In 2006 I returned to Australia after three years in Spain.  In the intervening years I’ve been amused to see the proliferation of Spanish tapas restaurants that have seemingly come out of nowhere.  Everyone seems to be doing tapas (and to varying degrees of success).  As much as I enjoy going to these restaurants (well, some of them anyway) the tapas they serve seems to bear little resemblance to what I remember eating at my local, Bar Dia, and at many other small tapas bars I visited around Spain.

Eating tapas in Australia involves adding airs and graces to the ritual that I’m not familiar with.  In a tapas bar in Spain wine is drunk out of small tumblers rather than fancy stemware and the beer is the local draft drunk in canas rather than imported bottle beer.  The bars themselves are usually small, cramped and feature a prominent coffee machine.

Although regional variations are quite pronounced there are a number of dishes that are generally found on a tapas menu including croquettas, jamon, tortilla espanol, pimientos de padron, rabo de toro, pulpo de galego and my all time favourite, albondigas.  It is rare to see more than a couple of these dishes on a menu in an Australian tapas restaurant.

Albondigas, or Spanish meatballs, has no specific recipe.  In this sense it is a tricky dish to pin down, not only is there regional variations but recipes can differ from bar to bar, kitchen to kitchen.

Whilst living in Spain I found myself becoming addicted to both jamon and albondigas.  Every time I travelled somewhere new I had to try the local version of albondigas.  I must have eaten thousands of the little suckers.  I can safely say that the best albondigas I ate was in a tapas bar whose name I can’t recall in the small Andalusian mountain town of Ronda.  The meat had just the right balance of herbs and spices and the tomato sauce was just right, rich with just enough garlic to flavour the dish without overpowering it.  For a long time I’ve wanted to recreate this dish and when I found this recipe I thought it worth a try.

Ingredients

1/2 lb ground pork

1/2 lb ground beef

1/2 lb ground veal

1 cup of bread crumbs

6 garlic cloves (if using good garlic this should probably be scaled back a bit)

2 tbs chopped fresh parsley

1 1/2 tsps coriander seeds

1/2 tsp nutmeg

1/2 tsp cumin

1/2 tsp hot paprika (vary depending on taste)

Salt and Pepper

Olive oil

1 medium onion, minced

1 cup dry white wine

3 cups of crushed Italian/Roma tomatoes

I had bought my meat in cubed form so the first step was to mince it.  I chose the larger die however in retrospect I probably should have gone smaller to make a finer meat consistency.

The bread was blitzed in the food attachment of my stick blender and added to the meat mixture.  The garlic was minced and the parsley chopped and this too was added.  The coriander, cumin, nutmeg and pepper were all ground then along with the salt and hot paprika mixed in with the meat and breadcrumbs.   The minced meat was then hand formed into small balls.  I ended up with 40 meatballs, just covering my baking tray.

These were then baked for around 12 minutes in an oven pre heated to 180 degrees C until they had browned nicely.

In the meantime the tinned whole tomato was processed in preparation for the sauce.  The onion and two cloves of garlic were minced and then fried off in hot olive oil in a large frypan.  The tomato and wine were added to the pan and the combination left to simmer for 15 minutes.

The sauce was seasoned then the meatballs, which were ready by then, were added and left to simmer on  low heat for for a further 10 minutes.

In keeping with Spanish tradition I ate my albondigas with some crusty bread and a nice cold beer.