three times is the charm: ginger-garlic chicken meatball soup ahoy
continuing our cooking while Rome burns thematic arc
Last time I demonstrated how to make mushroom ravioli at home using objects and supplies you might already have lying around. Tonight, we’re going to explore the wonder and delight of tiny chicken meatballs produced not by rolling gloppy minced chicken around in one’s disappointed fingers, but by extrusion. Trust me, this technique makes your life SO MUCH easier.
The first time I did this soup was actually supposed to be a sort of riff on a recipe in Fuchsia Dunlop’s Szechuan cookbook but the way Dunlop describes forming the meatballs straight-up does not work in the world I inhabit. Chicken mince, even chicken mince with stuff in it, has the consistency of extremely sticky thin dough and is impossible to shape without it gluing itself to your hands and refusing to let go. I had a whole batch of the stuff and no way to form it into balls. So I thought, fuck it, I’m going to pipe it instead.
This works. It works better than it has any right to. It works due to two factors: you have to cut off the individual balls as they emerge from the piping bag with a sharp quite cold knife, and when these individual 3/4-inch lengths of piped mixture drop into boiling water, they cook very quickly and shrink from rough rectangles into near-spheres in the process.
Here, then, is how you make this soup. It is immensely forgiving. It can be done with homemade stock or store-bought broth or even straight-up caldo de pollo cube broth, but I’ve had best results using store-bought to supplement homemade stock. You can season the chicken with anything you want. You can do this with tarragon and marjoram and garlic and rosemary and make a sharp-bitter-savory soup without the mushrooms and with bright bitter greens. You can do this with fresh chiles and deeply spiced broth and make it into the kind of thing that opens your sinuses and makes you happily sweat. For me, the ginger-garlic-mushroom-greens combination works gloriously and is incredibly easy to do.
You will need — for this version — one package of ground chicken, three large green onions, a chunk of raw ginger about the size of your thumb, four or five large garlic cloves, a large handful of shiitake mushrooms, a double handful of chopped greens — bok choy, chard, beet greens, anything of that ilk — and at least 8 cups of stock or broth, more or less to taste. Also: sea salt, ground ginger, garlic powder, Szechuan peppercorns if you have them.
Chop your ginger into a fine mince. You can grate it if you want a smoother texture in your meatballs but I kinda like the tiny fireworks of flavor that come with minced bits of ginger. If you have a garlic press, put your garlic through that; if not, mince the shit out of it. Mince two of your three green onions to about the same size as the garlic and ginger; chop the other one into thin slices crossways.
Get a giant stockpot and put it on one burner of your stove on simmer/low flame; put your stock/broth into it and add a healthy shake of ground ginger and garlic powder. Boil a smaller saucepan full of salted water on a nearby burner. Once it boils, keep it going. This is what you’re going to use to cook your meatballs.
Take your ground chicken and put it into a medium-sized mixing bowl. Add to it the garlic, the ginger, and the minced green onions. Add a generous amount of ground sea salt and black pepper, along with some crushed Szechuan peppercorns if available. Mix thoroughly. By this time your saucepan should be boiling merrily. Get a bowl and slotted spoon ready. Carefully spoon your chicken mixture into one corner of a gallon-sized ziplock bag; when it’s full, squeeze out the air and seal the bag. You are now ready to pipe your chicken meatballs.
Cut off the corner of the ziplock with kitchen scissors. You want the hole to be no wider than your fingertip. Take a sharp knife in your other hand. With the chicken mixture in its bag cupped in your dominant hand, the way you would pipe icing, slowly pipe a stream of chicken mixture over the boiling water in the saucepan. Let 3/4 of an inch extrude before you cut the mixture off with the knife and let it fall into the water.
This will take a little practice. You will get better at controlling the speed at which the mixture is extruded and also the technique whereby you chop off each individual meatball. They will not look like meatballs when you cut them off: have faith. As they cook they will plump up into something quite close to a sphere.
After you’ve done about ten or fifteen, stop: you want your water to stay close to boiling, and dropping cold meats into it will knock down its temp. Rest your piping bag nozzle-up in a bowl or something while you wait for the meatballs to cook. They will pop up to the surface when they are nearly ready.
A moment here to talk about food safety. I hate not being able to measure a done-ness by a visual or contact-thermometer reading, but I have learned a lot about how these little objects behave relative to their level of cookedness, and you really can do it visually if you’re making meatballs that are all the same size and shape. The first couple of times you try, take one out and cut it open to make sure there’s no pink inside. After a few you’ll get to recognize when they’re done by how high in the water they are riding — but if in doubt, cut it open to make sure. Remove the cooked meatballs from the water with a slotted spoon and go pipe a new set in. Repeat until you’ve used up all your chicken mixture.
While all of this has been going on, your stockpot with your spiced broth has been simmering on the back burner. Taste it and see what it needs. You will probably want to add about a cup and a half of liquid to get it to the final volume, and at this point you can add soy sauce, a splash of mirin or cooking sherry to balance the saltiness if it’s too strong, a tiny dribble of black vinegar or splash of white wine to jack up the acid, or any other flavor adjustments you feel are needed. Take the pot of water you’ve used to cook your meatballs off the front burner and bring the stockpot forward. From now on you’re cooking in this.
Bring the liquid up to a rapid simmer. Once you’ve adjusted the taste, add in your sliced shiitakes, let cook for a few minutes, then add your greens. Stir thoroughly. Let it cook for several more minutes before tasting again; adjust seasoning. Once you like the taste of the broth with the mushrooms and greens, add your seasoned meatballs back into the soup and let it cook for at least ten minutes at a rapid simmer, then serve. The meatballs will have sunk immediately on being added to the pot and will now be back up at the surface vying for space with the greens, scallions, and mushrooms.
Serve generously; take the pot off the heat, cover. When it’s cool enough, either put the entire thing in the fridge or decant the remaining soup into containers. Recipe as written serves two generously or four parsimoniously, with the same amount left over.
(It is also totally possible to make these meatballs with whatever seasoning you like and freeze them for use in future recipes, soup be damned.)
Next time: MINESTRONE WARS and SAMOSA POTATOES.