Mmm, meatloaf!

Every country has a dish with a thousand variations, one where every household's version is a little different. In India, it's curry. In Italy, it's pasta sauce. And in America, it's meatloaf.

The humble meatloaf is often taken for granted. The butt of jokes, the stuff of childhood nightmares. I submit to you the theory that there is a lot of bad meatloaf, and if you dislike meatloaf, you may simply be suffering from a childhood exposure to bad meatloaf.

The main thing that makes a bad meatloaf is dryness. I myself perpetrated a lot of dry meatloaves when I first started cooking from scratch, about ten years ago. For the longest time I didn't realize that meatloaf should be cooked in a loaf pan. Instead, I lumped it up in the middle of a 9x13 pan.

The problem is that when you bake meatloaf, a lot of moisture comes out. Not just fat from the meat, but also juice from the sauce you added (ketchup, barbecue sauce, tomato paste, what have you). You might think this would be good, make that meatloaf more healthy, but its main result is to leave you with a very dry loaf.

Instead, bake your meatloaf in a loaf pan. When it has finished cooking, pour off some - but not all - of the grease. Let it sit for 10 minutes to rest and reabsorb some moisture.

Regardless of which recipe you use, I have found that it helps to mix up the meatloaf, then pop it into the fridge for about half an hour before baking. This gives the flavors a chance to bloom and mingle before you start cooking, and results in a more flavorful meatloaf.

Here are some of my favorite meatloaf recipes:

• Basic meatloaf 
• Low-carb meatloaf (great for those of us on a low-carb diet, very tasty!)
• Glazed meatloaf (with a sweet-and-sour glaze)
• Ranch meatloaf (who doesn't love ranch dressing?)

Image courtesy Flickr/su-lin