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Iowa Ham Balls
- Intermediate
- 75 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, a sweet edge rounding the corners.
Ingredients
- 500g ground ham
- 350g ground pork
- 150g breadcrumbs
- 2 eggs
- 120ml milk
- For the glaze: 200g brown sugar, 120ml cider vinegar, 120ml water, 1 tbsp dry mustard
The skills inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy · egg · mustard
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Mix the ground ham, pork, breadcrumbs, eggs, and milk and roll into balls.
- Arrange in a baking dish.
- Whisk the brown sugar, vinegar, water, and mustard into a glaze and pour over the balls.
- Bake at 175C for 45-55 min, basting twice with the glaze, until browned and cooked through. 55 min
- Serve with the thickened glaze spooned over.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Shaping by hand 85 recipes
- The pieces match: weighed, or judged against each other rather than by dividing the mass by eye, so that no piece is half again the size of its neighbour.
- Surfaces are smooth and unbroken with no cracks, tears, or dry patches, and the seams are sealed and sitting underneath.
- The shape is defined and it holds while the tray waits: it has not slumped, spread, or relaxed back out of its form.
- Nothing is trapped that should not be: no air pocket where filling should be, no filling breaking through the surface, and no excess flour greying the outside.
- They finish together in the heat: no piece done while another is still raw, which is the only test that the first mark was met.
Where it goes wrong The dough was worked past its point or shaped without a rest, so it fought back: the pieces spring out of shape on the tray and bake tight, uneven, and torn along the surface.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Chenin Blanc (Vouvray sec)
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais
- From the Taps
- Farmhouse saison
- Zero-Proof
- Cloudy apple juice, chilled
Pork loves fruit and gentle sweetness: orchard-note whites and low-tannin reds flatter it where heavy oak flattens.
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