Albondigas {Mexican meatballs}

I like meatballs, I enjoy making them as much as I enjoy consuming them. Now I also love soup and these Mexican meatballs are made specially to be made into soup. Best of both worlds 👌

Ingredients

500g ground beef

200g rice (rinsed & drained)

1 small onion (finely diced) 

1 clove garlic 

7 fresh mint leaves(minced)

1 teaspoon fresh oregano

Half a bell pepper (finely minced)

1 attarugu aka scotch bonnet(minced) 

Salt (to taste) 

Msg

1 large egg

Procedure

1. Get all the ingredients into a large bowl and mix to combine. Mix only until when you form a ball of the mixture it sticks together and doesn't fall apart easily. If you find your mixture is too sticky and stringy then you've overmixed it and will end up with chewy and rubbery meatballs that will be unpleasant to chew on.

2. Using your hands or an ice cream scoop measure out the balls you want and form them into relatively smooth balls and arrange them on a tray. 

3. From stage 2 you can go straight into making soup or place them into freezer safe container and freeze for later use. 

Procedure for Making Albondigas Soup 

1. Heat a little oil in a pot then sear your albondigas in the oil, turn the meatballs periodically to get them to brown all over. Remove the albondigas from the pan and set aside. 

2. Add some blended tomatoes, onions, peppers and garlic in the remaining oil and fry until oil separates and the sauce darkens to a deeper red color. 

You can certainly use a soup base here to ease your work or some leftover tomato sauce or stew. If you are using any of these time savers then simply add it to the meatballs without picking them out of the pot. Let that cook together for 10minutes, covered. After the 10minutes are up add chicken stock or plain water gently, making sure not to stream the liquid directly on the meatballs. 

3. Add any vegetables you want to use in your soup. Potatoes, radishes, yams, carrots, courgettes aka zucchini, pumpkin or squash, peas, leafy greens, even cooked beans. 

If you are using vegetables that cook at different times make sure to first add the ones that you know take longer to cook first. Let those have some time cooking in the soup until they are nearly done before you add the ones that don't take time at the end. 

4. Season your soup with salt, seasoning cubes and any other spice or spice blend you enjoy. Cover and let everything cook on medium heat, a gentle simmer is preferred to roiling boil. When the heat is too high and the soup boils aggressively the meatballs tend to fall apart. We don't want that {for presentation sakes mostly, because it will taste amazing even when the meatballs fall apart to be honest} 

5. When the soup is done (ie all the meat and vegetables are cooked through) turn off the heat then add a few mint and oregano leaves, stir and then serve. 

6. Serve in a deep bowl making sure to have every component with enough sauce then squeeze a generous amount of lime juice and enjoy.

In my soup here I have the albondigas, seared awara aka tofu, white cabbage, peas and carrots 🥘

This is basically it with these delicious albondigas. One limitation is that you cannot simply decide to grill or deep fry or bake these meatballs and eat them like you would regular degular meatballs. It won't work because of the raw rice. You'll end up with uncooked rice in your mouth. However as soups go, you can make a million varieties of soups with these meatballs, just make sure you cook them through always, meaning give enough water and time for them to be fully cooked. Also season generously, there's only salt, pepper and Msg in the albondigas themselves so your broth has to carry a lot of weight to balance everything out. 

Recipe note;

Any kind of rice can be used in this recipe but the type of rice and when you're cooking the albondigas demands particular handling methods. What I mean is if you are cooking the albondigas right away and you are using rice that needs a lot of time on fire to cook then you need to soak your rice in water after rinsing it so as to soften it and give it relatively the same cooking time as the ground beef it is mixed up with, because even though the meatballs are cooked in soup {ie plenty broth and no risk of dry meatballs} there's a chance that cooking the meat for very long can make for tough meat pieces.

If you are using rice such as basmati that is thing and generally doesn't require much liquid and time to cook through then there's no need for you to soak it after rinsing. 

On the other hand if you are making a batch of the albondigas to freeze you can skip the soaking part, as freezing and unfreezing breaks down the rice for you.

As always if you have any questions or comments please leave them in the comments section and I'll be sure to answer them. Thank you 💕