Swedish Meatballs And Mash

It's been ages since I cooked something and posted it too, but I've been meaning to do it. There's a huge difference between meaning to and actually do it. For the past few months I've been bookmarking the recipes Google and Chrome has been throwing at me, with the intention of trying them out one day, but that one day has never come, till today.

Today I made time to cook Swedish meatballs and mash, a nice and inviting recipe published by The Irish Times, here. The reason I liked this recipe is because it's close to what I like in taste, it's easy to make and doesn't need much time or effort. Obviously I didn't follow the recipe to the letter, but that's not something unusual. There are no major deviations from the original idea though. So, let's see what I was up to today.

Ingredients for the meatballs:

• 1kg minced meat (I used 500g pork and 500g beef, but you can use any combination of meat you like),
• 1 large onion, chopped,
• 4 cloves of garlic, chopped,
• 1 egg,
• 3 tbsp of semolina,
• 1 tbsp red paprika powder (make sure it's good quality and not brick powder),
• 1 tsp salt,
• 1 tsp pepper.

The original recipe says breadcrumbs, but I always use semolina because it makes the meatballs more softer. The other thing that I did differently is that I added red paprika powder to it, which adds a nice extra flavor and left out the dill. I'm not a huge fan of dill and because the sauce already has dill, adding it to the meat would have been to much for me.

Instead of chopping the onion and garlic by hand, I used my blender and was satisfied with the result.

I added all the ingredients to a mixing bowl and mixed it well.

After mixing the meat and the spices well, I made 24 meatballs and placed them in a ceramic baking tray.

The recipe says to preheat the oven to 180°C and bake for 20 minutes, but, but my meatballs were a bit big and baked them for 30 minutes. Baking time is tied to results anyway, so adjust yours as you wish.

And here it is, the meatballs after 30 minutes. I was really satisfied with the result. The reason I chose this recipe was because baking the meatballs in the oven is much more healthier that frying them in hot oil. However, what I gained with this is cancelled with the sauce and you'll see why.

Ingredients for the sauce:

• 100g butter,
• 2 tbsp all purpose flour,
• 500g beef stock,
• 250g cream,
• 1/2 tsp salt,
• 1/2 tsp pepper,
• chopped dill.

Lucky me, what you see on the photo is real beef stock as I had beef soup and used the beef stock for the sauce. It's way tastier than to use some Knorr cubes or powder as this is made of real meat and veggies.

The method of making the sauce is pretty simple, but mine did not turn out as it should and I tell you why in a bit.

First I melted the butter in a pan, then added the flour and stirring constantly, cooked for about five minutes. Then added the beef stock, salt and pepper and cooked for a few minutes. Then added the cream. So what was the problem? I used sour cream, because I didn't want my sauce to be sweet, I wanted a sour sauce and the consistency of sour cream is different.

Ingredients for the mash:

• 1 kg potatoes,
• salt,
• 100 ml milk,
• 50g butter.

After washing and peeling the potatoes, I chopped them into cubes and cooked in salty water till tender. After draining the potatoes, I added milk and butter and mashed it.

At the end I sprinkled it with dill, instead of adding dill to the sauce and turns out it was the right decision.

The sauce does not look good, but tastes very good and as my goal was to cook something delicious, I don't really care 😜

Compared to the original recipe, my sour cream was of 20%, while the cream recommended has usually 32% fat, which is considerably higher that I want it to. Not to mention the taste.

I like the idea of baking meatballs, the result is amazing and I think I'm going to use it from now on as it's super simple and healthy as well, if you don't ruin everything with a heavy sauce.

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