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Porcupine meatballs are one of those Slow Cooker dinners that look a little surprising and taste completely comforting. The name comes from the uncooked rice mixed right into the ground beef — as it cooks, the rice swells and pokes out in all directions, giving the meatballs their signature spiky look. Everything goes into the Slow Cooker raw, you pour tomato sauce over the top, and a few hours later you’ve got a hearty, saucy dinner the whole family will ask for again.
Why You’ll Love It
Only 7 ingredients — pantry staples you probably already have on hand
No browning, no extra pans — mix, shape, pour, and walk away
The rice cooks inside the meatball — absorbing all the beef and tomato flavor as it goes
Leftovers are even better — the sauce soaks deeper into the rice overnight
Feeds a crowd — two pounds of beef stretches into a generous meal for six
Ingredient Notes
Ground beef: I use 80/20 most of the time. Fat is flavor. You can go 85/15 if that’s what you have.
Rice: Long-grain white rice. Don’t use instant, don’t use jasmine (I tried, it got weird and a little sticky), don’t use brown rice unless you’re prepared to cook these for significantly longer and add more liquid. I made the brown rice mistake once. Once.
Tomato sauce: Just regular canned tomato sauce — not pasta sauce, not crushed tomatoes, not marinara. I’ve used store brand my whole life and it’s fine. Sometimes I’ll add a splash of Worcestershire to the sauce when I’m mixing it with the water, just because I like the depth of it, but that’s not in the original recipe.
Onion: Finely chopped. This matters more than you’d think. Chunky onion in a meatball is a texture problem. Finely chopped onion basically dissolves into the meat and you get all the flavor without biting into a big piece of raw onion that didn’t cook all the way. Ask me how I know.
Salt and pepper: I use kosher salt. I always use kosher salt. I don’t know when this happened but at some point in my forties I just stopped buying regular table salt and now I’m one of those people.
Ingredients
2 pounds ground beef (I use 80/20)
1 cup uncooked long-grain white rice
1 medium onion, finely chopped — and I mean finely
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
2 cans (15 oz each) tomato sauce
1 cup water
Instructions
Spray your Slow Cooker with a little nonstick spray. This step is easy to skip and then you spend twenty minutes scrubbing the crock after dinner, so just do it.
Add the ground beef right into the Slow Cooker crock — yes, right in there, you’re not dirtying a bowl tonight. Add the rice, the chopped onion, the salt, and the pepper. Get your hands in and mix it together until everything’s distributed evenly through the meat. Don’t overwork it. Overworked meatball meat gets dense and tough and then nobody’s happy. Just mix until it looks like the rice and onion are throughout, and stop.
Now shape the meatballs. Golf ball sized, roughly — about an inch and a half across. I shape them right in the slow cooker, pinching off a piece, rolling it between my palms, setting it back in. You’ll end up with somewhere between eighteen and twenty-four meatballs depending on how your hands feel that day. They can touch each other; they’ll firm up as they cook and won’t fuse together.
In a bowl or big measuring cup, whisk together both cans of tomato sauce and the cup of water. Pour this gently over the meatballs. You want them mostly submerged — if a few tops are sticking out, just spoon some sauce over them.
Lid on. LOW for six to seven hours, or HIGH for three to four. I almost always do LOW because I start it in the morning and don’t think about it again until it’s time to eat. Don’t lift the lid to check on them. I know it’s tempting. It lets all the heat out and then you’re looking at undercooked rice inside meatballs and that’s a whole situation.
When they’re done, the rice will be puffed up and peeking out — that’s the porcupine thing — and an instant-read thermometer in the center of a meatball should read at least 160°F. Taste the sauce, adjust the salt if it needs it, and serve.
Variations
Add two cloves of minced garlic to the meat mixture if you want more depth — it works really well with the tomato base.
If you want a little heat — not a lot, just a hum of it — stir a quarter teaspoon of red pepper flakes into the tomato sauce before you pour it over.
I tried Italian sausage once, half and half with the ground beef. It was very good but also it tasted like a completely different recipe and honestly I wasn’t sure I’d improved anything.
If you want to make this ahead: mix and shape the meatballs in the insert the night before, cover it, and refrigerate it. Pour the sauce on in the morning before you start cooking. Add about thirty minutes to the cook time if you’re starting from cold.
Storage
Three days in the fridge, in a good container. The sauce gets absorbed into the rice overnight and the whole thing becomes this dense, almost jammy meatball situation that I like even better than the original. Reheat in the microwave with a splash of water, or in a small skillet over low heat, spooning sauce over the top.
These freeze well too — they never last long enough to test the limits.
Serve them over mashed potatoes or egg noodles, tear some bread to soak up the sauce, put a green salad on the table if you feel like it. They don’t need much. That’s the whole point.