These make a great appetizer or light meal.
Not much else to say about them, except to go easy on the mixing, so they don’t get tough.
The pineapple adds a nice amount of sweetness to offset the salty fish sauce.
Enjoy!
What you’ll need:
- 1 lb ground pork
- 2T starch
- 3 lime leaves (half a stalk of minced lemongrass is a good substitute)
- 2 scallions, finely chopped
- 2T cilantro, chopped
- 100g pineapple, finely chopped (fresh is better) + chunks for topping the meatballs, if you want
- 1t fish sauce
- 2t Thai spring roll sauce
- 0.5t salt
- More Thai spring roll sauce—optional as a garnish
What to do:
Remove the thick, center vein from the lime leaves and discard. Finely chop the remainder of the lime leaves.
Heat the oil in a medium frypan over medium-high heat and sauté the pineapple, lime leaves (or lemongrass, if using) and scallions. The idea is to cook these items and cook off some of the liquid in the chopped pineapple. You’ll know most of the liquid is cooked off when less steam rises from the pan. Set aside to cool.
When the pineapple mixture has cooled, add the ground pork, followed by the starch, cilantro, fish sauce, spring roll sauce and salt. Mix until just distributed. Now add the cooked pineapple mixture and mix again, until distributed.
You can form and cook the meatballs right now, or cover the bowl and let the flavors develop in the refrigerator for a couple of hours.
If you’re going to add pineapple chunks to the top of the meatballs, cut up your pieces and put them on a rack sprayed with oil. But the rack under the boiler under high heat until the top of the pineapple begins to char. Remove from the heat and set aside.
To cook the pork, form the meat mixture into balls and put into a large frypan over medium heat. Let them cook, turning occasionally, until the interior temperature reaches 165 degrees.
When fully cooked, skewer a pineapple chunk onto each meatball with a toothpick.
Serve hot or warm with spring-roll dipping sauce.
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