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My fiance loves meatball subs from Subway.  I don’t have a preference one way or the other, but the fact that my fiance loves them is enough for me.  This last week we made our own.  “Made,” in this context, basically means “assembled from frozen/pre-packaged items”, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Here’s the thing – even if you’re using pre-packaged foods, you’re still usually substantially better off preparing the food at home.  This was still a quick and easy meal, and we had tons of leftovers!  Here’s what we used:

  • 1 (2 lb) package of frozen meatballs (from Wal-Mart)
  • 1 quart pizza sauce (bought in bulk at Sam’s Club)
  • Shredded mozzarella cheese
  • Long hoagie-style buns (from Sam’s Club)
  • Oregano (tiny flakes in a spice jar, not the whole kind)

To get the really nice soft meatballs, you need to use a wet cooking method.  Dump the meatballs into a 5 quart pan, dump the pizza sauce over them, and cook on low to medium heat.  Stir occasionally.  Ideally your pizza sauce should reduce a bit as you cook, causing it to thicken up.  We cooked ours for 20-30 minutes on the stove top; you could bake them just as easily as long as the dish was mostly covered.

Just slice the buns lengthwise, and spoon meatballs onto them.  Top with shredded cheese, sprinkle with basil, and put them under the broiler in your oven for a few minutes – just long enough for the cheese to get bubbly and develop little brown spots.

This made two full-length sandwiches (probably about 15″) the first night, two half sandwiches the next day, one more half sandwich the next day, and there’s still some sitting in our refrigerator.

We compared it to what you get at Subway, and had a few observations:

  • We got more meatballs. At Subway, you get maybe 4 or 5 small meatballs on a 6″ sub.  We loaded ours with twice that, and it was *excellent*.
  • We got more cheese. None of this super-skinny half-slice of cheese nonsense – we used a generous portion of good-quality mozzarella.
  • The subs were bigger. As we mentioned above, our full-length subs were about 25% bigger than Subway’s.
  • The subs were less expensive. We figure our total cost for the above at about $10.00, and got about 5 15″ subs out of the deal.  Even more money could be shaved off if we watched for sales on meatballs (I don’t make my own at this point, as I don’t have a recipe that I’ve found to be good yet), or if we made our own bread.

We’ll definitely be doing it again.  Next time I think I’ll bake my own bread.  I’d planned to this time, but I didn’t get the time the day we were going to be having the subs.  Some of the meatballs were a little tough – I attribute this to the quality of the meat from Wal-Mart.  Next time I’ll get the meatballs at Sam’s Club, where I know they’re good.

All-in-all, I consider this to have been a good experiment!