How to make sublime meatballs; how NOT to make awful dry ones; meatballs for every day of the week

Clare

2 years ago

“The thrill of the meatball is that it can be what you fancy”
Rosanna Dodds, The Financial Times August 2024

Executive Meatball Summary (the complete low-down is explained in more detail below):

Ensure they are juicy by:
- Using mince with a reasonable amount of fat
- Incorporating some cheese… nothing too hard and dry
- use fresh breadcrumbs (made from stale bread), maybe soaked in milk, rather than panko
- Serving with or in lots of wonderful sauce
- Allowing them to rest
Ensure they’re tasty by:
- Including alliums: onion, shallot, garlic, chives, leeks…
- Including a touch of sweetness by incorporating dried fruit, or serving with a fruit jelly or chutney
Stop them falling apart by:
- Remembering to include an egg
- Allowing them to rest before serving
Give them a caramelised crunchy outside and hang on to your sanity at the same time by:
- Frying first, turning only once, then cooking through in a low oven for ten minutes or so afterwards

The key to juicy and moist meatballs

The one cardinal rule when making meatballs is to ensure they are good and moist. There are key steps to take:

Don’t use lean meat. Any meat you use should, ideally, be 20% fat.
Include some sort of soft cheese. This could be ricotta, mascarpone, crème fraîche, mozzarella…I sometimes include a little grated pecorino, but no dry, sawdusty packeted parmesan. I think including the cheese in the meatball mix keeps them moist, but you can also tear up burrata (or, less successfully as it’s not so creamy, mozzarella) and adds it to the surrounding tomato sauce.
Use breadcrumbs made from stale bread rather than the dry Panko type. Soak in milk, or add a bit of milk to the mix.
Make sure you have a damn good sauce, and plenty of it.
Make sure any accompaniments you serve with the meatballs have a sauce too – a slurpy dressing; a yoghurty-tahini coating….or a yoghurt-hummusy one…or a tomato one
… and don’t forget to deglaze the pan (ideally with some form of alcohol) and include that juice as well
Some people add moisture by braising their meatballs in the accompanying sauce for a short while (this works especially well with the more-liquid tomato sauce); or even adding them to soup.

Other guidelines: the alliums; a touch of sweetness; the imperative egg

Include some sort of chopped alliums: any colour onions, spring onions, leeks, garlic, shallots, banana shallots, chives. Some masochistic types actually grate their alliums. Others fry and serve chopped alliums separately, but this is a mistake because the alliums are another source of juiciness in the meatballs.
Include a touch of sweetness – the easiest way to do this is with raisins, dried sour cherries, dried cranberries, dried apricots, dried barberries, prunes ( à la Alice Delcourt) included in the meatball mix. An alternative approach is to serve them with cranberry or crab apple jelly; or lingonberry jam; apple sauce; or tomato chutney… you get the picture… Another alternative, if you are serving the meatballs with rice or couscous is to include the dried fruit (and maybe some nuts for texture) in the rice mix.
Don’t leave out the egg. Some people omit it. Why? It helps to stop the meatballs from falling apart…it’s no extra work…there’s usually one kicking around somewhere in the kitchen. Some people just use the yolk. Again, why? Who wants just one egg white lurking lonelily in the back of the fridge?
Just before serving leave the meatballs to rest for a few minutes. This also helps to stop them falling apart. It allows the flavour to develop and helps retain the juiciness.

Include a touch of sweetness with dried fruit, fruit jellies, chutneys… or some lingonberry jam

How to cook them

Some people drop them into a hot (temperature) sauce – which does help prevent them falling apart.
Other people (India Knight’s method) simply put them under the grill – no turning required. BUT a) you need to watch them like a hawk and you can’t get anything else done while you are doing that, and b) if you have an AGA you might not have a separate grill (or you’re like me, and you need to bend double to use it.).
My method is to 1) pre-heat your oven to 160°C. 2) Fry the meatballs (turning once, with care) with a little hot oil in a pan which you can move to the oven. 3) Once caramelised and crispy on two ‘sides’, move to the oven for ten or so minutes to cook them through. This is a) the best way of getting them a bit crispy on the outside, and b) it gives you ten minutes in which to make the sauce, or go and have a bath.

How to achieve the crispy exterior

You can (but it’s not essential) coat them either in a veil of flour; or in some extra breadcrumbs… and then…
Fry in a little hot oil as suggested in the section above.

You can achieve a bit of extra crispiness by rolling in breadcrumbs

The accompanying carbs

Americans famously serve their meatballs with spaghetti.
You can cook meatballs together with small pasta (orzo, kritharaki, malloreddus) in tomato sauce. Tear in burrata.
Alice Delcourt, brought up in the USA, now running Erba Brusca in Milan, serves hers with couscous.
In the middle east they often fill pitta with meatballs, shredded lettuce, and a yoghurt and tahini sauce.
Italians also often use bread, it could be hunks of fresh bread, or toasted crostini.
The Danes also go for bread. They serve their meatballs with rugbord (Danish rye bread).
The far eastern versions go well with rice or noodles
The Scandinavian type go well with rösti, or fried potatoes. In IKEA they’re served with lingonberry jam and mashed potatoes.
Saucy Dressings’ favourite way is to serve them with wild rice.
Paul Ainsworth (in his book Love of Food) serves his inside a panuozzo, a kind of baguette made out of pizza dough
German frikadellen go well with creamy dauphinois potatoes, although more traditionally they are served with boiled potatoes.

“‘We recommend that you don’t forget to serve the meatballs with good homemade bread for the final ‘scarpetta’, an essential custom for this dish!’
Recommendation made on the Italian Giallo Zafferano website. The ‘scarpetta’ is the act of mopping up delicious juices with a hunk of bread

“My only problem with them was that because they’re put together with rice, I didn’t want to serve rice with them.

Shahrzad: You usually serve them with bread.

Jila: Yes, they’re much nicer with bread. You can of course use potatoes as well, but in Iran we do it with bread.”
quote from an interview with Iranian cooks, Jila Dana-Haeri and Shahrzad Ghorashian, on the Five Books website

Other, less-carb-heavy, things to serve with meatballs

Green salad with a slurpy, or a mayonnaisy, or German dressing
Especially good with lamb meatballs is a green salad with raw, finely sliced (use a potato peeler) courgette, raisins, and feta
Good with pork meatballs is a green salad with raisins and pickled apple
Swedish meatballs might have a yoghurty cucumber and dill salad served with them
Braised greens go well
Braised red cabbage with apple and cranberry jelly goes well
So does buttered cabbage with toasted and crushed caraway seeds and crispy onion
Or white cabbage with a creamy sauce
Or you can add small cauliflower florets to the pan with the meatballs before you put them in the oven
Try aubergines slathered in a yoghurt sauce
Tomato salad with mayo

Ringing the changes.. meatballs don’t have to be ‘meat’balls

The main ingredient in meatballs is ….. meat! Usually… I like to use a mix of pork and beef.
Paradoxically, you can make non-red-meat meatballs using:
- Aubergine
- Zucchini
- Spinach and ricotta
- Cannellini beans
- Chicken…
  - try Julius Robert’s chicken and ricotta meatballs in broth: with orzo, crème fraîche and dill, from his book, The Farm Table.
  - India Knight puts a couple of boneless, but skin on, chicken breasts in food processor until coarsely ground. Then she adds a couple of handfuls of panko breadcrumbs (I would use fresh ones made from stale bread), lemon zest, herbs, salt and pepper, pulse again and fry. This is enough for four people when served in buns together with a hearty salad.
  - Sophie Wyburd (see Tucking In) relates that chicken meatballs “pair perfectly with a more summery palette of green pesto
- Fish: Rachel Roddy makes white fish ‘meat’balls and serves them with tomato sauce. Go here for the recipe.

Therapeutic aspects of meatballs – two quotes which say it all

“When inspiration fails to strike, there’s always mince – the equivalent of the reliable boyfriend in the sensible jumper.”
India Knight, The Sunday Times, April 2023

“What do you do after a bad day? I go home and make meatballs”
Rosanna Dodds, The Financial Times, August 2024

The international meatball

Italian meatballs (polpette) use beef; parmesan or grana padano; oregano and parsley…maybe basil
although Roman meatballs use a mix of beef, pork, and veal; a mix of pecorino and parmesan; and parsley. Usually Italian meatballs come with a tomato sauce.
Spanish meatballs (albóndigas) also get served with a tomato sauce, often including saffron.
Middle eastern meatballs (köfte in Turkey; kibbeh in The Lebanon) use lamb; the meat is seasoned with cinnamon, coriander or cumin… also parsley. Before serving they are sprinkled with lemon juice. They are often served with a yoghurt and tahini sauce.
the Persian type (koofteh) which are giant, use split peas and rice instead of bread to bulk out and contain chopped prunes, dates, or dried barberries hiding within.
Try making a sort of far eastern version with pork; for the alliums use spring onion; add ginger and soy sauce; a touch of sake.
Scandinavian meatballs (köttbullar, best sampled at IKEA, where they are excellent) will have a mustardy sauce or a brown gravy (béchamel made with meat stock and a dash of soy sauce) and could contain dried lingonberries or more often, be served with lingonberry jam. They’re often made with pork, although the further north you go in Sweden the less pork you will find in the meatballs!
German meatballs (Frikadellen) are traditionally made with mace and cardamom.

Japanese meatballs are going to include spring onions, soy sauce, and ginger.

The original meatball

OK – so where did the concept of the meatball come from in the beginning? It seems likely that they were first made in Persia, which had a more advanced cuisine than most of Europe.

Good to know

The meatballs (pre-cooking) and most of the sauces freeze well so it’s worth making a large batch and freezing.
Don’t try to cook for more than four people, because you won’t fit more than 24 meatballs in the frying pan.