Comments on How do I prevent Swedish meatballs from falling apart?
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How do I prevent Swedish meatballs from falling apart?
How do I prevent Swedish meatballs from falling apart? I don't really have a fixed recipe. I use minced meat, bread crumbs, grated onion, eggs, cream and spices. I also did allow the bread crumbs to swell in the cream for a couple of minutes before adding the rest of the ingredients. But my meatballs keep falling apart when I fry them. What is the secret here?
Got request for proportions in comments, but since I never measure anything I can only give a rough estimate.
This time, I think it was 1kg of minced meat, 3dl cream, a half grated onion, 2dl bread crumbs and one egg.
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Like what has already been said, falling apart would likely be due to too much liquid, too little binder, or both.
I checked what one of my cookbooks says about Swedish meatballs, and that recipe calls for (among some other ingredients) 400g mixed1 minced meat to one egg and four tablespoons (60 ml, 0.6 dl) of breadcrumbs. Scaling that up to 1 kg of meat, that would be 2.5 eggs and 1.5 dl of bread crumbs, but no cream; I suspect the additional eggs also serve a similar purpose to the cream.
Since the eggs would serve both to provide a bit of liquid as well as binder, I strongly suspect that your issues are caused by both too much liquid and too little binder.
Especially for 1 kg of minced meat, I would suggest that you try cutting back on the cream and adding an egg or two.
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a combination of pork and beef meat, usually resulting in about 20% fat ↩
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