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These porcupine meatballs are the ultimate budget-friendly comfort food — just four ingredients, a Slow Cooker, and a few minutes of hands-on time. The rice puffs up right inside the meatballs as they simmer, and the tomato sauce turns rich and cozy over hours of low, slow cooking. It’s the kind of dinner you set and forget, and it feeds a crowd without costing much at all.
Why You’ll Love This Recipe
Just 4 ingredients — ground beef, rice, tomato soup, and water, nothing fancy required
Truly hands-off — the Slow Cooker does all the work while you go about your day
Budget-friendly — stretches a couple pounds of ground beef into a full dinner for a crowd
Naturally saucy — the rice thickens the tomato sauce as it cooks for a rich, glossy finish
Great for leftovers — reheats beautifully and tastes even better the next day
Ingredient Notes
The ground beef — I usually go with 80/85 lean, because anything leaner and the meatballs turn dry and sad, like little hockey pucks, and anything fattier and you’re skimming grease off your sauce for twenty minutes. My mother used whatever was on sale, which some weeks meant something closer to 90/10, and she just added a little extra water to the sauce to compensate. I don’t know if that actually works scientifically, but it’s what she did, so it’s what I do.
Rice needs to be uncooked, long-grain, plain old white rice — not instant, not minute rice, none of that. The raw rice is what soaks up the liquid as it cooks and puffs up inside the meat, and if you use the quick- cook stuff it just turns to mush, or so I’ve heard from my sister-in-law who tried it once and never brought it up again.
And the tomato soup — has to be Campbell’s condensed, in my house anyway. I’ve tried the generic store brand a couple times when money was tight (see a pattern here?) and it’s fine, it’s not bad, but it’s thinner and a little more acidic and it changes the whole personality of the sauce. Little things like that matter more than you’d think.
Ingredients
2 pounds ground beef, 80–85% lean
1 cup uncooked long-grain white rice
2 cans (10.5 oz each) condensed tomato soup — Campbell’s, if you can swing it
1 1/2 cups water, though I sometimes eyeball this a little heavier if the meatballs look like they need more coverage
Instructions
Okay, so — dump the ground beef and the dry rice into a big bowl together. Use your hands, don’t be dainty about it, just get in there and mix until the rice is more or less evenly spread through the meat. Don’t overdo the mixing though. My mother always said if you work ground beef too much it gets tough, tastes like a hamburger patty from a gas station, and I don’t have any reason to doubt her on that one.
Roll the mixture into balls, roughly an inch and a half, though mine always come out a little uneven in size and I’ve made peace with that. You’ll get somewhere around two dozen, give or take a few depending on how big your hands are feeling that day. Set them on a plate as you go.
Spray the inside of your Slow Cooker — I forgot this step once, years ago, at my son’s apartment when I was showing him how to make these for the first time, and we spent forty-five minutes afterward chipping dried tomato sauce off the crock. Learn from my mistakes. Lay the meatballs in, snug, maybe stacking a few on a second layer if they don’t all fit flat.
Whisk your tomato soup and water together in a separate bowl until it’s smooth — it’ll look thin and a little too watery at this point, don’t panic, that’s normal. Pour it over the meatballs, trying to get most of them covered, though a few peeking out the top is fine.
Lid on. Low for six to seven hours, or high for three to four if you’re in a hurry, which — who isn’t. You’ll know it’s ready when there’s no pink left in the center of the meatballs (cut one open if you’re not sure, nobody’s judging) and the rice inside has gone tender and translucent, and the sauce around the edges has thickened up just slightly and gone glossy.
Baste the tops with a little of that sauce before you serve, mostly because it looks pretty, though I couldn’t tell you if it changes the flavor much.
Variations
My daughter swaps in ground turkey these days — she’s decided beef isn’t for her anymore, which is a whole other conversation I won’t get into — but she uses the 85/93 lean kind because otherwise, she says, they come out dry and a little sad. I tried adding a half cup of tomato sauce once instead of some of the water, thinking it’d deepen the flavor, and it did, though it also made the whole thing a touch sweeter than I like, so I’ve gone back and forth on whether that’s actually an improvement or just a different dish wearing the same name. My nephew, who has apparently decided he’s a chef now because he watched some cooking show for a summer, insists you should brown the meatballs first in a skillet before they go in the Slow Cooker. My mother never did that. I don’t either, most days — too many dishes, and honestly I can’t taste much of a difference, though I’ll admit the one time I did brown them first, they held their shape a little better.
Storage & Reheating
These keep in the fridge for a good four or five days, though ours never last that long. I’ve absolutely left a container of leftovers on the counter overnight because I got distracted by a phone call from my sister and just — forgot, and had to toss the whole batch the next morning, which felt like a small tragedy at 7 a.m. on a Wednesday. Don’t do that. Get it in the fridge within a couple hours. Reheats fine in the microwave, or in a saucepan on the stove if you’ve got the patience for it, with maybe a splash of water to loosen the sauce back up since it thickens quite a bit once it’s chilled.
A Few Last Thoughts
I still make these more often than almost anything else in my rotation, and I think it’s less about the taste — though the taste is good, don’t get me wrong — and more about what it represents, which I suppose is one of those things you’re not supposed to say out loud about a recipe involving canned soup. Serve it over mashed potatoes if you want something really cozy, or plain rice if you’re trying to stretch it even further, the way we used to. There’s a bag of egg noodles in my pantry right now that I keep meaning to try under this sauce instead, and I still haven’t gotten around to it. Maybe next Tuesday. Or Thursday.