TUESDAY, MARCH 8, 2011 | Posted by Fancy Food & Culinary Products blog at 11:08 AM

Editor’s Choice: MamaMancini Meatballs and Sunday Sauce

I was raised in an Italian household. Needless to say, I’m no slouch when it comes to spaghetti sauce, meatballs and home made pizza dough. My Nonie — i.e. grandmother — spent hours in the kitchen teaching me the fundamentals for comforting and soulful Italian cuisine. As a result, I try my best to avoid everything from prepared sauces to frozen entrees. I’m a connoisseur of all things authentic. So, I was definitely skeptical when the package of MamaMancini Frozen Beef Meatballs in Sunday Sauce arrived in our offices. Three things quickly convinced me to try them. Reason one was an empty refrigerator. Reason two was a starving husband. Reason three was the mounting snow outside our window. Luckily, we had one remaining box of rigatoni, some fresh Parmesan and crusty bread to accompany our meal. Though, I must admit the packaged meatballs were definitely the stars of the show and it seems my endless labors in the kitchen could hardly compete.

Here’s the thing. It wasn’t as if they were good as far as frozen meatballs are concerned. They were good by all standard. Restaurant quality … heck, they were close to Nonie’s quality! You could tell that care had been taken during the preparation, as I could taste a delicate mixture of herbs combining with the juicy chunks of tomatoes. The meatballs themselves were huge and would have been excellent sliced in half and slathered inside a hoagie bun. After gobbling them down, I decided some research regarding the company was warranted — if only to find out where they’re sold to buy more! The popular meatballs are derived from the original family recipe of founder Daniel Mancini’s Brooklyn grandmother and within the past year have experienced a 300-percent growth in sales. Co-founder Carl Wolfe attributes this to the fact that, “people want simple, delicious ways to bring their families together for dinner.” If that was the overall goal, MamaMancini certainly succeeded. Luckily, eager Italian chefs that crave authenticity can find them in a number of grocery stores including but not limited to Publix, Giant Eagle, Brookshires, Key Food, Mars Supermarket, Harris Teeter and Big Y World Class Markets. They’ll definitely be on my future shopping lists.

~Cathryn

SOUTH ORANGE, NJ – South Orange’s own meatball guy now has his own meatball day.

Sunday is MamaMancini’s Day at Above restaurant, with a feast of spaghetti and turkey, beef or spicy balls to recognize Daniel Mancini, founder of MamaMancini’s meatballs.

If that wasn’t enough, he’ll also be celebrating National Meatball Day on Wednesday.

The plaudits are a surprise for a man who started cooking up his grandma’s recipes as a way to ease out of a stressful lifestyle.

After a 25 year run in the apparel industry Mancini, who still lives in town, was aware of the crashing economy and decided that everyone just needed to slow down.

If everyone just chilled and made a family dinner, maybe they would be able to step back from their crazy lifestyles, Mancini said.

During Mancini’s childhood his family never went out to dinner.  His grandmother would cook all the time and everyone would hang out at the table.

Mancini wanted to take this lifestyle and find a way to recreate it for other people.

“The only way I could think of was to take my grandma’s meatballs and sauce recipe and try to package it as a meal,” he said.

“Being Italian, I would never buy a meatball, so I said If I could find a meatball an Italian would want to buy than I have a meatball everyone’s going to want to buy. So I decided it had to be my grandma’s recipe and not change anything in it.”

Mancini took that recipe to the owners of Eden Gourmet when the store first opened on South Orange Avenue, and had them try it.  They immediately told Mancini if he could make them, they would sell them.

Mancini partnered with neighbor Carl Wolf, and started cooking up Italian feasts. Eden Gourmet was the first place to carry the meatballs in Sunday sauce.  They soon hit the shelves of all six of the chain’s stores, and then local Whole Foods Markets.
The big break for MamaMancini’s Meatballs came when Mancini was featured on an episode of The Martha Stewart Show on April, 21 2009. Martha aired the segment again July of the same year.

“I guess she got a great response,” he said.

MamaMancini’s just launched turkey meatballs and sausage and peppers with onions, which are currently available in the Garden of Eden marketplaces and The Fresh Market.  In March, for the first time, MamaMancini’s will be selling the Sunday sauce in bottles.

Mancini noted, “The way it looks, we will soon be in every store in the country.  Everywhere we go, everyone wants the meatballs. We have yet to hit a store that says I don’t want these.”

MamaMancini’s now has a base in East Rutherford, NJ, and sales people around the world.  It produces 300,000 meatballs a month and, by May, expects to expand production to 700,000.

“The plan is to have Mama’s in every house across the country,” he said.

For Immediate Release March 4, 2011

NATIONAL MEATBALL DAY is Wednesday, March 9, 2011

MamaMancini’s Meatballs Celebrates with Free Food and Fun

To celebrate National Meatball Day – March 9^th, 2011 – the popular MamaMancini’s has cooked up a number of ways for everyone to bite into America’s favorite comfort food for free. The meatballs, which have become America’s fastest growing meatball, are derived from the original recipe of founder Daniel Mancini’s Brooklyn grandmother.

FREE MEATBALLS FOR A YEAR

Meatball lovers can score a year’s worth of free meatballs by logging onto www.facebook.com/MamaMancinis and posting a photo of themselves with a meatball. The person with the most votes wins a year of MamaMancini’s Meatballs and Sunday Sauce.

FREE MEATBALL SUBS

The first 50 people to email meatballday@mamamancinis.com (beginning Tuesday March 8^th) will get a free, hot MamaMancini’s Meatball and Sunday Sauce sandwich on Sullivan Bakery bread or a dish of MamaMancini’s Meatballs and Sunday Sauce with dipping bread delivered to their home or office. The delivery service is from 12-3pm on March 9^th only, in the Manhattan area. Go to our Facebook Page, http://www.facebook.com/MamaMancinis, for all the details.

FREE MEATBALL DINNER AND VIEWING OF “CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS

On March 9^th from 4pm – 6pm, the coolest hangout for kids in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Klub4Kidz will be host a free meatball dinner for parents and kids (while supplies last). Klub4Kidz will also show the film “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” at 4:30pm. www.klub4kidz.com, 159 North 4^th Street. The Klub is open to the public, with a $10 admission per child.

SUNDAY FAMILY DINNER

Celebrate MamaMancini’s Meatball Day on Sunday, March 6th, with a family-style dinner at Eden Marketplace/Above Restaurant in South Orange, NJ from 4pm-8pm. Daniel Mancini, founder of MamaMancini’s Meatballs in Sunday Sauce, will host the dinner and be on hand to talk about his all-natural, handmade meatballs. The special prix fixe menu for the family style dinner includes: Spaghetti with MamaMancini’s Turkey, Beef and Spicy Meatballs, Italian style bread and salad. Bring the kids, your folks, your neighbors and your friends for a Sunday Meatball Feast. To reserve, please call 973-762-2683 or visit Open Table: http://www.opentable.com/above-restaurant-and-bar-reservations-south-orange

About MamaMancini’s
MamaMancini’s is a NJ-based gourmet meatball company, which launched in 2007. Brooklyn native Daniel Mancini created MamaMancini’s Meatballs and Sunday Sauce based on the recipe that he learned from his grandmother as a child. In 2007, Daniel along with partners Carl Wolf and Matt Brown launched the company, which is based in East Rutherford, New Jersey. MamaMancini’s has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, People Magazine and USA Weekend (which called 2010 the Year of the Meatball). Daniel has appeared on the Martha Stewart Show, the TODAY Show’s Cooking School series, The Daily Buzz, Mr. Food, Fox Business and more.

Contact:
Lois Najarian O’Neill Kendra Borowski
The Door                                                The Door
212-905-6191                                         212-905-6196

Meet Mancini, Maestro of Meatballs

By Peter Genovese/The Star-Ledger
Published: Monday, February 21, 2011, 5:45 PM

The lowly meatball is back with a vengeance, and a mild-mannered guy from South Orange is making millions — of meatballs, anyway — delivering this most basic of comfort foods to the supermarket shelves and dining room tables of America.

“You pick up meatballs at the supermarket, some of them have a lot of fillers and preservatives,” says Daniel Mancini, sitting at a table inside Eden Marketplace in South Orange. “There are 25 different ingredients, and a lot of them you can’t pronounce.’’

There are just eight ingredients in MamaMancini’s meatballs, named after Mancini’s grandmother and available in an estimated 4,000 stores around the country.

A year ago, Mancini, a former garment-industry midmanagement type, was making 50,000 meatballs a month. Last month, he made 300,000 meatballs. By midyear, he expects to be making 700,000 a month.

Daniel Mancini at his hot bar in Eden Marketplace, South Orange

That’s a lot of meatballs.

“Meatballs are one of the hot new food trends,” Mancini says.

Trends in the food business last about as long as cooks in Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen; in the past few years, it’s been high-end burgers, then gourmet pizza, then cupcakes, all seemingly poised to take over the world.

But lately there’s been beaucoup buzz about the humble little meatball. The annual Meatball Madness contest at the New York Wine & Food Festival pits 25 of the city’s top chefs in a meatball showdown. The Meatball Shop, the latest hipster joint on the Lower East Side, offers “Naked Balls” (four meatballs with your choice of sauce), sliders (one meatball on a bun) and heroes (three meatballs in a baguette), among other items.

And a guy who once worked at Abraham & Straus, Gimbels and Alexander’s is sitting atop a meatball mountain, one that seems to grow every day.

“I always say my meatballs are second-best,” Mancini, 52, said. “I don’t want to be yours, or your grandmother’s.”

No one knows who made the first meatball — there were recipes for stuffed meat patties in ancient Rome — but meatballs have been a fixture in kitchens since the first Italian grandmother took control of cooking duties.

“Do not think for a moment that I would be so pretentious as to tell you how to make meatballs,” Pellegrino Artusi, author of a famous 1891 Italian cookbook, once said. “This is a dish that everyone knows how to make, including absolute donkeys.”

Mancini learned how to make meatballs from his grandmother, who lived with Mancini’s parents and his two brothers and sister in a three-story home in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Grandma Anna Mancini, who came to this country in 1921, ruled over the kitchen.

“She was always happy, never stern,” Mancini recalled. “She had the toughest job — cooking for everyone.”

Grandma taught him how to make the meatballs, and would send him on errands: to the pork store, to the pasta store, to the bakery.

“I really concentrated on what she was doing when she was cooking,” he said. “I knew her meatballs and sauce.”

Anna Mancini died in 1977. When it came time for Mancini to switch career gears in a garment-industry downturn, meatballs seemed a logical choice as any.

He started selling his meatballs, based on his grandmother’s recipe, at Eden Marketplace, a gourmet specialty food store in South Orange. He partnered with neighbors Carl Wolf and Matt Brown, who are now CEO and president, respectively, of MamaMancini’s LLC.

Mancini’s breakthrough meatball moment came in April 2009, when he appeared on “The Martha Stewart Show.” “I thought I would be the guy at the end (of the show),” he said. “I was the first guy and I was on a half hour.”

Sales jumped, pending deals suddenly were consummated, and the meatball man was on his way. The meatballs, available in beef and turkey versions, are made in an East Rutherford plant, and are packaged with a Sunday sauce. The beef meatballs are made with breadcrumbs, Locatelli romano cheese, whole eggs, onion, parsley, salt and pepper, while the Sunday sauce is made with Italian plum tomatoes, onion, olive oil, garlic, bay leaves, salt and pepper.

MamaMancini’s meatballs can now be found in 4,000 stores nationwide, including Garden of Eden Gourmet stores, Whole Foods, ShopRite, Waldbaum’s, Publix and others. Mancini even has his own hot bar at the Eden Marketplace, with the two kinds of meatballs, plus pasta, vegetable and other dishes.

The Sunday sauce and a marinara sauce will soon be available in bottles on store shelves. A spicy meatball is on the horizon. Life is good for the meatball man.

Food trends may come and go, but Mancini believes he’s more than a flash in the pan.

“I see this going on forever,” he said confidently.

Feb 07, 2011

MamaMancini’s Is ‘On A Roll’

MamaMancini’s, a South Orange, N.J.-based gourmet meatball company launched in 2007, is rolling to new growth territories with a projected 300 percent sales growth from last year from a cluster of new retail accounts.

Derived from the original family recipe of founder Daniel Mancini’s Brooklyn grandmother, the meatball brand is sold fresh in supermarket delis and hot bars, as well as in the frozen section.

Over the last six months, a number of new retailers have signed on to carry the product, marking many brand new markets for MamaMancini’s, including Publix, Giant Eagle, Brookshire’s, Giant Food Stores, Key Food, Mars Supermarket, Harris Teeter, and Big Y World Class Markets.

“Our healthy expansion and popularity has been confirmation that people want simple, delicious ways to bring their families together for dinner,” said Carl Wolf, co-founder of the company. “We’re especially proud of this rapid retail growth and look forward to making our meatballs available everywhere.”

In other developing brand extensions, MamaMancini’s has expanded its product line in the Southeastern specialty food store The Fresh Market, introducing a fresh meatball sub and sausage and peppers entree.

Celebrity chefs and A-list foodies are having a ball with the classic comfort food.

MARTHA STEWART> has talked up chef Daniel Mancini’s frozen meatballs available at supermarkets nationwide or at mamamancinis.com.

Editor’s Notebook: On Mama Mancini’s Menu
Tasting from the new buffet at Eden Gourmet
By Marcia Worth | Email the author | 5:40am

Cold weather calls for hearty fare, just like Mama used to make. Not my mama, nor yours, perhaps, but Mama Mancini, the namesake and inspiration for Daniel Mancini’s line of Italian foods.

As South Orange’s Mancini celebrates the surprising success of Mama Mancini’s meatballs, based on an old family recipe, he has added entrees to the dinner table.  The hot food buffet at Eden Gourmet now boasts a selection of Mama Mancini’s finest, ready to eat at the seats along the window or to take home.

MamaMancini's Kitchen at Eden Gourmet

As Mancini guest-bartended at Above on a recent Tuesday, in celebration of his expanded line of foods, Patch taste-tested a few of the foods available.

It doesn’t take a culinary expert to recognize that Mama Mancini’s entrees are labor-intensive foods.  Stuffed shells, meatballs, pasta and peas, sausage and peppers are projects for the home cook, fine for a leisurely weekend, but harder on a night when we’re digging out flashlights and finding the shovels for the next blizzard.

The sausage and peppers were especially satisfying, a nice combination of savory meat and sweet peppers. Served with linguine, also on the hot bar, this is a nice lunch or a satisfying dinner. Carefully selecting stuffed shells from the hot bar, I paired that with broccoli rabe. The contrast of colors and textures made for a beautiful presentation. The acidic broccoli rabe was balanced by the smooth cheese inside the shells. Finally, who could go wrong with pasta and peas in a cheese sauce?

Just beyond the hot bar, Italian bread is there for the taking. Likewise, the traditional salad bar offers marinated, grilled vegetables and Caesar salad to round a meal.  Not that anyone I care to name would do this, but it would be possible to put a fine meal on the table – salad, bread, main dish and a vegetable – in only minutes and to pass it off as one’s own.  If guests are skeptical, tell them truthfully:  “Mama cooked tonight.”

Next Best Thing to Homemade
By Carolyn Maynard-Parisi | Wednesday, Jan 12, 2011 2:30pm

New York magazine, in its recent “Where to Eat” issue, blithely dismissed meatballs as “the latest faux-comfort-food fad (that) has mercifully fallen flat.” Tell that to the lively, hungry crowd at Above Restaurant in South Orange last night. They came to celebrate the meatball – in particular, the debut of MamaMancini’s Kitchen, a hot meatball bar at Eden Marketplace.

Daniel Mancini (pictured left to right here Carl Wolf, Matthew Brown, Daniel Mancini, Paul Bartick), head meatball whisperer and South Orange resident, launched MamaMancini’s a few years ago. Armed with his grandmother’s famous recipe, he started selling frozen meatballs online and at grocery stores across the country.

Eden Marketplace was one of the first places to carry them, and they proved so popular that the company chose Eden to be the spot of its first flagship hot meatball bar. Meatballs in Sunday Sauce, Turkey Meatballs, and Sausage with Peppers and Onions are some of the dishes available.

Last night’s event was Mancini’s way of showing some love for his hometown – and what better way than by feeding them meatballs? So, you might ask: how are the meatballs? Let me start by saying I am not easy to please when it comes to certain iconic foods from my culture. Growing up in an Italian-American household, I naturally believe that I make the best meatballs and Sunday gravy – as my mother and grandmothers did before me.

Daniel Mancini agrees. “I always say, our meatballs are the second best you’ve ever had.” But I tried Mama Mancini’s meatballs with an open mind. And you know what? They are very, very good. The turkey and the spicy versions were quite fine, but I was really impressed with the classic beef meatballs in Sunday sauce. They are surprisingly tender (tough, overworked meatballs make me mad) and gently suffused with – not overpowered by – onion and cheese.

It seems as though Mancini is on to something. MamaMancini’s is the fastest growing meatball company in the country, Mancini has appeared on the Today Show and the Martha Stewart Show, and even Rachael Ray is a fan. Take that, New York magazine!

Want to know the secret to MamaMancini’s meatballs and Sunday sauce? Watch the video.

By Laura Griffin January 10,2011

Meatballs Galore

MamaMancini’s debuts hot bar at Eden Gourmet, hosts meatball event at Above

Mama Mancini’s Meatballs: MyFoxNY.com
Published : Tuesday, 28 Dec 2010, 8:13 PM EST

Several years ago, Daniel Mancini decided it was time for a change. So he ditched his day job and began making and selling is grandmother’s meatballs. It was the same recipe he’d learned how to make from Anna Mancini when he was 15. Now his Mama Mancini’s Meatballs are sold in supermarkets across the country.

MAMA MANCINI’S MEATBALLS

Makes about 1-1/2 dozen

FOR THE SAUCE
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
1/4 cup coarsely chopped onion
2 cloves garlic, coarsely chopped
4 (28-ounce) cans whole peeled plum tomatoes
2 bay leaves
1/2 teaspoon coarse salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground pepper

FOR THE MEATBALLS
2 pounds ground beef chuck
1/2 cup freshly grated Romano cheese, plus more for serving
1 cup dried plain breadcrumbs
1/4 cup finely chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley leaves
1/4 cup finely chopped onion
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon coarse salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
1/4 cup olive oil, for frying
1 pound cooked spaghetti, for serving

Make the sauce: Heat olive oil in large saucepan over medium heat. Add onion and garlic and cook, stirring, until translucent. Using your hands, crush tomatoes and add to saucepan, along with their juices; stir to combine. Add bay leaves, salt, and pepper. Cover, bring to a boil, and immediately reduce to a simmer.

Make the meatballs: Place beef, cheese, breadcrumbs, parsley, onion, eggs, salt, and pepper in a large bowl. Gently mix together by hand to combine. Wet hands with cold water and roll meat mixture into 1-3/4-inch balls.

Heat olive oil in a large nonstick skillet over medium heat. Working in batches if necessary, place meatballs in skillet. Cook until browned on all sides, but not cooked through. Transfer meatballs to a paper towel-lined baking sheet to drain.

Transfer meatballs to sauce and gently stir from the bottom up to coat with sauce. Cover and let simmer for 30 minutes. Uncover and reduce heat. Continue cooking, stirring every 15 minutes, for 3 hours more. Serve with spaghetti, sprinkled with more cheese, if desired.