Posted by johngl
While these may not quite rival the humorous spectacle of Pete Schweddy’s Balls (Schweddy was portrayed by Alec Baldwin in 2001) they do, by all accounts, taste good.
So johngl, why do your balls taste so good?
I am so glad you asked. It is the ingredients.
Perhaps there is a slogan in there somewhere:
Better ingredients,
Better Balls!
Junior John’s
Okay, never mind. It’s early on the morning after Christmas day, what do you expect…
Anyway, ingredients do matter:
Clockwise from the top center: Peanut oil, corn starch, pork shoulder, imitation crab, and water chestnuts.
Imitation crab? You have got to be kidding!
Nope. Back when I first started working on this recipe (roughly 30 years ago), I did use canned lump crab meat. Of course, back then, I only made a dozen or so at a time. They would disappear in minutes. Now, a small batch is about 90 balls. Have you checked the price on three pounds of lump crab meat?
The recipe goes like this:
equal parts of crab, ground pork, and water chestnuts. That’s it.
For this batch, there was 3 lbs of imitation crab, a 3 lb chunk of pork shoulder, and six 8oz cans of water chestnuts (only 2 of which are pictured).
The equipment needed to process this mass of stuff is:
From the far left going clockwise: the grinder, the fryer, and the food processor.
For smaller batches, everything can be done by hand, but for nine pounds of stuff, help is required.
First, cut up the chunk of meat:
Grind the meat:
And it winds up here:
Switch machines and chop the water chestnuts with just a few pulses:
Then, move to the crab:
The crab is pretty delicate (even the imitation stuff) so just do a couple of quick pulses in two separate batches. It fluffs up substantially:
Now, it is time to fold it all together. Just dump everything into a very large bowl and, using your hands, mix it all up until the ingredients are well incorporated.
Time now for seasonings: a couple of oz. soy sauce, one oz. Worcestershire sauce, one teaspoon fresh ground pepper, 1/8 teaspoon pequin powder, 1/2 teaspoon granulated garlic, 1/2 teaspoon hot Hungarian paprika, and about a teaspoon of ground mustard.
Mix it up thoroughly until it looks like this:
Doesn’t that look just tasty? Okay, so not really. But it starts to look better when you roll it into cute little balls:
Then, take these guys and roll them in corn starch laced with a bit of fresh ground pepper:
Load them into a fryer that is loaded with peanut oil heated to at least 350 F.
The temp will drop a bit once you place your balls in the boiling oil:
Keep an eye on them and pull them once they turn that nice, golden brown:
I usually get 10 balls per pound, so serve them (hot or cold–they are good either way) in groups of three with cocktail sauce or a nice soy blend of soy sauce, grated ginger, mirin, and rice wine vinegar (or a handy pot sticker sauce you might laying around).
You can use these as appetizers, but I would suggest making them a little smaller. Most everyone seems to really, really like these things, so make sure you limit access. Otherwise, people will fill up on them and won’t have any room left for the meal you worked so hard to prepare.
Please eat responsibly.
