Long time, no post. I've been busy with work, had a broken arm for some time, and on top of that my apartment was under renovation, so apologies for the long posting intervals. My previous post, the one about new potatoes and herring, is from the beginning of May. Right now I'm on a short business trip in Mariehamn, Åland, with some extra time before my flight departs back home, so I figured this is as good a time to blog as I'll ever get.
I've been using my trusty Chinese bamboo steamer on a weekly basis to cook salmon, as with steam the texture and taste get close to perfection, and a fillet is done in six minutes. My new salmon staple is a butterflied fillet marinated in soy sauce and wasabi, and I really, really love the sharpness of wasabi with warm, fatty fish. After months of raving I managed to get Anna to try the dish, and although she liked it, apparently her steamed teriyaki salmon was even better. A sucker for new recipes, I tried hers, and sure enough it was super yummylicious!
This post is not about steaming or fish, though. Enough of those already, even if the steamer did make it into the background of the picture. Since the teriyaki salmon was so good, and the teriyaki sauce sooo easy to make from scratch, I decided to play around and make something else with it. First I thought of chicken teriyaki, but I didn't have any chicken. What I did have was a pound of fat-free, super high grade ground beef left over from a steak tartare I had made the day before.
S loves meatballs, so making them instead of some potentially fancier dish was an easy decision. Since the teriyaki sauce can be done in a flash, the whole dish is ready in 45 minutes, from fridge to table. Basically teriyaki sauce is just mirin (Japanese cooking wine), soy sauce and sugar mixed together. Simply dissolve one tablespoon of granulated sugar in 1/2 dl each of mirin and soy sauce and you're done. 30 seconds in a microwave oven does the trick. I read that teri means shine and yaki grilling. The shine comes from the sugar when the sauce is cooked thick and poured over the food, meatballs in this case.
There is no egg and no breadcrumbs in these meatballs. Instead, raw potatoes go into the food processor with the shallots and garlic, and a quarter of the sauce is kneaded straight into the mix, so the only other seasoning needed is black pepper. With completely fat-free beef the potato is there to keep the meatballs juicy. I rolled them small and packed them side by side into a glass oven dish, where the sauce that runs off collects at the bottom.
I strongly suggest using low sodium soy sauce unless you have a serious death wish. In this recipe I used 1 dl of regular soy sauce. Apparently that holds nearly three teaspoons of salt, which is quite a lot for 400 grams of meat. After all that salt I still feel the bloat.
Recipe card
Teriyaki Meatballs
- 2-4 servings
- Oven 200 °C
- Baking 30 min
- All in all 45 min
- Energy 950 kcal total
You will need
Teriyaki sauce
| 100 ml | low sodium soy sauce |
| 100 ml | mirin |
| 2 tbsp | granulated sugar |
| 2 tbsp | brown Maizena or similar corn starch |
Meatballs
| 400 g (1 lb) | fat-free ground beef |
| 2-3 | shallots |
| 3 | small potatoes |
| 2 | cloves of garlic |
| black pepper to taste |
Method
- Mix the soy sauce, mirin and sugar, and quickly warm in the microwave oven. Stir until the sugar has dissolved.
- Mix the shallots, raw potatoes, garlic and black pepper in a food processor until fine. Knead the mix together with the ground beef and 1/4 or slightly more of the teriyaki sauce. Make small meatballs and place them in an oven dish.
- Cook the rest of the teriyaki sauce with the corn starch until quite thick, and pour over the meatballs. Bake at 200 °C for 30 minutes, until nice and brown.
Leave a Reply