Yes, they will stay in spaghetti sauce. If you store them for a few days and reheat, they may crumble a little bit but they should stay together pretty well.

You can easily make this into a vegan recipe – simply substitute the egg with a chia or flax seed egg and replace the parmesan with either vegan parmesan or nutritional yeast! To make a chia egg, combine 1 tablespoon of chia seeds with 3 tablespoons of water and let it sit for 5 minutes until it becomes a gel. Do the same thing with flax meal and water to make a flax egg. If you’re using nutritional yeast instead of parmesan, I would recommend adding half the amount used in the original recipe.

Thank you so much for the detailed review! I’m so glad the canned lentils worked for you. That makes sense that you need to dry them out a bit more. An extra egg or more breadcrumbs is the perfect solution!

Hi there! I tried this recipe today with canned lentils – they were fantastic! Hubby & baby loved them (although my toddler refused to try them – but in your defense he doesn’t like meatballs or meat patties either so it was a gamble)! Hubby even said, as you mentioned, that they tasted just like the real thing.

My only tip for anyone using the canned lentils is either let them dry out a bit in the colander after rinsing them or add an extra egg (which I did) as mine were so wet they were falling apart. I didn’t try adding more crumbs simply as I had run out, but next time will try this as well.

I got 24 ‘meat’balls out of this recipe.

Yes, but use 2 1/2 cups of canned lentils instead of the 1 cup of dry. Also, they make be canned with salt, so rinse them under running water to remove the excess salt. Let me know how they come out!

It makes about 12 meatballs, and the serving size is 2-3.