Little Foodies Sweden - Meatball Challenge

If somebody had told me that I'd feel nervous about a challenge between my home cooked food and bought food I'd have laughed. But nervous I was. I made the Swedish Style Meatballs (recipe below) and bought some ready made Organic Swedish Meatballs from Waitrose. For the purpose of the test only we tried one of each.

Homemade on the left - Bought on the right

Preferences were as follows:
Hubby: Homemade
Little: Homemade
Small: Bought
Me: Homemade, though I did waiver!

So homemade was the winner! Thank goodness for that. Obviously I sulked about Small's final decision but I soon got over it.

The bought ones were really good, they had a nice texture and lots of flavour. But though they were organic they still tasted processed. The homemade ones had a softer texture, but could definitely have done with more salt. I think that's why Small preferred the bought ones, he loves really strong tasting food and as the bought ones were heavily salted, they did seem to have more flavour. Served with all the trimmings of lingonberry jam, pickled cabbage, runner beans and the traditional creamy sauce, the homemade ones won hands down and I think anybody would have come to that conclusion. Really, I'm not just saying that.

The recipe for our Swedish Style Meatballs (made approx 40 meatballs)
250g organic beef mince
250g organic pork mince
1 medium onion peeled and finely chopped
1 tablespoon of oil for frying the onion
1 cup of double cream
1/2 cup of Wholegrain Buckwheat flour
1 egg
a pinch of salt and a few grinds of pepper
1 teaspoon all spice
2oz butter and a big splosh of oil for frying the meatballs
Flour on a plate for rolling the meatballs prior to frying

Fry the onion in tablespoon of oil
In a large bowl add the pork and beef mince and mix it together with your hands.
Add in the flour, double cream, egg, all spice, salt and pepper and the fried onion. Again mix with your hands. You need to really get stuck in and mix well.
Form into small round balls and roll in the flour on a plate.
Put on a separate plate until you are ready to fry them.
In a large frying pan add the butter and oil and warm. Add the meatballs and fry gently for about 5 minutes on each side. I finished mine off in the oven as I was getting other things ready. They could have been finished in the frying pan. You'd have to test to make sure they were cooked through.

This was our version as we didn't have things to hand that were needed. Most recipes that I've seen for Swedish meatballs have potato in and rusk flour. Ours were really good. They're very different to Italian style meatballs but equally delicious! It would depend what sort of mood for food you were in to determine whether to go Italian or Swedish.

Swedish Style Cream Sauce
1 cup of double cream
1 cup of beef stock
2 tablespoons Japanese Teriyaki Sauce
1 tablespoon plain flour (optional)
salt and pepper to taste
Put the cream, stock, teriyaki sauce and salt and pepper in a pan and start to warm through. Whisk in some plain flour to thicken if required.

Really delicious. I would make this again as a sauce for other things too. Again, it was different to Swedish recipes which all those that I saw said to add Chinese Soy Sauce and not Teriyaki but as we've been using soy sauce a lot recently we'd run out.