‘The Pioneer Woman’: Ree Drummond Gives Boring Meatloaf an Italian Twist
Ree Drummond has a variety of delicious meatloaf recipes — proving the classic comfort food doesn’t have to be made only one way. The Pioneer Woman star has an interesting Italian twist on traditional meatloaf that changes the flavor profile with just a few ingredients.
Ree Drummond’s meatloaf recipe incorporates Italian flavor
Drummond’s Italian meatloaf recipe starts with soaking bread in milk. Then she combines the milk-soaked bread with ground beef, parmesan, eggs, parsley, Italian seasoning, salt, seasoned salt, and pepper. She mixes everything together and places it on a broiler pan, forming it into a loaf shape.
While demonstrating how to make her easy meatloaf recipe on an episode of The Pioneer Woman, Drummond explained why this type of pan is a great option. “I like to use these broiler pans to make meatloaf because they have slats and all the fat drips out so it doesn’t sit in the fat as it cooks,” she said.
In another bowl, she makes a topping for the meatloaf — a combination of diced tomatoes, brown sugar, mustard, cayenne, salt, pepper, and Worcestershire sauce.
Drummond tops the meatloaf with thin pancetta slices and spoons the tomato mixture over it. She tents the pan with foil and bakes the meatloaf in a 350 degree Fahrenheit oven for 40 minutes, then removes the foil and cooks it for 30 to 40 minutes.
“This takes meatloaf to a whole new level,” she wrote in her blog post. “You’ll love it, adore it, and want to marry it.”
Drummond shared some easy meatloaf modifications
The Pioneer Woman star also shared a list of ideas in her blog post to switch up the flavor and customize the dish to your tastes, such as using a combination of ground beef and ground turkey or a combination of ground beef and Italian sausage.
She also suggested adding “12 to 15 cloves of roasted garlic to the meat mixture” or using chopped fresh herbs rather than dried Italian seasoning. Drummond said that subbing Asiago cheese for parmesan gives it a “sharper flavor” as well.
You can find the full recipe on the Food Network website.
Drummond’s cheeseburger meatloaf recipe is another fun family-friendly option
Drummond has a number of meatloaf recipes, including one family-friendly meal idea that’s a fun mashup of meatloaf and cheeseburgers.
While sharing how to make her cheeseburger meatloaf recipe on an episode of her cooking show Drummond noted that while she thinks “meatloaf is pretty much the perfect food,” it also “really gets a bad rap.”
She continued, “I think it’s one of those foods that, if it’s wrong, it’s really wrong. But on the flip side of that … when meatloaf is right, it’s such a beautiful thing.”
Drummond’s process is similar to the Italian version of her meatloaf, but with a cheeseburger spin. She mixed together ground beef, milk-soaked bread, eggs, diced red onions, ketchup, mustard, salt, pepper, bacon, and sharp cheddar cubes.
She also shared her meatloaf trick for cutting down on cooking time — when forming the meat into a loaf shape, make it flatter. “The more dome your meatloaf has to it, the longer it takes to cook and the harder it is for it to cook evenly,” The Pioneer Woman star said. “So I like to have it pretty much a uniform thickness but not too thin that you can’t slice it and see that beautiful meatloaf inside.”
After topping the meatloaf with half of the sauce (a combination of ketchup, yellow mustard, grated onion, salt, and pepper), she baked it in a 350 degree Fahrenheit oven for an hour with a foil tent. After an hour, she removed the foil, added the remaining sauce, and cooked it for another 40 minutes.
The full recipe is available on the Food Network website.
