Made Swedish Meatballs

[conuly]

I love Swedish Meatballs, and making my own is much better than the frozen kind, but wow, what a production. The recipe is simple enough, but so much moving stuff in and out of the food processor. Fresh breadcrumbs, not dried. Grind the onions, then grind the meat some more to make it really really pasty, which I have to do in batches because the machine isn't that big. Roll out lots of tiny meatballs. WASH THE DAMN FOOD PROCESSOR. It's such a hassle. (Luckily for me, I had a band-aid on my thumb, so I was able to impose on Ana and ask them to do the meatball rolling. I could've done it faster due to practice, but I'm sure not complaining.)

Today my sauce wouldn't thicken and wouldn't thicken, and I made more roux and it still didn't thicken, so I melted some more butter still and when I went to the pantry to get more flour - it thickened! Like glue! Tasty glue, but still. After all that bother I decided I'd just live with thick sauce.

There is a reason I only make this once or twice a year. Friday is my birthday, and I sent Jenn to Trader Joe's to get me lemon curd (and also copious amounts of butter, because it's $1.50 cheaper there than the current price at my supermarket, and that adds up fast) and tomorrow I'll make cake, but today I had my birthday Swedish Meatballs. (I was going to have barbecue pork in the slow cooker, but I forgot to put it in early enough. My backup was buttermilk brined pork chops, but I forgot to brine them. I normally would make split peas in this situation, but I used up the last of the split peas this afternoon making soup for lunch. Happy birthday to me!)

Anyway, the recipe I have in the cookbook calls for what seems like a very small amount of spice given the amount of meat. When I went checking this out on the internet, it seemed like no two recipes call for exactly the same spices! I have no idea how they do this in Sweden, but mostly I just mix and match as I see fit on any given day. And I double it from what it says in my book. My book is clearly wrong.

Poll #23339 Swedish Meatballs

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 25

View Respondents

Which spices (in small quantities) should go in either the meatballs or the sauce?

View Answers

Allspice
13 (54.2%)

Black pepper
18 (75.0%)

Cardamon
10 (41.7%)

Cloves
8 (33.3%)

Ginger
7 (29.2%)

Mace
1 (4.2%)

Nutmeg
15 (62.5%)

Other
6 (25.0%)

Parsley?

View Answers

Yes
18 (78.3%)

No
5 (21.7%)

Lingonberry jam?

View Answers

Yes
11 (45.8%)

No
10 (41.7%)

Some other jam I can more readily get
3 (12.5%)

Comments

[wendelah1]

White pepper, if possible, rather than black. Don't ask why. Recipe's from Food 52.

[conuly]

I'm asking why.

[redbird]

I said yes to ginger, but that's because I'll put ginger in just about anything; I'm not sure whether it belongs here.

[wendelah1]

Because...that's what my recipe says?

Okay, well. According to Chowhound, white pepper tastes hotter but also less complex. Sounds about right. Maybe it would let the other spice notes be more prominent. Just a guess, really.

Black pepper is fine.

[conuly]

Oh, I thought you had some reason that you just didn't want to spell out. Or that you did want to spell out, but only after being asked.

Sometimes white pepper is put in recipes because the food it's on is white and black pepper on the light whatever is considered unsightly.

[conuly]

Fair.

[conuly]

Nutmeg is always a good choice.

[oloriel]

My "other" is cinnamon. Just a small touch of cinnamon. It's just a prerequisite with minced meat! And some paprika (amount depending on your personal preferences). It may not be in the original recipe, but that's OK, this isn't the 19th century. I'm fairly sure you can get spices in Sweden these days. XD

[scripsi]

Being Swedish I must say I never found meatballs difficult. But then my recipe (coming from a great-grandmother) says nothing about food processors... :)

[cactuswatcher]

WASH THE DAMN FOOD PROCESSOR

Yeah, the one thing that irks me about some cooking shows on TV is when the chef uses every mixing bowl, pot, pan and gadget in the kitchen for one dish, then magically has it all clean again for something else that's supposed to go with the first dish later in the same episode. I can buy all the gadgets, but I can't afford an army of helpers to clean up after me! ... "You can make this at home!" Yeah, but can I borrow your restaurant staff to clean up the food processor, garlic press and whatever as we go?

[grammarwoman]

Happy early birthday! Hope the prep leads to a lovely day. :)

[conuly]

Cinnamon is something that did not come up in any internet searches thus far!

Nor paprika, though I did consider adding it.

What does come up, always with a disclaimer that it's "not traditional", is a single clove of garlic. Because garlic.

I'm fairly sure you can get spices in Sweden these days.

I'm fairly sure you could get spices in Sweden since, like, the Crusades. Isn't that why there were the Crusades? But not paprika for the same reason there were no potatoes in Sweden during that time.

[conuly]

It's not a difficult recipe, it's just time consuming and so much washing of things.

[conuly]

I'd use my food processor so much more if I never had to wash it, I can tell you that.

[conuly]

What a sweet looking lemon hedgehog!

[zesty_pinto]

Hah, when you said handmade, I didn't think you meant every step short of visiting an abattoir.

I have a meat grinder for the KitchenAid and while it doesn't get much use, when it does I make sure it gets used for awhile, mostly because I hate cleaning that damn thing as well. I tried dishwashing it at first and all I did was cover the thing in smut because I didn't read.

In terms of homemade recipes like this, I feel like a lot of it is going to be by ear, not unlike meals like majdra or biryani which I've found to vary wildly.

I'd offer my own two cents on the recipe, but that would mean I actually did it, hah! It's been IKEA over here for the most part when the opportunity comes.

[conuly]

1. What steps did you think I'd skip?
2. Don't forget I have to grind the spices too.

[zesty_pinto]

1. Grinding your own meat is a big one. I don't know that many people who have their own meat grinder. I was impressed with myself when I got that extension, myself.

Did you roast the spices too?

[oloriel]

Nah, the crusades were for fundamentalist religious reasons. The spices thing was colonialism. :P

Well, of course you could get some spices in Sweden since (at the very least) the Middle Ages, BUT they were prohibitively expensive and thus used very carefully except by the very rich, blah de blah. But then, much later, came Napoleon and the Continental System, and spices became actually more difficult to get than after the Crusades. And recipes that you follow today are much more likely to come from the 19th century (or later, of course) than from the time of the crusades.

[conuly]

Ah, I see your problem. No, the meat is ground when I bought it, it's just that the recipe wants it much more finely done than I can get at the store, so into the FP it goes.

[bibliofile]

(HBD!)

[conuly]

?

[conuly]

Oh - happy birthday? Thanks!

[grammarwoman]

:) It is my standard birthday greeting icon, made originally for a friend who had a nickname of Lemons.

[conuly]

How fortuitous!