Home of the Snarkmaiden

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.

In comments betnoir asks about a recipe for glögg -- a traditional Swedish drink in the Yuletide. As I mentioned to her, easiest is to just buy a bottle of mix from Ikea -- or Cost Plus, for that matter. But doing it yourself is about equally trivial. It's just mulled wine. Here's approximately what I learned at my mother's knee.

1 jug cheap red plonk of your choice - burgundy or port, usually
2-4 sticks cinnamon
10-20 whole cloves
5-8 whole cardomom kernels
1 cup sugar
a handful of raisins
6 blanched almonds
1/2 each thinly sliced lemon, lime, and orange

Pour the wine in a large cookpot, add the sugar, spices, raisins, citrus, and nuts and heat until steaming, stirring periodically. Heat at steam point for 5-15 minutes to let spices steep. Serve in glass mugs.

As with most other Swedish recipes I know, there are oodles of variants. Googling, I see that lots of recipes include between a 1/4 cup to a full liter of plain vodka. Our family never added vodka, but depending on how much you want to put your guests on their butts, you can add that much vodka. Lots of the recipes I see use just citrus peel rather than whole slices, but I think the slices look pretty floating in the wine, and besides It's How My Mother Did It. You can vary the amount of sugar to taste, and can either steep the spices in vodka overnight and discard the spices and just use the vodka, or make a spiced simple sugar syrup and then add the wine, vodka, and fruit at the end. I see at least one recipe including a bit of ginger. And you can play with how many or few citrus types you use.

But the basic core is this: red wine, Christmas spices, raisins, sugar, and citrus, mixed together and heated 'til steaming. The rest is endless variation to suit your tastes and larder.