Meat – Benefits of boiling meatballs before frying them

You might consider a different approach - don't fry them. Drop them (carefully) into a pot of boiling sauce instead. They come out perfectly even, very tender, and more flavourful than frying. Usually the sauce we're talking about is a sweet tomato-based sauce, but it could be anything that's reasonably thick (so that the meatballs don't just fall straight to the bottom).

This sounds counterintuitive to a lot of people - you might think it would be more likely to fall apart this way, but in practice it sets almost immediately because it's suspended and has a much more even heat distribution. When frying, all of the heat comes from the bottom; it's the combination of pressure and weight (gravity) that makes it fall apart.

Perhaps you want the rougher, browned texture of pan-fried meatballs, and that's fine; but I thought I would mention this anyway because I can distinctly remember dozens of guests having come to the family home (this is a family recipe, after all) asking "how are you able to make the meatballs like that?" So if you have a chance, just give it a try; you might be pleasantly surprised.

Really, this is just to even out cooking times for vegetables that don't have a surface area to volume ratio consistent with the other things you're stir-frying. If you were to shred those green beans, as is sometimes done, you could put them in at the same time as raw, julienned carrots, and they would finish at the same time.

If you put them in whole, you'll end up with beans that are burned on the outside and raw on the inside, as there's not enough time for the heat to penetrate to the center of the bean before the outside burns. Or, if you fry at a lower heat, you could get the beans cooked, but would have to add the carrots later (which means a lower temperature, too, since the beans are dragging heat out of your pan) in order to have them not turn to mush.