic. Again, put through the food processor – but only until it’s chopped up fine – not pureed. This is where I misread and accidentally pureed my wet ingredients. Thankfully, I had more garlic and bell pepper – but no more onion. I re-did the chopped vegetables using onion powder instead of fresh ones. The texture may be off, but the flavor would be similar.

Pro Tip: read the instructions carefully.

The healthy part of the meatloaf

Finally, combine the wet and dry ingredients with some freshly ground (in the food processor, of course) sirloin and chuck meats – with an egg as a binder. Here is where the book deviates from the website. The book says to shape the meat mixture into a loaf on a pan. The website says to use a loaf pan. I just shaped my meat since I’m following the book.

Meatloaf, Smeatloaf, Double-Beefloaf

While the meatloaf begins to cook, you assemble the glaze/sauce. It’s basically a barbecue sauce. I like the idea of making your own sauce, but it just uses a 1/2 cup of ketchup along with some other ingredients. The biggest benefit of making your own sauce is that you know exactly what is in your sauce – you lose that when you just using store bought ketchup as your base.

The instructions say to cook the meatloaf for 10 minutes, brush on the glaze and then cook until the internal temperature reaches 155 – which should take roughly another 25 minutes. This sounded really off to me. When I’ve cooked meatloaf in the past, I’ve always cooked at 375 for about 45 minutes. The website does not give an estimated time. Still, I started out using Alton’s instructions. I started the oven at 325. At 10 minutes, I covered the meatloaf with the glaze. I noticed that the food was supposedly roughly 1/3 the way through the cooking time, but had only increased temperature by about 4 degrees. I decided to jack up the heat up to 375. In the end, it took just a little longer than my meatloaf normally takes to cook (explained by the fact that the first 10 minutes were at a lower temperature)

Lookit all that fat pooled around it... yum.

Verdict
This is a decent meatloaf, but it didn’t blow me away.

When I first pulled it out of the oven, I immediately noticed all the grease sitting around the loaf. When I use the loaf pan, I normally have to take it out every 15 or so minutes and drain the grease off the top. I think that if I did it loaf-pan-less again, I might put it on a rack so it’s not sitting in its own juices while it cooks.

Eating it, I bit into some large chunks of garlic. This is because the fresh garlic is “chopped fine” with the wet ingredients. I love garlic. I mean, I love garlic – but I don’t want to bite into big chunks of it. I’d probably toss those in with the dry ingredients to get a finer texture, or mince the garlic first so it’s smaller than the rest of the veggie chunks.

This is one of those recipes that really needs a bit of tweaking, but it’s a decent base recipe. I’d also probably add some red pepper flakes to kick up the heat on this a bit – but I’ve been on a really big red pepper flakes kick lately.

Meatloaf Again Rating:

It didn't really hold up well to slicing.