Meatloaf
A panade of bread and milk is what keeps it tender, and free-form on a tray rather than in a tin is what gives it a crust on more than one side.
- Prep
- 25 min
- Cook
- 1 hr 10 min
- Resting
- 15 min
- Total
- 1 hr 50 min
- Serves
- 6
- Revisions
- 1
Allergens
- Celery
- Cereals containing gluten
- Eggs
- Milk
- Mustard
- Sulphites
Named from the ingredients as written, including those carried in from sub-recipes. This is not a guarantee — check the labels on what you actually buy, and note that a product’s recipe can change.
Ingredients
Serves
Loaf
Glaze
Method
Loaf
Heat the oven to 180C fan and line a baking tray with baking paper.
Soak the torn bread in the milk for 10 minutes, then mash it to a smooth paste with a fork. This panade is the whole difference between a tender loaf and a dense one: the starch holds water that would otherwise be squeezed out as the meat proteins tighten.
Cook the onion and celery in the oil over medium heat for 10 minutes until soft, add the garlic for a final minute, and let it cool. Raw onion in a meatloaf stays crunchy and weeps water.
Put both minces in a large bowl with the panade, the cooled vegetables, the eggs, Worcestershire sauce, mustard, salt, pepper and parsley.
Mix with your hands until it is just combined and no more — about 30 seconds. Worked further, the meat turns springy and slices like a sausage.
Tip it onto the tray and pat it into a loaf about 25cm long and 10cm wide, with the top gently domed.
Free-form rather than in a tin, so the sides brown and the fat runs away instead of collecting round it.
Glaze
Mix the glaze ingredients and brush a third of it over the loaf.
Bake for 40 minutes.
Brush on another third and bake for 20 minutes more.
Brush on the last of it and bake for a final 10 minutes, until the glaze is sticky and dark at the edges and the centre reads 71C/160F.
Rest for 15 minutes on the tray before slicing. Cut it hot and the slices fall apart; the resting is not optional here.
Nobody has rated this recipe yet.
Sign in to rate this recipe. One rating per person, and you can change it.
What to expect
- Taste
Savoury and slightly sweet, with the glaze giving a sharp, sticky, almost barbecue edge against a mild interior. Mustard and Worcestershire sauce are what stop it tasting like a large plain meatball.
- Aroma
Roasting meat with caramelising sugar over it. The last ten minutes, when the final coat of glaze goes on, is the strongest.
- Texture
Tender and slightly loose, not springy, and it should hold a slice without being firm. The contrast between the sticky lacquered top and the soft interior is most of the pleasure.
- Sound
Very little. Fat crackling faintly on the tray, and the glaze bubbling at the edges near the end.
- How the flavour moves
Sweet-sharp glaze first, then savoury meat, then a long mild finish. The glaze is doing all the work at the front of the mouth and the seasoning is doing it at the back.
- Serve it
Hot but rested, or cold from the fridge the next day, which is a legitimately different and good dish.
- Goes with
Mashed potato and green beans, or a baked potato. Cold, with white bread and pickle.
Cook's notes
- Difficulty
Easy, with one rule: mix as little as possible.
- Cost
Low.
- Equipment
A baking tray, baking paper, a frying pan and a probe thermometer.
- When to make it
A weeknight, with the sandwiches in mind.
- Best season
None.
- You know it is done when
The glaze sticky and darkened at the edges, and clear juices rather than pink ones where a skewer comes out. The loaf will have shrunk slightly from its shaped size.
- And it feels like
Firm but yielding to a press, and it should slice cleanly rather than crumble — if it crumbles it was not rested, and if it is springy it was overmixed.
- Food safety
Mince is minced, so surface bacteria are distributed all the way through and the centre must be properly cooked. 71C/160F at the middle, taken with a probe pushed into the thickest part; colour is not a reliable test in a loaf this size. Both raw meats and the eggs mean the mixing bowl and hands want washing properly afterwards.
- Where it goes wrong
- Dry breadcrumbs instead of a milk-soaked panade, which is why most meatloaf is dense.
- Overmixing, which makes it springy and sausage-like.
- Raw onion in the mix, which stays crunchy and releases water.
- All the glaze at the start, so the sugar burns over seventy minutes.
- Slicing it straight out of the oven, when it falls apart.
- Lean mince, which has nothing to keep it moist.
- If it does go wrong
Dry: too lean, overcooked, or no panade. Crumbling: not rested, or not enough egg. Springy and bouncy: overmixed; nothing fixes it after the fact. Sitting in a pool of fat: expected on a tray, and the reason for the tray — lift the loaf off before it cools into it.
- Making it ahead
Mix and shape a day ahead, keep covered in the fridge, and add 10 minutes to the bake.
- Keeping it
Four days in the fridge, whole rather than sliced, which keeps it moist.
- Reheating
Slices in a covered dish at 160C fan for 15 minutes, or fried in butter, which is better.
- Freezing
Freezes well cooked, whole or in slices, for three months. It can also be frozen raw and shaped, then baked from thawed.
- Leftovers
A cold meatloaf sandwich with mustard and pickle is a better dish than the hot original, and is the actual reason to make a large one.
- Scaling it
Two smaller loaves cook better than one large one and give more crust. Do not make one enormous loaf; the outside dries before the middle is safe.
- Substitutions
All beef works and is slightly drier. Milk can be buttermilk. Panko is a poor substitute for the bread but better than dried crumbs; use 50g and the same milk.
- Dietary swaps
Contains gluten, milk, eggs, mustard, celery and sulphites. Gluten-free bread makes a perfectly good panade, which is one of the easier gluten-free swaps here. Nut free as written.
- Shopping for it
Nothing unusual. Stale bread is better than fresh for the panade.
- Keeping the cost down
One of the cheapest ways to feed six, and the bread is doing real work rather than padding.
- Sustainability
Beef and pork, with beef the heavier of the two. Meatloaf is unusual among meat dishes in that stretching it is the original point rather than a compromise: the panade is there to make less meat go further, and Depression-era versions used considerably more bread than this one. Going to 400g beef, 300g pork and 120g of bread makes a loaf that is arguably better, because the panade is what keeps it tender.
- Nutrition
Substantial, and the panade makes it go further than the meat alone would.
- Worth it?
The panade and thirty seconds of mixing. Two rules, and they are the difference between the dish's reputation and the dish.
Where it comes from
- Origin
The United States, in its modern form.
- Also called
Meatloaf.
- Said out loud
Straightforward.
- What the name means
Literal: meat, in the shape of a loaf.
- History
Chopped meat bound and baked appears in European cooking for centuries, and German and Scandinavian immigrants carried versions of it to the United States. The dish became an American fixture around the turn of the twentieth century with the spread of the meat grinder, and it flourished in the Depression and again under wartime rationing because bread, oats or crackers made expensive meat stretch. The ketchup or tomato glaze is a mid-twentieth-century convention rather than an old one.
- Why it matters
American home cooking of a very particular kind — unfashionable, associated with mothers and diners, and periodically rediscovered. It carries a lot of nostalgia for a dish that is essentially a large seasoned rissole.
- When it is eaten
A weeknight dinner that makes a week of sandwiches.
- The traditional way
Ground meat bound with a starch and egg, seasoned, formed and baked, usually glazed.
- How it changed
From a way of stretching meat to a dish made for its own sake, and from tin-baked to free-form as people worked out that the sides brown better on a tray.
- Regional variations
Every country with a mincing machine has one: the Dutch and German versions, Scandinavian kjøttpudding, and the Italian polpettone, which is often rolled around a filling.
- How this version differs
Free-form on a tray rather than in a loaf tin, so all four sides brown and the rendered fat runs away instead of collecting around it. The glaze goes on in three coats rather than one, so it lacquers instead of burning.
- Sources and credit
None.
Beef Tacos
Chilli con Carne
Classic Beef Burger
Steak Diane
Chicken à la King
Chicken Burger
American
Main courses
Dinner
Beef