Swedish Meatballs with Mushroom Gravy

hey everyone it's kenji i'm making some meatballs with mushroom cream sauce actually there's not gonna be any cream in it but it's a mushroom sauce um so the first thing i'm gonna do um this is sort of loosely based on this meatball recipe from my book um the food lab but i'm going to make it a little bit different because i don't have all the ingredients in there but the first thing i'm going to do i'm going to start with about a quarter cup of milk you could use buttermilk you could use cream you could also use chicken stock something like that quarter cup of milk and then here's the real trick a little bit of gelatin so we're gonna add about a quarter ounce of gelatin which is i don't know a few teaspoons and we're gonna let that sit on top of the milk milk and hydrate and what this gelatin does is that when you incorporate this stuff into your meatballs as they cook the meat kind of even even the small little chopped up bits of meat are going to contract and push out juices and what the gelatin does is it helps trap in those juices so your meatballs stay more tender and more juicy as you go all right so i got my milk now i'm gonna do this is a mix of pork and beef you can do all pork or all beef or all lamb or whatever meat you want this is um a pound of it um and then to that i'm gonna add a big a big old pinch of salt i'm gonna season also with some white pepper oops just blend it up in there a little bit of white pepper a little bit of red pepper flakes because i like a little heat um and then oh you know what i need um i need some nutmeg nutmeg nutmeg cloves nutmeg nutmeg is kind of the classic sort of swedish meatball flavor that make you do want to go fresh grated generally i mean you can use you can use pre-ground it's fine but fresh grated tastes better sorry i don't want to do a i don't want to be in a garden here pretend that you got to do [Applause] everything artisanal and handmade all right so we got our meat um we're going to add an egg whoa i just popped right out i'll add them like that ectoplasmic residue all right we got our egg there and now a little bit of soy sauce here let me get this rag off my fingers um so meat on its own tastes meaty um but the thing that makes meat taste meaty you know the the thing that gives us that umami sensation is um well it's a couple different chemicals but the main one is glutamic acid um so you know monosodium glutamate is a source of glutamic acid it's also you know things like parmesan cheese mushrooms those are all rich in glutamic acid um so by adding things that are rich in glutamic acid to meat you can make them taste a little bit meatier so in this case i'm doing a little bit of soy sauce about a teaspoon of soy sauce to there i'm also going to add some worcestershire sauce so worcestershire sauce has um anchovies in it um which have glutamic acid but they also add a thing called inocinic acid which um it doesn't taste very meaty on its own but it enhances the the flavor of um it enhances the meat enhancing flavor of um glutamic acid so it's sort of like it's sort of like if um glutamic acid is batman enosinic as it is robin it's like not not too effective on its own but it helps a lot um in the overall scheme of things all right so our gelatin is mostly bloomed so that milk mixture is going to go in here milk and gelatin if you don't want to do soy sauce and worcestershire there's other things that are rich in glutamic acid you could use marmite or vegemite you could use anchovy fillets you could just use straight up msg there's nothing wrong with that either um all right so i'm gonna add how much how much bread goes in here now in my recipes there's two slices of sandwich bread so i'm gonna ba this is these are bread crumbs that i ground from dried up bread earlier it's a lot i don't know not that much um what bread does is it um you know if you don't have bread crumbs what what can happen is that your sausage mixture rather than um having sorry not your sausage mixture your meat mixture rather than having the texture of meatballs which are kind of tender and soft they can turn into sort of more of a sausage where they kind of get like snappy and dense which is what you want for sausage but not what you want for for meatballs you don't want your meatballs to be kind of springy and dense you want them to be tender oh you know what else i'm gonna get in there some garlic and meanwhile i'm gonna get my pan heated up so i can start frying these guys all right so we're gonna get about about a quarter inch or so of oil in there so this is somewhere you know somewhere between deep frying and pan frying shallow frying um and then i'm also going to get this pan bread is where i'm going to make my mushroom sauce so also a little bit of oil in there maybe a tablespoon of oil okay so i got my garlic my daughter requested meatballs today you need some milk and cheese i'll get you some i'll get you some other cheese all right so brother i'm sorry my daughter wanted some milk and cheese all right so i've got i'm gonna do three cloves of garlic here so this basic meatball technique by the way um you know it's the same basic technique you would use if you're whether you're making these kinds of sort of like swedish swedish-ish meatballs or if you're making you know italian-american meatballs where instead of um instead of nutmeg you would add parmesan cheese or maybe some maybe some ground up or diced up pancetta um some parsley you know but the same basic process of incorporating uh the dairy you know the eggs the milk the um breadcrumbs and the gelatin those are all things those are things that i would do no matter what kind of meatball i was making or if i was making meatloaf um any kind of sort of tender ground meat thing meatloaf meatballs hamburg steak that kind of stuff all right and then there's also some thyme from the garden is there some time leaves in there i'm not even gonna bother i'm not even going to bother chopping and we'll just as long as there's no big stems in there i think we're good okay so now we're going to mix this all up now the real trick to the trick to seeing if you've seasoned it properly put a little bit of it in a bowl like this get your microwave calling your buddy chef mike and you cook for 10-15 seconds just until it's cooked through um and then you can taste it and you can see if it needs more salt um that way you don't have to kind of eyeball it you could of course also measure this um if i was if i was doing this by weight i would go for about one and a half percent um salt by way to the meat nope that does not need any more salt that's good all right so now i'm gonna get a plate and get a little water in this bowl and then using wet hands and damp hands is i think chef john says is that a chef john thing we're gonna make balls you can make many says you want i'm going kind of largish largest balls because i find small small balls to be a little is fiddly funny are you laughing because i'm talking about balls [Music] small balls are fiddly yes you can feel free to leave your comments below we got our nice medium-sized balls not too big not too small only only moderately fiddly um and i'm going to fry them this is cast iron you can you know cast iron works non-stick works even even stainless steel will work if you're doing stainless steel you want to just you really do want to make sure that it's nicely preheated before you get the balls in there um otherwise they'll stick to the bottom and then the real key is once you get these going don't try and move them especially if you're in stainless steel don't try and move them until that bottom is nicely browned all right so while those cook i'm going to make this mushroom cream sauce there's a quick wash all right so mushroom cream sauce we're going to start with eight ounces of cremini mushrooms so when you're chopped when you have a lot of vegetables to chop i always like to think of it as sort of like a i'm a i'm a factory assembly line where i do all of one task first and then all the other tests so i'm gonna start by cutting up all the bottoms first and then i'm gonna go ahead and start slicing them that way it's much more efficient as far as your motion goes you don't have to spend all the time in between each mushroom doing every single task you just do it all at once okay and then [Music] so to cut mushrooms i cut off the ends like that see a couple slices off the end and turn it on its side so the idea is that you give it a kind of stable base first and that makes it easy to um go pretty fast on the next bit um and we're aiming for you know relatively thin slices maybe between an eighth and a quarter of an inch but there's no need to be real super precise here um even if they're a little bit uneven it's still going to work fine all right so i got my oil preheating over there i get my mushrooms in [Music] and then i'm going to get some butter here [Music] check out those uh look at those meatballs they're doing there you go nice and brown [Music] what are we looking for i'm going to reduce the heat a little bit just so that we make sure that they're i'm not going to over brown before the sauce is ready to accept them so these we're mainly going to brown them on the exterior here and then we're going to finish you don't have to worry too much about them cooking all the way through while they're in this uh you know in the browning phase because they're going to finish it by simmering in the sauce so mushrooms they are they have a lot of liquid in them um by the way you can if your mushrooms are dirty you can wash them these ones these ones i had uh rinsed before you can wash them no problem just wash them spin them in the salad dress they'll spin them in the salad spinner or don't even bother they're going to cook just fine either way you know they're going to start by expressing quite a bit of moisture and you're going to see this will probably eventually start to kind of steam a little bit and boil rather than sear and that's fine because once that moisture all sizzles away they're going to start browning again so yeah mushrooms are mushrooms are pretty forgiving to cook it's hard to it's hard to overcook them until they really get burnt um all right so the other thing i'm going to do in that sauce is an [Music] onion this one i'm going to mince up real fine um incidentally i know sometimes people say that that horizontal cut makes no difference it does and i think i mentioned in another video that i i with a friend of mine we built a mathematical model of an onion and sort of calculated um the effectiveness of various cuts on the onion and we found that um indeed the horizontal cut does make a difference as far as um evenness of onion pieces go because without that horizontal cut what ends up happening is that the pieces towards the end as you're cutting here you know you're slicing it this way so in the middle everything you're cutting basically perpendicular to the layers um and so you end up breaking into small pieces but when you get towards the end you're cutting almost parallel with the layers and so the the side pieces um get quite thick um so even when you cut them off they end up being kind of slivers instead of dice so that horizontal cut knocks those side pieces down so to make sure that they are all within a certain threshold as far as the size goes garlic and onions this feels like this is like that time of year when garlic skins are really stuck on you know the garlic goes through phases because it gets it gets harvested and then it ages um in storage i guess it depends where you get your and where you get your garlic from whether it's local or imported but it gets held in storage and the longer it gets held in storage the easier it becomes for that the skins to slip off so very fresh garlic um which is coming in this time of year uh i find to be harder to peel a little bit more fiddly to peel all right [Music] there we go so we got some nice browning going on actually i'm gonna go with white pepper on this one a little white pepper a little salt okay i'm gonna go in with a little bit of butter a couple tablespoons of butter this is gonna be basic sort of bechamel you know like a white sauce a butter flour um and then i'm gonna do a combination of chicken stock and uh there's that there oh garlic skin chicken stock and milk um again you can do heavy cream if you want you could do you can do buttermilk buttermilk was delicious creme fraiche would be delicious too and i got my butter in there i'm gonna go into my garlic and onions and those garlic and onions we just really want them to sweat out we don't want to add much color to them i don't want that sweetness these aren't sweet meatballs they're just swedish meatballs um and thyme i'm just throw the whole time sprigs in just like that [Music] so they'll add flavor and then at the end it'll be really easy to pull the twigs out either you can do it manually or you can let your you know i'll let my i'll let my wife and daughter do it themselves at the table let's try and get one more side of these browned browning is flavor of course um there you go that looks good [Music] [Music] okay so this is looking pretty good now i'm gonna add my flower in there so that was a couple tablespoons of butter so i'm also going to add a couple tablespoons of flour i just eyeball it and what we're doing is we're making a roux here so the oil butter and flour are going to combine together and what's going to happen is that so what happens is if you take flour and you try and add it directly to a water-based liquid you know say chicken stock milk anything like that and you add it directly there um the flour what happens is it forms these are kind of little capsules where the exterior of the capsule is gelatinized flour gelatinized starch while the inside is still dry flour and so it becomes really difficult to incorporate flour evenly into a liquid not only that but but flour incorporated straight into a liquid has a raw flavor to it so the point of a roux is when you cook flour in a fat what it does is the fat coats each individual little particle of flour so that then when you add your liquid it um the particles are already separated from each other so when the starch starts to starts to swell up and set it doesn't form um clumps um at least at least not if you're careful about it which we're gonna beat all right so i got some chicken stock now the real trick with a roux of course is to add your liquid slowly so we're going to go in with we're aiming to have about a total of a cup of chicken stock or so and a cup of milk or you could do a cup of heavy cream but there i started with about a quarter cup of chicken stock so i'm going to incorporate that in it's really thick right now i'm going to add like another quarter cup or so i'm also going to deglaze as i do this so kind of scrape up the bottom so this method you know adding adding liquid very slowly to a roux it's true no matter what you're doing so you know whether you're whether you're making a plain old white sauce like a bechamel whether you're making a gravy you always want to add your liquid very slowly um especially at the beginning and get it nicely incorporated before you add any more and the better you do that the smoother your sauce ends up you see how nice and nice and smooth this is getting this will be my last chicken stock edition all right so i got about a total of a cup of chicken stock in there you can of course also if you want you can deglaze this with um something like wine um or brandy or any kind of liquor that will add flavor to it and also have a touch of acidity which goes nicely here all right those meatballs are done now i'm going to finish this off with milk [Music] and at this stage we can add it a little bit more rapidly because our sauce our butter and flour have already basically been fully incorporated so i had about about a cup of milk [Music] bring that up to a simmer i'm going to actually finish that off with a little bit more nutmeg because i like that flavor so this dish these meatballs um i'm not sure what we're gonna eat them with today my daughter asked for pasta so i'll probably make some pasta with them but traditionally you would have these with um a cucumber salad like very cucumbers that are very lightly um sort of marinated in uh vinegar so like sort of a light pickle almost cucumber salad and a um [Music] could be potato salad like a vinegary potato salad um or mashed potatoes um and then lingonberry jam although the closest thing that we would have in the u.s to lingonberry jam well you can get lingam berryjam of course at the supermarket or at like ikea but if you want to make jam out of fresh fruit it's hard to find lingam berries in the us so the closest thing we would have would be um something like uh cranberry cranberry cranberry jam cranberry jelly same stuff you put on your turkey all right so i think these meatballs are actually probably pretty much cooked through already so they're not gonna need to spend too much time in this cream sauce and there's gonna be plenty of sauce to go on whatever we want whether it's mashed potatoes or um or pasta which is what it'll probably do because my daughter wanted pasta so now all we gotta do is let this reduce down until it's just lightly thickened or i guess as thick as you want it you can make it you can make thin gravy you can make it thin thin gravy thick gravy you are after all the commander of the navy of your pork gravy i don't know are there other chef john fans out there you know chef john is actually a neighbor my knee was just um we've never met in real life but we live like within like 10 miles of each other um it might be fun to do a collaboration sometime i think we want to finish it off with a little lemon juice oh and you know what else i'm going to throw in that and that uh gravy is touching soy sauce a little more mommy boost all right this looks great to me we can get our nice beauty shot and i can eat one and do that and do that mmm thing these do look good don't they if i do say so myself get some mushrooms on there that time spring out of there so here we are and they do they look like what's in the book they look pretty similar to what's in the book um of course the flavors are different but you know you can get you can get the recipe in my book i think that recipe is also on sirius eats and if it is i will link to it otherwise i'll link to where you can get my book um hi so there you go see how nice and tender those meatballs are that's the trick you know like hamburgers if you cook them all the way through to well done they get dried and that's because they're just plain old ground meat there's nothing holding that moisture in whereas meatballs bread crumbs and eggs and in this case gelatin oh yeah you see how when i push that see all that juiciness um that's what holds in the juiciness on the meatballs all right chubby sit sit good girl a little for you to come on here you go good boy all right everyone swedish meatballs with mushroom gravy um i will see you later guys gals and non-binary pals bye-bye you

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 613,855

Keywords:

Id: Ld5cECqIFU0

Length: 26min 46sec (1606 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 27 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/spade_andarcher]

Great, now I have to make Swedish Meatballs this week.

[u/Vaeh]

I don't know why it's never occurred to me, but blasting a small bit of minced meat in the microwave to taste the seasoning is just wild.