Meatballs

[Mike Nolan]

This is a pretty generic meatball recipe, it can be baked, fried or cooked in tomato sauce.

The seasonings are the ones I use when cooking them in tomato sauce, for Swedish meatballs I'd probably use different herbs, like nutmeg.

1 small onion, finely diced
2 tablespoons butter
1 pound ground beef (I usually use 80 or 85% lean)
2 eggs
1/2 cup old fashioned rolled oats
1-2 tablespoons milk
salt
pepper
1/4 teaspoon basil
1/4 teaspoon thyme

Sautee the onions in the butter and allow to cool. Mix all the ingredients thoroughly and shape into meatballs.

Yield: 28 meatballs 1 1/4" in diameter

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[NancyG]

My Swedish descent mother often made Swedish meatballs. The signature flavoring was allspice. She never used nutmeg, though I have seen it in some recipes. And never used garlic in anything, including meatballs.

[Mike Nolan]

My grandmother was German, she used a lot of ground cloves when cooking meats. I find cloves can be overpowering, more so than nutmeg or allspice.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Anyone use different meats? At the meat department people would order equal weights of ground beef or veal, pork, and lamb, I think. It was always late Saturday afternoons. The store used to actually sell a meatball mix of the three meats but stopped because of cross contamination concerns.

[Mike Nolan]

Personally, I like a combination of beef and lamb, but my wife doesn't care for lamb. I've used beef and pork, it tends to get a bit too greasy for our taste. I've tried various fat levels of ground beef, from 70% lean all the way up to 93%, 80 to 85% seems to make the best meatballs.

I'm not sure what the point is to ground veal, to me the whole point to cooking with veal is that because the animal was still young it hasn't developed the heavy muscle fibers found in fully grown beef, so it is is very tender. But when you grind up meat, that pretty much takes care of the tougher muscle fibers.

[Italiancook]

My mother-in-law used ground veal and ground pork in her Italian meatballs. I can't tell you what the point of the veal was, but they were delicious.

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