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Meatballs Like You Haven’t Seen Them
Alison Roman likes them nicely crisped, without the sogginess that comes from tomato sauce or gravy.
When it comes to food, I will forever favor crispy over saucy, because saucy is the enemy of crispy, and crispy is the best and most pleasant thing about food. For example, I can’t stand when people squeeze lemon over my fried calamari or schnitzel, and think eggplant Parm is a waste of a crunchy piece of eggplant. (I have privately critiqued certain restaurants and dishes by describing them as “overwhelmingly saucy” or “too sauce-forward.”)
And so if you saw the word “meatballs” in the headline and began fantasizing about a simmering pot of tangy tomato sauce or salty Swedish gravy, you have come to the wrong place.
Let me just come right out and say it: These meatballs are not saucy. Instead, they are lightly spiced, pan-fried with a crunchy exterior and served with fat slices of olive oil-browned eggplant on a bed of warmed chickpeas. If that disappoints you, let me comfort you by mentioning that technically there is a sauce, but it’s a thick, spoonable sauce made of seasoned yogurt and it sits below (never over) the meatballs.
To further destroy your meatball fantasies, you may also notice the absence of any binding ingredients, such as bread crumbs, egg or dairy. O.K., so really each meatball is more of a round sausage, but I’m still calling them meatballs. (“Round sausage” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue — no pun intended.)
The good news for anyone I may have lost here is that this whole dish (except the yogurt sauce) is made in one skillet. In fact, the success of each component depends on it.
The meatballs are cooked in the pan first, so the eggplant can brown in a mixture of olive oil and leftover fat. Then the chickpeas are tossed around in whatever is left (not to crisp, but to take the tinny edge off). It’s a dish built layer by layer: The ingredients are cooked separately not to annoy you, but to bring the most out in each one. The end result feels kind of fancy, almost restauranty, but still comes together in about 45 minutes.
Hopefully, by this point, I have so successfully distracted you with the appealing details of this one-skillet dinner that you’ve forgotten all about the lack of sauce or traditional meatball ingredients, and you’re willing to give it a try. If so, my job here is done.
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