Lebanese Style Meatballs That Break Every Sweet & Sour Rule

We end up with a lot of leftovers in our fridge when we're recipe testing for our cookbook. And sometimes the combinations of those dishes do not work at all. But occasionally you find a winner. This is a creamy aubergine dip with pomegranate glazed meatballs. It is sweet, sour, tangy, sharp and absolutely delicious. You're gonna love this. Now the first thing you need for some mutabbal is some charred aubergines. We're gonna start off by roasting a couple aubergines and before we stick them in the pan, I'm just gonna poke them a few times with a knife. This just helps them cook a lot quicker. I've got a regular stainless steel pan here. Just put that on high heat. That's ripping hot. I'm just gonna go in with a little bit of oil and then I'll get those aubergines in there. This is gonna get smoky so if you prefer, just stick them on a barbecue outside. And once they've had a few minutes on one side, flip them over. You should have some dark charred burnt bits. And then just keep doing that a few times until they're nice and charred all over. We need to continue cooking them though. So I'm gonna keep them in the pan and stick them in the oven. If you've got a stainless steel pan with a stainless steel handle like this one from Made In, then you're good to go. But it's one of my favorite things about these pans. Now while that's in there, we can actually start preparing the kofta mixture. And for that, you need onions like every kofta has. These are just a couple which I'm gonna roughly chop. And then I'm gonna stick them in a small food processor. We're gonna process these until they turn into a pulp. You can just stick them in a blender or you can just grate the onions instead. I'm just lazy. Now this onion pulp has a lot of water in it. We need to get rid of some of that so the meatballs don't end up too loose and crumbly in a way. I've got a nut milk bag or a cheesecloth here. Just chuck those onions in. I'm gonna squeeze out about half of the liquid. That's pretty much all the easily removable moisture. The other thing you need to prep is a bit of parsley. And this has had the thick stalks removed already. And it just needs to be finely chopped. Let's make the kofta. So I've got a big mixing bowl. I'm all gloved up. So I'm gonna start off by adding in our meat. I've got a kilogram of lamb mince here which is about 20% fat. You can use beef or any other meat but you do need that 20% fat in there. Then we've got our two onions which we grated and we squeezed the liquid out of. And the parsley. We're gonna season this to give it a bit more of a levantine flavor. So salt, black pepper, and some boharat, a little bit of allspice, some cinnamon, then some sumac, and a little bit of cayenne pepper for some heat. Last thing that's going in is a few cloves of garlic. And then the fun part begins. We're gonna start kneading this all together. You really want to get in there with your hands and push the mixture around. Squeeze it into the bowl just like you would with a bread dough. Just to get all the ingredients mixed in well. And then to start binding the proteins together. After about a minute and a half of mixing, grab a piece, pull it apart, and you get all these stringy fibers. That means that you have a well-mixed kofta. So after mixing you're going to want to shape this but check your mixture first. If it seems oily like the fat is melting, then stick it in the fridge for around half an hour before you move on. Mine is feeling good so I can straight away start shaping it into individual balls. So I've already figured out the size of the balls. I want them around 40 to 45 grams each. They don't need to be perfect. You just want them roughly the same size so they cook evenly. And you're just going to roll them out until they're nice and smooth. If any of them are a bit too big or a bit too small, you can always steal a lump from another one. This is what they should look like when they're all done. So I'm just going to stick those in the fridge to rest and so that fat can firm up again before we cook them. Okay, so our aubergines are fully cooked. They have some good char on them but they are really hot. We need to let these cool down before we can mash them. So I'm just going to set them aside. Now in the meantime, let's start cooking these meatballs. Then grab your favorite or larger stainless steel pan. Mine is made in five ply stainless steel frying pan, 12 inch size, so that should fit all of the meatballs. And I'm just going to put it to preheat on high. That special steel will give me a perfectly distributed heat profile, zero hot spots and it's going to be really easy for me to control the temperature when we're searing and building a sauce. And once this pan gets up to temperature, it is just as good as non-stick without any of the risk of any forever chemicals leaching into your food. All you got to do is just add a little bit of oil and then you can start sticking those meatballs into brown. After about 90 seconds, they should be ready to flip onto the next side. Roll them around like that and look at that color you get from the pan. Now just like all their products, Maiden have designed this pan to have all the same professional quality features as you would expect in a professional kitchen, such as these curved walls which make flipping your meatballs really easy and the rolled rim which makes pouring out a sauce feel free. That's why their kitchenware gets such high reviews with over 100,000 five-star reviews from real home cooks and that's why they also get used by real chefs in three Michelin-starred restaurants across America. So if you're looking to buy some new kitchen equipment, check out the stainless steel collection and Maiden's other cookware by using the link in my description to save on your order. Now these have been searing for about five, six minutes. I'm going to take them out. So let's do the same thing with the second batch and then we can get started on that sauce. I've just taken out the last meatballs and we've got a nice frond in the base of the pan. So first thing I'm going to do is deglaze it. I've just got some vegetable stock here. You can use beef, lamb, whatever you want. I'm just going to work through that, release all those bits of flavor that have baked into the pan. This is the benefit of using stainless steel or a pan from a material that would usually stick because it'll develop this delicious frond. So everything's been released. Let's go in with the rest of the stock and then we've got a bunch of pomegranate molasses here, which is going to give us the sweet and sour flavor that we really want. For seasonings, a little bit of salt with some black pepper and then some cayenne for some heat, a little bit of lemon juice and a sprig of rosemary as well. Oh, that smells so delicious. Now in this bowl, I've made a basic cornstarch slurry and now that the mixture is boiling, I can pour that in and that's going to thicken up the sauce to give us, well, like a glaze almost. We can see we've now got this glistening sauce and that's going to continue to thicken as it cooks. We're going to add the meatballs back in now, just carefully though, so we don't get too much splashing. I should have been a bit more careful. This smells absolutely incredible. It's going to take around 15 minutes for that sauce to reduce down to the thickness we want and for those meatballs to fully cook through. So I'm just going to turn it down to medium, medium high-ish. So just so you can see the bubbles, but it's not boiling too vigorously. So that sauce has thickened down. It is the most delicious looking glaze, really deep brown. The meatballs are fully cooked through. I'm going to set it aside and I'm just going to leave that till we're finished with the aubergine and we're ready to plate. So we want to peel our aubergines to get the flesh. There's a lot of ways you can do this. I like to just take off the head and then if you're lucky, you can kind of just squeeze it out. Now you just need to mince it really fine. Just use a sharp knife and work your way through it back and forth quite a bit. Now that's pretty finely mashed. They're tiny pieces of aubergine and depending upon how long you've cooked this for, there might be a lot of liquid in there. If there is, put it in a strainer and then get rid of that excess liquid. So this is looking pretty good. So it's ready to be turned into a mutabal right away. And then let's make a tahini sauce, which is basically the rest of the mutabal. I'm going to go in with yogurt and then we've got some tahini and then some salt and black pepper. And then usually mutabal will have lemon juice in it, but because we've got an acidic dish that's going on top of this, kind of want to keep this just creamy. We're going to skip the lemon for this and I'm going to add about a tablespoon of water. Mix this together and see if we need more. That is really, really stiff. So we definitely need more water. So it's got a pretty thick consistency, which I think is right for the aubergine. We'll add that and then we'll see if it needs more adjustment. So that's got the consistency we want. It's thick enough to sit under the meatballs without being crushed by them, but also still got that creamy, delicious texture we're looking for. Now let's make the final component, which is the fried garlic sauce that goes on top. Now I'm going to put a tiny sauce pan, which by the way, is also part of Maiden's stainless steel collection. I'll put this on the stove and put it on medium high. And I'm going to let that heat up for a second. Then we're going to go in with a little bit of olive oil, quite a bit. And then we're going to add some pine nuts and fry those until they start to take on some colour. So now I'm going to add in the garlic because we want this all to be cooked at the same time. And then a bunch of chopped coriander as well. We're only going to cook it for around 30 seconds just to remove the most raw of that garlic flavour. And then that's done. Now I do want a bit more oil in there though because we do want some to spoon over the dish. So I'm just going to leave that in there to infuse. So grab yourself a serving platter and then spoon over quite a bit of that mutabal. Spread it across the base all nice. And then put a few of the meatballs, space them out evenly. And you could go one or two layers. Then spoon over some of that garlic and coriander sauce and then drop over some of those pomegranate kernels. And you're ready to dig in. You can use some bread. You can serve this alongside some rice. This is really one of those dishes that when you put in the middle of the table, everyone's going to just jump right in. That is so incredibly good. The combination of the creaminess of the aubergine with that spicy mint sauce and then the tangy sour flavour of the meatballs. Absolutely fantastic. In fact, I'm going to put a little bit more sauce on there because I want to make it extra sour. But that is absolutely a 10 out of 10 dish. You got to try it.