Hasta La Ideas

All Unitasker Wednesday posts are jokes — we don’t want you to buy these items, we want you to laugh at their ridiculousness. Enjoy!

My husband comes from a large Italian family, and when we were first married I decided to learn to make pasta, marinara, and meatballs from scratch. When forming meatballs, I scooped the meat out of the bowl with a soup spoon and then used my hands to roll the meat into a smooth ball. This is the same way I made cookies, so it wasn’t a difficult skill I had to master. Scoop, roll, done.

Little did I know at the time, but there was a kitchen gadget especially for the purpose of making meatballs. The Meatballer:

To be fair, the Meatballer could also be used on cookie dough or for really big melon balls. However, so can a soup spoon. A soup spoon that already lives in your kitchen drawer. Or, if you don’t like spoons, I’m sure your ice cream scoop could work in a pinch (if you own one of those). The reason this doodad seems especially unitaskery to me is because it can’t be easy to cleanly release the meat. Unless you’re greasing the Meatballer between each use (which doesn’t sound appetizing), meat bits are going to stick to it. The great thing about using a spoon is that you can use your fingers to scrape off the meat that sticks to the spoon. There doesn’t seem to be any comparative advantage to using and owning the Meatballer over a spoon.

This device is less expensive than most of the unitaskers we feature. So, maybe throw in a specialty Perfect Meatball Pan Set to raise the price tag!

Thanks go to reader Liz for introducing us to the Meatballer and for getting the lyrics to Skee-Lo’s “I Wish” stuck in my head: I wish I was a little bit taller, I wish I was a (meat)baller, I wish …

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