The most annoying part of this recipe is of course caramelizing the onions. I take no shortcuts when I do this, and I suggest you suffer through it as well. It took me near two hours to caramelize 10 onions because I sweat them on the lowest heat setting possible. You can check my guide to caramelizing onions if you want some extra help.

The meatballs themselves are 100% pork. I know some people like to do a 50/50 with pork and beef, or make turkey meatballs or what have you, and you are free to do whatever you wish. However for this recipe I’ve just used pork since I feel it works best with the caramelized onions.

Ingredients

400 grams Pork; minced.
150 grams Caramelized Onions; roughly 8-10 yellow onions worth. The onions I start with weigh between 150-170 grams each, about the size of a baseball.
100 grams Breadcrumbs. I used German Style Paniermehl since it’s my favorite to use with meatballs, but you can use whatever breadcrumbs you prefer.
3 cloves Garlic; minced
1 tbsp Smoked Paprika
2 tsp Red Chili Flakes
1 large Egg
Salt; to taste
2 tbsp Dried Ground Porcini Mushrooms
2 tbsp White Wine; dry
1 tbsp Butter
40 ml Heavy Cream
1 tbsp Flour; more or less depending on desired thickness
1 tsp Black Pepper; freshly cracked

Instructions

This recipe assumes you’ve already made or bought caramelized onions, but if you haven’t, I used 10 medium yellow onions (1.5 kg total starting weight roughly) for this recipe, which resulted in about 150 grams of caramelized onions. I cook them extremely slowly in my dutch oven on the lowest flame my burner has. They are dressed with a little olive oil and 60 ml of water and allowed to sweat for as long as possible. I mix them up every 15 minutes or so until they are about 80% reduced, then I watch them carefully stirring often so they do not burn until they are reduced to 10% from starting volume. You can see my full guide to caramelizing onions here.

In a bowl add the pork, caramelized onions, breadcrumbs, garlic, egg, salt, red chili flakes, and smoked paprika and mix thoroughly with your hands. If it seems too wet, add some more breadcrumbs. Cover the bowl and place in the fridge for a half hour.

Pre-heat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Line a baking tray with parchment paper and make slightly larger than golf ball sized meatballs with your hands. Place them on the tray an inch or two apart. You should be able to get 16 meatballs out of this recipe.
Place in the oven for 20 minutes. At 20 minutes, turn them over and let cook for another 5 in the oven. While they are cooking, do step 5.

Take the dried ground mushrooms and put it in 60 ml of warm or room temperature water. In a sauce pan, make a roux of the butter and the flour. When it is combined, add the mushroom water and whisk. When the sauce thickens a bit, add the white wine and whisk some more. Slowly add the heavy cream and salt and pepper to taste. Use more or less heavy cream to your desired consistency.

When the meat balls are done, add them to the sauce pan and agitate the pan, coating the caramelized onion meatballs fully with the mushroom sauce. Serve hot and with bread.

Notes

This is just my sort of cheat way to make mushroom sauce, if you have a preferred way you should use that. I’ll probably update this recipe once I make a more time intensive mushroom sauce. That being said, this mushroom sauce is still good, and a quick way to make one if you are in a time crunch. I like how it can be made while the meatballs are baking.

You can also use fresh mushrooms if you like to make sauce that way, I find dried mushrooms impart a stronger flavor, but it is entirely up to you.