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Sweet-and-Sour Potted Meatballs

Posted by The Serious Eats Team, March 19, 2008 at 11:45 AM

The following recipe is from the March 19 edition of our weekly recipe newsletter. To receive this newsletter in your inbox, sign up here!

If you're not lucky enough to have grown up with a bubbe fussing over you and cooking you some of the most amazing comfort food ever, then Jewish Home Cooking by Arthur Schwartz can help you approximate the experience yourself. Here's an adaptation of Schwartz's potted sweet-and-sour meatballs, which can be used in stuffed cabbage, stuffed peppers, sweet-and-sour cabbage borscht, and more.

- makes 24 meatballs; serves 6 to 8 -

Ingredients

For the sweet-and-sour sauce:

• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil


• 1 medium onion, finely minced


• 2 (15-ounce) cans tomato sauce


• 1/2 cup water


• 1/2 teaspoon sour salt, or the juice of 1 lemon (about 2 tablespoons)


• 1/4 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar


• Salt and freshly ground black pepper

For the meatballs:

• 2 pounds ground chuck or a combination of ground neck and tenderloin


• 2 eggs, beaten


• 1/3 cup long-grain rice, parboiled for 3 minutes


• 1 cup fresh breadcrumbs from challah or good-quality supermarket white bread (with crusts)


• 1 medium onion, grated on the coarse side of a box grater


• 2 1/4 teaspoons salt


• 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Procedure

1. Prepare the sauce: In a 5-quart stovetop casserole or Dutch oven, heat the oil to medium; sauté the minced onion until tender and golden, 8 to 10 minutes. Reserve 1/2 cup of the canned tomato sauce to season the meatballs, then add the remaining sauce to the onions. Rinse out both cans with the same 1/2 cup water to loosen any sauce that remains; add that liquid to the pan. Stir in the sour salt (or lemon juice) and brown sugar. Bring to a simmer, uncovered, over medium heat. Remove from the heat; set aside.
2. Make the meatballs: Put the ground meat in a large bowl; push it to one side. Put the eggs, rice, breadcrumbs, onion, salt, and pepper on the other side; combine with a large fork. Incorporate meat into the breadcrumb mixture a little at a time, eventually mixing everything together.
3. Cook the meatballs: Bring the sauce back to a gentle simmer over medium heat. Using a 1/4-cup measure, make compact meatballs and drop them gently into the sauce. By the time the pot seems full, the first meatballs will be cooked enough and firm enough to push them around gently to fit in more meatballs. You may have to go to a second layer. It's OK if a few meatballs are, at first, not covered with sauce.
4. Cover and sinnner slowly 30 minutes, gently rotating and pushing meatballs around after about 15 minutes. Eventually, sauce will increase enough and meatballs will shrink enough for them all get covered with sauce. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Serve very hot, preferably reheated. The meatballs benefit from at least several hours or overnight in the refrigerator. Store in the covered pot (if it's not aluminum) and reheat over low heat.

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