American Improvements on Swedish Meatballs

[akirlu]

I like Swedish meatballs, but they're kind of a pain in the butt to make. Lately, though, I've been picking up a few little tricks to make them less trouble, and a lot more worthwhile. I guess sometimes you have to move to America to improve on a Swedish recipe.

The main trick -- the one that makes the end result so much more worth it -- I learned from Alton Brown: add a third meat. Lamb, that is. Normally Swedish meatballs are made with a half-and-half mixture of ground pork and ground beef. If you add ground lamb to the traditional combo, the resulting meatballs are a revelation. The lamb somehow adds meatiness and depth to the flavor without making the end result overtly lamb-y. I'm now speculating whether lamb meat includes more of the umami amino acid than other meats because it's just the savory, brothy, meaty goodness that characterizes umami that you get when you add the lamb. Anyway, it's just marvelous. I don't normally go into rhapsodies about my own cooking, even when it's good, but this added lamburger business makes for incredibly tasty meatballs.

The other two tricks are mostly about making the physical process of making all those itty bitty balls of meat less taxing. The two things I dislike most about making meatballs are the iceblock fingers from mixing meats, and sheer, mind-numbing tedium. My fridge keeps meat cold enough that hand-mixing the meats together (which is what all the recipes call for) leaves my hands so cold I have to wash them repeatedly in very hot water just to warm them up again. And while there's a certain zen pleasure in rolling the meat into small, evenly-sized balls, it gets a bit same-y after three or four dozen. The probably-obvious solution to the first: mix up the meat in the KitchenAid mixer. Works brilliantly. It's fast, produces an even distribution and best of all, no frozen fingers. As for rolling out individual balls, it's Alton Brown to the rescue again: use a tool. A 1" mechanical ice cream scoop produces nice, uniformly sized proto-balls that just have to be lightly swished into shape between your palms and dropped on the prep plate. No muss, no fuss.

Updated Swedish Meatballs:

1 lb ground pork
1 lb ground beef
1 lb ground lamb
1 egg
1/4 cup bread crumbs
1 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp white pepper
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp Mrs. Dash


Place cast iron fry pan on medium heat. Add just enough high-smoke-point oil to coat the bottom of the pan lightly. Plop all your ingredients into mixer and run on medium speed until homogeneity is achieved. *Use small ice cream scoop to dish out equally-sized balls of meat mixture, roll lightly, and put aside on a prep plate until a panful of balls have been made. Drop these one by one into your heated frying pan, shake pan to roll around, and go back to making more meatballs. Continue periodically to shake the pan to get the meatballs to brown evenly. Remove when the meatballs are cooked through, and add the next batch to the pan.

Repeat from * until all the meat mixture has been used up.

Goes nicely with mashed potatoes, plus leftover cranberry relish and haroset.

Comments

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

Cool recipe, one even I could tackle, but what's Mrs Dash?

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Ah, sorry -- it's a multi-herb spice. I usually use the Garlic & Herb version but there are several flavors. You could easily substitute small quantities of dried parsley, onion, and paprika, or whatever you like.

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

No doubt there are similar items over here which would mystify a Seattle resident. Marmite? Bovril? Bisto?

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Well, you could certainly try bunging in a bit of Bovril. I wouldn't bet against it being an interesting addition...

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Not that I was expecting to, but I've never found either a seasoning/sauce packaged mix, or a brand of frozen dinner, that anywhere near matches the Swedish meatballs I fondly remember from the Scandinavian or quasi-Scandinavian restaurants of the Seattle of yore. I may have to learn to make them myself, even though I'm the only one here who would eat them, and this is a helpful start. Next, the sauce?

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Have you tried the Stouffers Swedish Meatballs? I think they're really close to the places we went back when.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I have. Better than average of the kind, I think.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

The sauce is just cream gravy. Start with the fry grease/drippings from the meatballs and in the same pan you made the meatballs, over medium-low heat, add a goodish amount of flour. Call it 3-4 tablespoons. Whisk the flour into the drippings and heat until thick and bubbly -- as if you're making a roux, which is, essentially what you're doing. Add about a cup of cream, or, failing that, whole milk, to the roux, whisk together and heat until it thickens. With cream this will be more-or-less instantly, with milk it probably require heating until the milk actually boils for about a minute. I've seen recipes that use sour cream instead of cream for the gravy, and I bet buttermilk would work, too -- depends on whether you want that sour quality or not. Anyway, once the gravy thickens, add salt and pepper to taste and, if you're so inclined, a dash of sherry or port won't go amiss either.

(I should warn you that quantities here are all by guess and by gosh. I don't really use a recipe for gravy, it's all seat of the pants stuff.)

Or you can go have lunch at Ikea. Their meatballs aren't as good as mine but they're not bad.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Ikea sells lunch? I did not know that. (I have never been there.)

Target serves food, but from the look of their cafeteria and its menu, one would not want to eat there. Of course the merchandise is different from Ikea's as well.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Ikea has lingonberry relish with the meatballs! Unfortunately, our local one requires too much walking for me to get from the parking to the restaurant.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

If you have a disability parking placard, you should be able to park in the loading zone spaces, I would think. And if you ask the staff, I bet they would show you the short cut to the cafe. Most Ikea stores have several short-cuts through the store so that you can bypass the long wander through the various display sections, and it's very common for the first shortcut to go from the front entrance, past the kids' play area & restrooms, to the cafe.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Our Ikea is different. The loading zone is in the underground parking garage, and to get to the restaurant means going through a large elevator lobby in the parking garage, up the elevator, and then you're still not in the sales part of the store. You have another large lobby (no outside entrance -- just a lobby to the store) to go through and then the restaurant is just beyond the food store. I don't think there's any closer way to get there, and that's too far for me to walk these days. I can only walk about half a block now.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yes, Ikea stores follow the Swedish department store model of incorporating a moderately priced cafe in every store. The cafe has cafeteria-style service, and self-busing, but is usually an otherwise fairly airy and pleasant sit-down restaurant. Several of the food items are very traditionally Swedish cafe fare -- meatballs in gravy with mashed potatoes & lingonberries; poached salmon in dill sauce;, open-faced shrimp salad sandwiches; princess torte and massariner for desserts -- with some more obviously American-friendly items, especially for kids, including PBJ sandwiches, and hot dogs. The food is not brilliant, but pretty good, and the prices tend to be very reasonable. Our Ikea is proximate enough that we sometimes go for just a meal.

Availability varies, but I've seen some stores incorporate a smorgasbord or brunch buffet into their offerings. Nice for those who like getting a bit of various kinds of pickled herring or so.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

My family loves Ikea's meatballs and the sauce. I'm sure they aren't as good as yours, but we will never have yours to compare to, and Ikea's are reasonably priced and easy to fix!

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Oh, I do not mean to disparage Ikea as a source for quick, easy, tasty Swedish meatballs -- I often go that route myself, since Ikea is only some five miles away.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

One of the joys of living in Minneapolis is that Lund's/Byerly's and Ingebretsen's will both mix your meats for you, so you can buy them premixed and skip the freezing hands step. You have to check, because some places do add lamb, and some add veal, and some add neither.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Neat trick, that. I bet you can get yellow peas and potato sausage without a special trip to Ikea, too.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, yah. Cloudberries and knackebrod, too. I never grocery shop at Ikea.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yes, they're nice for getting uniform amounts of cookie dough doled out, also.

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

Oooh, cupcakes -- never thought of that, just cookies. I wonder what I could use for mini-cupcake pans.... Tools are good things.

[urlgirl.livejournal.com]

So in Romanian cuisine, whenever something calls for ground meat, we always mix in a little lamb. According to my grandmother, whom I asked once, this is because the lamb meat is a little fattier and a little more flavorful and "it holds everything together better." I don't eat red meat anymore, but when I did and I made Swedish meatballs, I always added in some lamb. Thanks for the vicarious treat :)

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'm coming to realize that part of what makes the Gyros-2-go gyro meat so amazingly tasty is the quality of their lamb.