Kitchen Archaeology: Oven-Baked Fish Sauce Balls

Recently I was sorting my Giant Blue Binder of Recipes and came across this scribble:

It’s clearly a recipe for meatballs, that I started out writing in one language and finished in a different one (forget bilingualism, I am bi-illiterate). I have no idea where it came from; I can only assume that, since I kept it, they must have tasted OK.

Conveniently, I was looking to cut up the last of the pumpkins we bought last September into soup; meatballs make a great Suppeneinlage.

(Tangent: Einlage. The inserts I put in my shoes when I had plantar fasciitis are called Einlage. The cards that fall out of magazines are called Einlage. Bits of meat/veg/toast/nuts that Germans lay in their broth and cream soups are called Einlage. These are the things I think about while I’m butchering squash.)

The less said about this soup the better; this was the wrong pumpkin. Underweight, and pale. Carrot soup would have been a better choice.

But you’re not here for the soup: On to the meatballs! I left out the salt as I thought the fish sauce would provide enough saltiness; you may want to go higher. Seems like a lot of curry paste, but I used a mild green and it was hardly noticeable. More heat next time!

I like the easy clean-up of baked meatballs, but they lack Röstaroma, the crunchy crust of the Maillard reaction that makes meat tastier. This scrap of paper holds the key to deliciousness from the oven: Five minutes of broiling (“Grillfunktion“) at the end.

It worked a treat. I’m already mentally adding it to all the untried meatballs in my queue.

Finally, Fish Sauce Meatballs in their natural habitat, als Suppeneinlage:

(Now I have to type up the recipe with fonts and colors, so it can have a real place in the Giant Blue Binder of Recipes.)