4 Levels of Meatballs: Amateur to Food Scientist

[lively music]

Hi. I'm Emily, and I'm a level one chef.

Hi. I'm Daniel, and I'm a level two chef.

Hi. I'm Yuji.

I've been a professional chef for eight years.

[lively music]

So today, I'm gonna be making Swedish meatballs

roughly in the style of Ikea's meatballs.

I modeled my meatball recipe after albondigas,

which are basically mini meatballs, sort of,

which are cooked in this really awesome sauce.

Today, I'll be making tsumire soup.

Tsumire means fish meatball in Japanese.

It is a great way to utilize all the fish scraps

you get out of day-to-day restaurant production.

So I am opting for a combo:

a 50-50 split of ground beef and ground pork.

Pork actually adds a lot of moisture.

And that, I think, is the extend of my knowledge on that.

It's ground beef.

One, I like beef. Easy.

Two, you don't have to worry so much about

if you accidentally under cook beef a little,

it's not gonna hurt anybody,

which is a relief when you're a level one chef.

This tuna was caught by line hook.

Line hook is the most sustainable way of fishing

because you don't catch any other fish.

So first, I'm gonna be scraping tuna bones

to get the meat out.

So this part of the meat is called the nakaochi,

in Japanese means almost like rib meat.

And then a lot of times,

restaurants actually scrape this meat

and make tuna tartare and serve it in maki rolls.

All right, let's scrape and get some meat out.

It's rather satisfying when you get the meat out.

You wanna make sure that the tip of the spoon goes deep

so that there is really nothing left.

This part is called the bloodline

and this part is really good too.

A lot of like nice ironing flavor.

This is very satisfying.

So to start these meatballs off,

I'm gonna saute some onions with some garlic,

and I'm gonna set them aside to cool

before actually adding them into the meatballs.

And now I'm just gonna bring this pan up to medium heat,

so now I'm gonna take these and add them into my pan.

While that's going, I will work on the garlic.

So these I wanna get nice and fine.

This gets added in with the onion.

I'm gonna add a little salt, a little pepper.

I'm just gonna transfer all these pieces into a bowl

and they're just gonna sit and kind of cool down

while I work on the rest of the meatball mixture.

You can almost see through the other side.

It's almost like a paper.

I took most of the meat out,

but there's still more you can do.

I turn this into a ramen broth at my restaurant.

So I have bread crumbs and milk and eggs,

and I'm gonna just combine these.

That's my first step. The next thing I'm gonna do

is just add my eggs in.

There we go.

I'm gonna break up the eggs. And now I just wanna make sure

this gets good and gloopy,

that's the technical term.

So now I'm done with scraping tuna.

So I'm gonna mix this evenly

so that you have a really nice blend.

So before I mix other ingredients,

I'm gonna chop this even more finer

so that it's gonna be really fluffy

and more fatty all around.

It's almost like making a tartare with the tuna.

I'm trying to break down the bloodline

as much as possible too.

All right, so the next thing I'm gonna do

is chop up my onion and my garlic.

Okay, so I'm putting my onion in raw.

Why, Emily?

Because I can. I do what I want.

I just trust that whoever made this recipe

knew what they were doing.

I particularly don't like to use raw onion when cooking.

I just like to cook them first.

Really gets a nice aromatic profile,

and the flavor layering is just much better, I think.

The laziest chop is really what this is.

I know that this is probably wrong,

but this is the way I do this.

'Cause here's the thing,

it's not like I can't do things that are more difficult.

It's just that somebody's got to represent

that there are lots of times when you don't want to.

That's what I'm here for.

So now I'm going to mix five grams of the scallion,

same amount of ginger,

a little bit of sesame.

Miso.

So this miso is a special blend of red miso

and also sake kasu,

which is leftover from making sake.

When it's used with the fish, it actually kind of balances

the flavor of the fish really well.

Ground beef and ground pork go into a bowl here.

Then I'm gonna season these with the oregano,

some cayenne, some basil, and a little bit of rosemary.

I'm gonna get an alternate

between sprinkling breadcrumbs in here

and then adding stock.

So it's gonna dry this out a bit

and then re-wet it with the beef stock.

[Both] An egg.

And this just serves as another binder,

so when it cooks it doesn't fall apart.

So we got the gloves on. This is gonna be interesting.

And a little bit of olive oil.

And the onions.

I'm just going to get my onion into my meat.

Two garlic cloves.

[Both] Salt.

Pepper.

And I'm just going to sport that all in.

Mix everything.

I'm gonna put a little bit of soy sauce.

You don't wanna savor this too much

because you're gonna be eating with miso soup.

Fingers at the ready.

It's gonna be gross.

All right, let's do this.

Do I use spoons for this? I don't know.

I mean, I'm sure that there are more sanitary ways.

I don't know.

Gloves.

It's like carving a pumpkin of beef.

Then I can just take it off, fling it into the garbage.

I'm going for like a rounded golf ball size.

So albondigas are typically smaller meatballs,

almost like bite size.

So I'll be using a spoon

so it actually helps to mix stuff for me easier

instead of with your hand.

It's almost like I'm making dumpling.

Maybe I'll just add a little to some of the smaller ones.

♪ Little meat hats for all my ball friends ♪

My meatballs are ready to move on to the next step,

so I'm going to cover them in plastic wrap

and put them in the fridge for a couple hours

so that they stay ball-like when I cook them.

So here is my tuna tsumire meatball

and now ready to be poached in the miso soup.

Cool, so the meatballs are formed,

and they are ready to be cooked.

So a tsumire meatball is a soup dish,

so I'll be making the base of the stock,

which is called the dashi.

Dashi is a combination of the bonito flake

and then also the kombu.

So you're gonna put the kombu

into a pot with the water,

and then you're gonna start heating up from cold water,

and then you wanna steep it at medium temperature

for about 10, 15 minutes until kombu floats up.

And then you don't wanna boil kombu.

It actually kills the flavor.

That's why before you get boil,

I'm gonna take the kombu out.

And then when this starts boiling,

we're gonna add bonito flake into it.

And I'm gonna let it steep for another 10, 15 minutes.

Now my dashi is finished and I'm gonna strain it.

The color looks nice, golden brown.

This is the ideal color of dashi that you're looking for

when you make dashi.

It smells awesome.

So if you go to farmer's market in America,

you'll see beautiful fennel and celeriac.

A special aroma that comes from these two ingredients,

very friendly to Japanese like fundamental flavors,

such as miso and soy sauce.

So I'll be keeping this fennel top

because I wanna use this little part

for the garnish later.

So now celeriac and our fennel are chopped up

and then they're ready for miso soup.

So I'm gonna be starting from the cold temperature

and I'm gonna raise it to a simmering temperature.

It's gonna go about 15 minutes or so.

So now vegetables are soft enough to blend,

so I'm gonna use a hand blender and I'm gonna blend it.

So now vegetables and the dashi are all nicely blended,

so I'm gonna add the miso,

and use kosho.

This kosho is a combination of yuzu peel

and then green pepper and salt.

You just ferment it for about a half hour.

Then I'm gonna mix it even more.

Now my tsumire miso soup is finished.

So my meatballs have been cooling for a little bit,

and they are ready for cooking.

This is less of a overall cooking

and more of like a browning.

I'm trying to brown all sides, get them warm,

and sort of semi cooked through,

and the rest they're actually gonna finish in the sauce.

So I'm going to go ahead and heat up my pan,

add some oil, and then start browning my balls.

Gonna set this on like a medium,

yeah, like a medium heat.

Nothing bad can happen on medium.

In general, you actually don't wanna boil the miso soup

once miso is added to the soup

because it actually kind of destroys the flavor of miso.

So you wanna keep the temperature below simmering.

Gonna add a little olive oil.

Ball number one.

I will say, they have,

despite the fridging, found a nice flat bottom,

but that's okay.

I'm gonna start poaching my tuna meatballs,

so it actually disappear into the miso soup,

but once it's cooked, it's gonna start appearing.

It will take about three to five minutes

for the tuna meatball to be fully cooked.

This is looking all right. Gonna give this a flip.

I'm not really too concerned

about them cooking all the way through at this point,

just because they're gonna finish in the sauce.

All right, I'm gonna say that these are

as cooked as they need to be.

I think it looks pretty darn tasty.

So the tuna meatballs are looking very good.

So it browned on one side, right,

and then it browned on the other.

That's my done.

So here are my meatballs.

And the next thing I'm gonna do

is just make a sauce for them.

Time for the sauce.

Okay, so to make my sauce,

I have my pan with my meatball drippings.

I have to add in my butter.

I'm just going to melt this butter

and swish it around a little.

I'm gonna throw a little bit more olive oil in here

and start with my onion,

which is actually the second half of the onion from before.

I just kind of wanna soften them,

let them soak up all the oil and the flavor

that's already in the pot. So now the onions are in,

I'm gonna throw in a little bit of salt and some pepper.

All right, so I'm just going to put my flour in

and then whisk it to make kind of a roux.

So the onions look good.

They're nice and they're clear.

And now I'm going to add my liquid components.

I'm gonna start with the crushed tomatoes.

[Both] Gonna add My beef stock.

And whisk it.

It's so much easier when there's no one around to judge you.

Now I'm going to start adding my cream in.

This is gonna be delicious. I'm very excited.

That's a little bit of red wine.

Now, I had never used red wine in cooking

prior to trying this recipe out a bunch.

It's actually pretty insane

how much flavor you can get from wine and food.

I thought it was just something

that really, really fancy chefs would do.

Next thing I'm adding is my soy sauce.

Just gonna use my little spoon to add my mustard.

All right, now that my sauce is almost ready,

I'm gonna put my meatballs into the sauce.

We're gonna let them simmer in the sauce

for about like 15, 20 minutes,

and in that time

not only will they be cooked all the way through,

they will also have soaked in so much flavor from the sauce.

All right, I think these Swedish meatballs are good to go.

For my garnish, I'm planning to use a leek,

and also myoga, which is Japanese young, fresh ginger.

I'm gonna try to cut this in one bites.

And then you're gonna open this up.

This is called hari negi.

Hari means needle. Negi means scallion.

Then I'm going to put this in water here.

Then gonna move to myoga.

Now I'm going to squeeze it like this.

Kind of removes the little bit of bitterness.

It's gonna look good on the garnish,

and it makes it a little bit easier to eat too.

And we're gonna transfer this to strainer.

So now my garnish, leek and ginger is all ready.

So for my garnish, I have some fresh parsley,

which is really all you need.

A lot of the flavor in the meatballs is just perfect.

I don't wanna mess with that too much.

It does add a nice little pop of color on top.

So just kinda chopping this down nice and fine.

I don't know if you'd call it a garnish per se,

but I will be serving my beautiful Swedish meatballs

with a little bit of lingonberry jam on the side.

They just go. They're meant to be.

They're like Harry and Sally.

Now I'm gonna put everything together.

So I'm gonna start pouring the miso soup in here,

and then put the tuna meatballs on it.

[Lisa] Feel like I'm chasing them. There we go.

We'll do three for this.

I usually like two to three meatballs, I think.

And then what I wanna do also

is get a little bit of the extra sauce

just to drizzle on top of this.

This is a leek and then ginger mixture.

Then gonna finish it with the fennel.

And top it with a little bit

of the freshly chopped parsley,

just enough to give it a little bit of a flair.

So this is the pepper called sansho.

I'm using this because it has a really nice minty flavor

that goes well with fish.

And there you have it.

My Swedish meatballs.

And these are my albondigas.

This is my tuna tsumire meatball soup.

All right, let's try these.

Salud.

Yeah!

Wow.

I wanna like throw the fork and walk away.

It's very good. It's super good.

It's funny. You can really taste the Dijon.

It's not a lot of Dijon, but you get it in there.

I was afraid of the tuna's texture,

but it's very soft and fluffy.

It's not overcooked at all.

It's such a robust profile you're getting.

You taste the onion, you taste the rosemary,

you get the pork and you get the fat of the beef.

The only thing that would make it better

is if I was in a table somewhere in Spain eating these.

So tsumire meatball is very like a family meal,

and it's not really a special dish,

but since I haven't made it so long in America,

and it's so good,

I feel like I should be making more every day.

Meatballs are a versatile and convenient way

to serve any kind of ground meat.

Let's see how each of our three chefs made theirs.

Emily made Swedish style meatballs

with ground beef as the main ingredient.

It's gonna be gross. All right, let's do this.

Ground beef is usually made

from less tender cuts of beef.

By first soaking her breadcrumbs in milk

before mixing into her meatball mixture,

the texture of her meatballs became very soft.

It's like carving a pumpkin of beef.

The wet breadcrumbs helped Emily's meatballs

retain moisture really well

because the breadcrumbs became gelatinized

with the natural meat juices

that would have otherwise been cooked out.

Emily also added her eggs to this mixture.

The eggs bind all of the ingredients together

because of the presence of proteins

like ovalbumin in the egg whites

that coagulate when heated

and connect to the meat with the seasonings.

The milk and egg yolk also added

some additional fat and richness.

Daniel's Spanish inspired meatballs called albondigas

were made from a mixture of ground beef and pork.

Pork is the meat from young hogs

and commercial hogs are bred to be lean.

Pork is lighter in color than beef for several reasons.

Hogs have a lower proportion of red muscles

because of the way hogs move around,

using their muscles more sporadically than cows.

These muscles require less oxygen,

so they naturally have less myoglobin

which is a compound that stores oxygen

and gives meat its color.

The flavor of pork comes from many different chemicals

such as hexanal and octadecanal.

Hexanal is associated with grassy flavors,

which come from the diet of the hog.

And that, I think, is the extent of my knowledge on that.

Daniel had a lower ratio of breadcrumbs to meat

compared to Emily.

The starches in his gluten-free breadcrumbs

soaked up the beef broth as they gelatinized

retaining moisture and giving his meatballs

a softer, more tender texture.

He didn't add an egg, so having less breadcrumbs

helped his meatballs retain their shape.

Instead of relying on added egg white proteins,

he relied on the meat proteins

that recoil and become more compact when cooked.

Yuji made his Japanese inspired meatballs

out of fresh tuna he cut from the bone and hand chopped.

Tuna's a large predatory ocean fish

that swims constantly at fast speeds,

which means they need a lot of oxygen for metabolism.

This means they have a lot of oxygen-rich myoglobin

which is why fresh tuna is so deeply red in color

and why some flavor compounds produced during cooking

are similar to those of cooked beef.

He also added miso,

a flavorful paste made from soybeans

that are fermented by a mold

called aspergillus oryzae or koji.

Koji is a versatile mold that's used

in the fermentation of various ingredients

like miso and rice vinegar.

Yuji also added his homemade soy sauce,

a dark liquid made from fermented soy

that varies quite a lot from processor to processor,

but is always salty and savory.

Emily refrigerated her meatballs

for about two hours prior to frying.

This was smart.

It helps her meatballs to keep their shape

because the fat is in solid form when it's cold.

She pan fried her meatballs in a small amount of oil

and was careful to make sure they were browned all over.

Daniel also lightly fried his albondigas in olive oil.

Low and slow 'cause I burn stuff all the time.

He made sure to expose

the entire surface of his meatballs to the hot oil

to get a nice crust and set the maillard reaction in motion.

This is a non-enzymatic browning reaction

between sugars and amino acids in the ground beef.

Products of maillard browning

are hundreds of aromatic rings

with oxygen, nitrogen and sulfur groups.

These in part roasted nutty beefy flavor notes,

but also some oniony earthy and slightly metallic notes too.

It's the complicated set of chemical reactions

that makes meat so delicious.

Yuji poached his tuna in his soup.

Poaching is a gentle cooking process

which allows proteins in the tuna to slowly coagulate,

giving them a tender texture.

When too much water is present,

maillard browning is inhibited,

so there's no roasted or toasted flavor in his meatballs.

While Yuji used fewer ingredients,

his level three status

comes from perfectly balanced flavors.

It smells awesome.

Sometimes knowing how to proportion

fewer ingredients with bigger flavor impact

increases the difficulty level

because each ingredient is so pronounced.

Meatballs are so versatile.

You can make them with beef, pork, tuna,

really any meat or fish you like.

There's no shortage of preparation methods either:

frying, poaching, or finishing it in a sauce.

Next time you're in the mood for meatballs,

we hope you'll take some of these tips

from our three innovative chefs.