The glory that is meatballs. I'm beginning to think that meatballs are the way to go with this skewer thing, at least some of the time. You can pack more flavor into a meatball than you can on a piece of meat. A meatball is a very Buddhist expression of no outside / no inside. It's all just "side." I've also been inspired by reading Charcuterie (pictured at right). This book should win the Nobel prize for literature. Alas, there are no trips to Stockholm in any cook's future. Meatballs seem to be in the fuzzy middle ground between hamburgers and full-blown sausages. I like hamburgers just fine, and they are popular with the family during the summer, but I always feel like they need a lot of work in terms of salt and flavoring.
On the other hand, I'm not ready to invest in basic sausage-making equipment, as there are a few things in the queue before that stuff. Even without the equipment you can still make free-form sausages, which is pretty much what a meatball is, especially if you add extra pork back fat like sausage. And the best cuts for sausages/meatballs are the cheaper cuts, like chuck, pork shoulder, and leg of lamb. Actually, I make all my regular skewers out of those anyway, as they have more flavor and are almost as tender as the more expensive cuts from the loin and rib. And you don't have to use pork fat to enrich the meatball; you can use butter, egg white, or even peanut butter, which makes supremely juicy burgers and balls without imparting much of a peanut taste. Sounds weird, but it's true. Try a couple of tablespoons per pound of meat.
This one. For these I was going for a basic Italian-style profile, so I added garlic, black pepper, Italian herbs, ground fennel seed, and parmesan pretty liberally to a mixture of chuck, pork shoulder, and veal shoulder, along with salt (of course) and let them sit overnight. I ground the meat myself in a food processor, but it is hard to get all the long stringy tough bits out (I'm using this argument as way to justify a meat grinder). I worked the mixture for a while by hand to get it stiffer so that it would stay on the skewer. As I learned from Charcuterie, the more you work ground meat, the stickier it becomes. Another trick to keeping it on the skewer is to surround it on both sides with a slice of onion, concave side toward the ball. The astute (or obsessive) among you will have noticed that every piece of meat in my skewers is hugged on each side with a concave piece of red onion. I skewered them up with orange peppers and fennel and put them on a medium grill.
You know the extra bit of meat that won't fill up a skewer? It becomes the cook's treat.
