Plant-Based Italian Meatballs

Polpette Senza Carne in Sugo

Don't tell my nonna, but I've been messing with her meatball recipe.

For years, I made traditional polpette—first in my family's kitchen, then professionally at Hearth and Insieme Restaurants in Manhattan under Marco Canora, who had learned his technique from Fabio Picci at Cibreo in Florence. Those meatballs were legendary: fall-apart tender, deeply savory, at once familiar, yet strikingly different.

The challenge was recreating that same texture and depth of flavor without any animal products. Not "pretty good for plant-based." Actually good. The kind that makes you forget there's no meat involved. Or the copious amounts of cheese that played no small part in the other-worldly texture of those meatballs.

This is the third recipe in my Italian shōjin ryōri series—taking the Japanese Buddhist culinary principles seasonality, harmony with the environment, and no-waste and applying them to Italian cuisine. I hope to demonstrate that these techniques are universal principles that are at work in most cultures and cuisines, not just Japanese. You just have to cultivate presence and awareness in the kitchen to see this.

No-Meat Meatballs Braised in Tomato Sauce © 2025 Tenzo's Kitchen LLC

What makes these plant-based meatballs different?

Most meatless meatballs fail in one of two ways: they're either dense and rubbery, or they fall apart for the wrong reasons—crumbling instead of that luxurious, melt-in-your-mouth tenderness you want.

The texture secret came from an unexpected place: tenkasu (Japanese tempura scraps) soaked in tomato juice. It creates the exact yielding, tender structure I remembered from my nonna's kitchen and perfected at Hearth. These meatballs have that same fall-apart quality—perfect orbs that melt in your mouth.

The flavor challenge was harder. Traditional meatballs get their depth from the Maillard reaction when you sear meat in a hot pan—that browning creates hundreds of flavor compounds you can't fake. My solution? Ground soy protein browned properly, patience while building the sauce, and the same garlic and oregano my nonna always used. The result delivers the same savory complexity.

This recipe is a hybrid: my nonna's approach to seasoning and her insistence on braising low and slow, combined with Marco's textural technique (though he'd be confused by my ingredient substitutions), and the shōjin ryōri principle of using every element purposefully. Nothing wasted, every ingredient working toward the whole.

The tomato sauce they braise in becomes the second act—you'll use it later in the week for spaghetti and meatballs, or over polenta, or stirred into white beans. That's the Italian home cooking way: cook once, eat multiple times, and use time to your advantage, allowing flavors to naturally blend with time.

These aren't "good for plant-based." They're just good. The kind that would make my nonna stop talking to me if she knew, but secretly go back for seconds.