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Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

I made Kenji's Swedish meatballs recipe recently:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ld5cECqIFU0

If you ever want to enjoy Ikea food again, I suggest you do not make this dish. It will be an unfortunate standards-raising experience.

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He added garlic.

He made them large.

Those two things alone completely disqualify this dish as Swedish meatballs. This is heresy. He made meatballs, sure, but them things ain't Swedish meatballs.

Your definition is a bit too One True Scotsman of the meatball world for my taste.

Larger Swedish meatballs are not uncommon in restaurants (and frankly neither is garlic). Kenji's video and recipe uses a lot of nutmeg and even says they are normally eaten with potatoes and lingonberry sauce. Not sure how much more 'Swedish' you can eat your meatballs.

In Sweden, my grandparents' generation didn't even consider garlic food. It was something you had to buy at the pharmacy.

The original Swedish meatballs were flavoured with allspice, but I think most people today think allspice has an old-fashioned taste.

I am very lenient, there's a ton of things that are non-traditional about his recipe. He's missing the onions, the mustard, the cream, and the ground beef. He's also using milk and gelatin, and worcestershire sauce.

I'll even forgive the marmite which is about as un-Swedish as you can get, because he's right about its purpose. I mean, no-one is batting an eye at adding soy sauce, but that's also available in Sweden, unlike marmite.

All of these changes are fine, he's still in the territory of "Swedish meatballs" despite having deviated quite far.

But adding garlic makes it a completely different dish. It is now garlic meatballs or Italian meatballs or whatever. We're in the territory of Southern Europe now, not Sweden.

The size of the things also moves them from meatballs to frikadeller. That's Denmark, not Sweden.

So he's made Italian-Danish garlic frikadeller. Great. I'm sure they're super tasty. But they're not Swedish meatballs.

I prefer this one and find it very authentic - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8Wu3Bps9ic

(For those not familiar, Regular Ordinary Swedish Meal Time is probably my favourite cooking show. Don't forget your pre-dinner mayonnaise)

Wow, I hadn't seen this channel before and LOVE the authenticity and first-person POV. Thanks for sharing!

If you like this channel, Kenji has a book, The Food Lab[0] that is the only place I go for recipes now. I have a hard time eating steaks prepared at restaurants since learning how to properly cook a steak from Kenji. His writing style is also pretty hilarious, and the book is fun to read as it feels like a conversation rather than a fry recipe book.

He also has a new book called The Wok [1] but I haven’t read any of the recipes. I imagine they’ll be delicious though, and also explain the theory of HOW to cook good food rather than just tell you exactly what to do.

[0] The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393081087/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_D4... [1] The Wok: Recipes and Techniques https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393541215/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_XQ...

I’ve been cooking out of The Wok and it’s also fantastic. The technique sections have been super helpful!

FWIW, proper Swedish meatballs are made with a mix of pork and beef. Plain pork meatballs can be quite good, but they're quite different in taste and texture.

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