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If you are looking for an authentic Swedish meatballs recipe, you’ve found one. This is my grandmother’s recipe for Swedish meatballs, also known as köttbullar, are so good they should be a controlled substance.
I never knew my grandmother so I can’t remember her ever making Swedish meatballs, but I do have several strong memories of mom making these little balls of yum long ago, in the 1970s. Of course we ate Swedish meatballs in the Seventies — everyone did. They were right next to the fondue.
But even this was simply withdrawal symptoms of the Swedish meatballs’ heyday a decade earlier. Can’t you just see the chafing dish, the Sterno and the meatballs nestled in that slowly congealing-yet-somehow-irresistible gravy? Groovy baby, yeah!
Yet of all the crazy throwback foods of that much-maligned decade, Swedish meatballs are high on the list for preservation. If you’ve eaten well-made ones, can any among you honestly say you have not stuffed yourself on them? What the heck is it about these meatballs?
Sure, they a lot smaller than Italian meatballs, or at least Italian American meatballs, so they go down real easy, one after the other… I’ve eaten several dozen at a sitting before, only to feel later like an anaconda that swallowed a cow made of butter.
Butter. Maybe that’s it? Every authentic Swedish meatballs recipe calls for obscene amounts of butter.
The gravy is part drippings from frying the meatballs in butter, flour, stock and, in some cases, lingonberry or cranberry syrup or jelly. Still, I’ve eaten lots of rich things before without succumbing to gluttony.
Maybe it is a Swedish meatball’s size. Small. Bite-sized, to be exact. Dangerous. My Italian meatballs are big, honking brontosaurus balls; you need at least three bites to get one down. These little Swedish meatballs are just a tablespoon.
That’s not so much. Maybe I’ll have just one more…
What follows is my Swedish meatball recipe, adapted from one given to my mother from her mother, who was a Massachusetts Swede. They call these meatballs Svenska Köttbullar, and they are traditionally served with a lingonberry or cranberry sauce. In Scandinavia, the meatballs are sometimes made with reindeer, so venison is a natural. You could use any red meat.
Venison Swedish Meatballs
Ingredients
- 4 slices stale bread, crusts removed
- 2/3 cup milk
- 3 pounds venison or beef
- 1 pound pork fat
- 2 eggs
- 2 teaspoons Kosher salt
- 2 teaspoons ground allspice
- 1 teaspoon caraway seeds
- 1 teaspoon black pepper
- 1 grated yellow onion
- Flour
- 1 quart beef stock or venison stock
- 1/2 cup sour cream
- 1/3 cup lingonberry jelly
- Salt
- Butter or oil for frying
Instructions
- If you are not using pre-ground meat, chill the venison and pork fat until it is almost freezing by sticking it in the freezer for an hour. Cut both the meat and fat into chunks that will fit into your grinder. Grind through your fine die in a meat grinder. If you do not have a meat grinder, you can use a food processor, set on pulse. Don’t crowd the processor and chop the meat in pulses until you get something that looks like ground meat — it will not be as good as with a grinder, but it is easier than hand-mincing everything, which is also an option. Put the meat in the fridge.
- Pour the milk into a pot and set it on low heat. Cut the crusts off the stale bread and break it into pieces. Add the pieces to the pot. They will begin to absorb the milk. Turn off the heat and mash everything into a paste. Let it cool to room temperature.
- In the meat bowl, add the grated onion, salt and spices. Crack the eggs into the bowl, then pour the bread-milk mixture in. With clean hands, gently mix everything together. Do not knead it like bread, and do not squeeze things together. Just gently work the mixture: Think cake, not bread. When it is mostly combined — you need not get everything perfect — grab a tablespoon and scoop up some. Roll it into a little ball with your palms.
- Gently roll the meatballs in the flour; you’ll probably need about a cup. You may need to re-shape them before putting them onto a cookie sheet lined with wax or parchment paper.
- When the meatballs are all made, get a large pan ready; I use a big cast-iron frying pan. Fill it with a little less than 1/4 inch of oil. I use canola oil with a little butter tossed in for flavor. Bring it up to temperature over medium-high heat. When a drop of flour flicked in the oil immediately sizzles away, drop the heat to medium and add the meatballs. Do not crowd them.
- You want the oil to come up halfway on the meatballs. Add a little oil if need be; don’t worry, you can reuse it. Fry on medium heat for 3 to 5 minutes. You are looking for golden brown. Turn only once. The other side will need 2 to 4 minutes. When cooked, set the meatballs on a paper towel or wire rack to drain. They can be used right away or cooled and then refrigerated for a week, or frozen for several months.
THE SAUCE
- Once the meatballs are cooked, drain all but about 3 or 4 tablespoons of butter/oil from the pan. Over medium heat, add an equal amount of the flour left over from dusting the meatballs. Stir to make a roux and cook slowly until it turns a nice golden brown. Think coffee with cream.
- Add the stock gradually and turn the heat up to medium-high. Stir well to combine and add more stock or some water if need be — you want this thicker than water, thinner than Thanksgiving gravy. Taste for salt and add if needed. Add the lingonberry or highbush cranberry jelly to the pan. Let it melt and then mix it in gently.
- Put the meatballs in the pan, coat all the meatballs with the sauce, cover and cook for 10 minutes over medium-low heat. Add the cream and just warm through, maybe 3 or 4 minutes. Serve over mashed potatoes or with German egg noodles.
Notes
Nutrition
Nutrition information is automatically calculated, so should only be used as an approximation.
I grew up on moose meatballs. If you want to add a dimension to the taste, mix some dried chantarelles or porcini with the meat. Very nice
I’ll be doing this on the weekend with moose … does anyone know where I can get a pound of pork fat? Is there a substitute?
Thanks! Looks amazing.
In my case, it’s Swedish meatballs with venison.
There’s always, it seems, a very limited amount of available wild venison and a few favorite ways to prepare it…and this is one of them.
I love how the assertive flavor of the venison shines through.
Thanks for sharing the recipe. Been looking for a recipe of this Swedish meatballs because my husband has been requesting me to cook this for him. I’ll be surprising him with this meatballs during our first anniversary. Wish me luck!
Hey Hank, Made the meatballs for Christmas…Awesome! Thanks for the recipe. Substituted venison for moose and Ikea’s lingon berry jam. The jam was pretty blah, but everything else was great. If you happen to be up in Oregon in early July, there are red huckleberries that grow in the coast range which are very similar to the lingon berry and make fabulous jam. Also, I’m not real familiar with the Sierra’s up your way, but down here on the Stanislaus NF, lion’s mane were blooming the 2nd week of December the last two years. I’m out doing deer counts then and have been able to harvest a few. The lion’s mane I’ve found have all been on living black oaks, growing out of scars in the 2500-4000′ elevation range.
These look awesome. I think I am going to try something similar with some good old Pennsylvania white-tail deer meat. New game recipes are exciting!
As if this debate needed more Swedes pitching in, but what the heck: moose is, as you’ve noticed, fine for meatballs, but so is a bunch of different animals. These days I usually make mine out of 50% wild boar and 50% good, free range fatty pig meat, which is an exellent combo, but I´ve had them in restaurants made from Brown Bear and beaver as well (not in the same meatball). Mind you, both of these variations were more interesting then actually tasty. If it´s meat then you can probably make a decent meatball out of it. Chicken? No probs. Turkey. Great. Venison? Lovely. Aligator? Probably, but hold the lingonberries on that one.
As for the lingonberry debate: anything that is sweet and tart works pretty well. I’ve substituted lingonberries with Cumberland sauce, black/red currant jelly at times, just out of curiosity. It all works as long as the sauce is rich and creamy. I’m thinking gooseberry jelly could be an interesting variation, if the sauce is adapted accordingly.
Thyme adds some lovely flavour to the sauce, as do most wild mushrooms, I tend to use black trumpet mushroom or funnel chanterelles. Brilliant combo.
If you need to bake them in the oven they’re too big.
If you don’t mind going overboard with big, big flavours and take it easy on the jelly/lingonberries, a truffle-infused potato mash/purée is to die for with swedish meatballs.
Butter all the way.
Sweden has tons of great bands: Abba is not the be-all and end-all of the music scene (admittedly my kids love them, but they love Michael Jackson as well…), I recomend Katatonia for long winter nights, of which we’ve had quite a few this year.
Josh: Pronunciation. I wish I could remember the phonetic alfabet they taught us in school but here goes: the K is soft; Kott is pronunced kind of like “Chet” (the name) but with instead of the e use a high, open mouth U-sound. As for “bullar” it´s not too dissimillar to how you would pronounce it, but you need to tense the lips a bit, and pronounce everything higher in the mouth, think british upper class, and you should be there.
— JC
Ingemar: Maybe in your area or household, but not everywhere in Sweden, and definitely not among Swedish American families. That said, baked is fine, too!
Swedish meatballs are ALWAYS baked in the oven not fried.
These were AMAZING. I used ground lamb and bison. so. so. yummy. Thanks!
yumm….these meatballs looks really good!
my swedish nana (very proud of her heritage as she was always around a bunch of italians) made these all the time – obviously not w/ moose meat (although i would’ve eaten them even as a three year old). they bring back great memories.
Cork: Nice job on the boar. I normally don’t work with Asian flavors so I bet that was a nice change for Michael and the crew! As for the moose, it may not be worth all the expense just for this recipe, but it very well might be for the 1,000-plus pounds of meat you can bring home…
Dang, Hank–Now I have to go back to Alaska to get darned moose again, because looks so incredible! I don’t think I could do what Sarah said about substituting elk, though I love both, they taste so different, and that moose meat is so much richer, and would have resided as my top of the list if I hadn’t tasted the sweet meat of antelope shot near Casper, WY, and only fed on sage. That moose meat just makes it that much richer a Swedish meatball.
…Let’s see now , $2,500 for a float trip on a raft (cheapest/best hunt still available in AK), a flight up to Anchorage for the first leg, and another $1,000 for a flight out to King Salmon…is it worth it, to come back down and use this recipe? Yes!!! BTW I’ve only been used to the big dinosaur balls, too…the smaller ones must taste that much better with a better sauce to meat ratio.
Oh, and that boar I shot on Sat that we turned into babi guling, ended up making some incredible burritos and an amazing off the cuff sweet Thai curry pork!
Cheers,
Cork
Heather: Isn’t it weird? I still get lots of traffic from people looking for instructions on how to pluck pheasants.
Michael: Never picked you as a Starlight Vocal Band fan, and definitely not an Abba fan. Go figger…
STARLIGHT VOCAL BAND & ABBA tell Holly two of my faves for her description of your Swedish Meatballs!
Best to you!
Your Rocky & Bullwinkle idea had me laughing out loud. And the recipe, photography, and food details had me drooling. I can almost taste these little meatballs already. Afternoon delight! 😉
Phew
The world is a comforting [meatball] shape once more
SBW
Moose! Even more Swedish than usual, I reckon. Those look wonderful and I agree, bite-sized is best.
Thanks for the link-love. It’s weird, 10-20% of all my traffic comes from people Googling Swedish meatball recipes.
Cecilia, the plate came from Cost Plus (now known better as “World Market,” I guess to distinguish it from Costco). I’d say 95 percent of our plates come from either Cost Plus or various stores in San Francisco’s Japantown. Japanese plates and bowls ROCK. I go to Japantown a couple times a year to exercise my credit card in the name of food photography.
And Tom, thank you! I’m blushing :-).