If you are looking for the best venison meatballs recipe out there, you found it. I’ve been perfecting this recipe for the past 20 years, and it makes a phenomenal version of the classic Italian-American meatball. Here’s how to go about making that perfect meatball. 

What Makes Perfect Venison Meatballs?

Don’t get me wrong, I love meatballs in all their forms. But for me, the brightest star in the pantheon of venison meatballs (or meatballs made from basically anything), is the classic Italian-American mega-meatball.

Big, juicy, tender, almost bouncy. You can cut them easily with a fork and they’ll hold together as you drag them through your favorite spaghetti sauce. 

Making perfect Italian-American style meatballs isn’t so much a question of what meat you use as it is how you make them.

Meat Matters

Classically, Italian meatballs back home in New Jersey are a mix of beef, pork and veal. As hunters, we can use that formula to our advantage. I’ve made these venison meatballs dozens of times, with all sorts of venison — deer, elk, antelope, nilgai, etc., as well as from pork and veal to duck and bear.

Fat equals flavor. Whatever meat you use, grind it with pork fat. Pork fat is softer than beef and blends better for meatballs. What grind? A fine grind, of course. All the best meatballs are finely ground, both for mouthfeel and for cohesiveness; it is not easy to get a coarsely ground meat to bind into a pretty ball.

Use at least a 4:1 ratio of meat to fat, and up to 3:1. In the case of the meatballs in the photos, it was 3 pounds of venison to 1 pound pork fat. Lean meatballs taste terrible.

What if you have pre-ground venison with no fat? Mix it with pre-ground pork. I would go 50-50, but you can go leaner, but not much. 

Making Juicy Venison Meatballs

The next step is also vital: Perfect venison meatballs are not all meat. Yes, it’s true — and counter-intuitive. Your mind says that an all-meat meatball will be better than one with “fillers” like bread or flour or breadcrumbs. Your mind is wrong. To me, a meatball should be pillowy yet substantial at the same time. One way you get that is by adding bread to the mixture.

I owe this particular bread technique to Marcella Hazan in her Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, which is to Italian cooking what Julia Child and Simone Beck’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking is for French cuisine.

Basically Marcella heats up a little milk and drops stale, crustless bread into it until the bread absorbs the milk, then she mashes everything into a slurry and lets it cool. Brilliant.

Breadcrumbs will also work, but will not make as nice a venison meatball as with the softened bread. 

Finesse Makes Tender Meatballs

The other primary step in making venison meatballs is to not take your aggressions out on the meat mixture. You mix gently, gently, gently, and not completely. It is OK to have some uneven spots. It makes things more interesting. Think cake, not bread. 

If you overwork your meatball mixture you will get tough meatballs. 

You follow that up by forming the meatballs with equal finesse. Use your palms, not your fingers. Greek meatballs are made with your fingers, Italian ones with the palms. You want a nice round ball that just barely holds together.

After you form them, you want to roll your venison meatballs in flour or bread crumbs. I like fine bread crumbs because they add some texture to the meatball. These meatballs will deform as you roll them in the crumbs. No worry, just reshape and place on a cookie sheet that has a piece of wax or parchment paper set on it.

Frying Meatballs 

To me the answer is pretty obvious, but there are actually a lot of meatball recipes out there where you don’t fry the meatballs before finishing them in sauce. This is blasphemy in the part of New Jersey I grew up in. And when I say “fry” I mean fry, not sauté.

Meatballs and spaghetti is a dish designed to show off — I’m not joking — as newly “wealthy” Italian immigrants found they could serve expensive meatballs and “expensive” factory-made pasta all the time. Much of Old Italy was so poor that these were festival ingredients, not weekly commonplaces.

This means you need lots and lots of oil to properly fry your venison meatballs.

The amount of oil should come up to exactly half the meatball — when they are all in the pan. You remember Archimedes and his bathtub, yes? That means start with about 1/4 inch and get that hot, then add more oil little by little until it is at the halfway point. This keeps the oil hot and prevents the “Saturn’s Ring” of un-fried, or double-fried, sections in the middle of the meatball. It’s an aesthetic thing.

Oh, and flip your meatballs only once, so both sides are golden brown. Remember it does not matter if they are cooked through! You are going to eat your venison meatballs in a sauce, which will finish the cooking. 

Once they are done, remove to a rack to drain. This is better than simply putting them on a paper towel, although that’s fine, too.

Baking Meatballs

And yes, you can bake venison meatballs. but you need to be very careful or you will get a nasty mess in your baking sheet when all the fat renders out. This ruins your meatballs. You fix this in a couple ways: Ideally, you bake your meatballs in a mini muffin pan. This preserves their shape. 

Second, you bake slow and low. I bake venison meatballs at 300°F only until the interior hits about 145°F. Remember you’ll finish them in sauce later. 

Finally, you can absolutely just simmer your venison meatballs in your spaghetti sauce. 

Tips for Better Venison Meatballs

Onions are another way to make a juicier meatball, and if you want to use them, add up to 1 cup of minced onion to the meatball mix. But you will need to sweat them in olive oil until they are soft and translucent. Raw onion in a meatball is a terrible idea. 

If you are making a classic Italian-American red sauce, with pork shoulder, sausages and meatballs, the pork shoulder can go in as early as you want, but you can absolutely overcook sausage and meatballs. They don’t need more than 20 minutes to cook through, and will start to suffer at an hour, even if cooked gently. (If you do want to make a Sunday gravy, you’ll want to make some sweet Italian and hot Italian sausages.)

This recipe can be doubled, and once browned, venison meatballs will keep a week in the fridge and they freeze well. Arrange on a baking sheet and freeze, then when they are solid, put the meatballs in a heavy freezer bag. They’ll keep about 6 months that way. 

You now have perfect venison meatballs, which need only to be finished in your favorite sauce. My choice is this meatless tomato sauce that is like a marinara, only with a little fennel.