Emperial Kjøttkaker (Meatballs)

Growing up, my family had a variety of Christmas traditions—many of which are shared by other folks with Scandinavian ancestry in the United States. One of these, was the requirement that we eat “Swedish Meatballs” (Köttbullar) for dinner on Christmas Eve. Any suggestion that we could ever—even once—eat something else for Christmas Eve dinner was tantamount to heresy, and likely to get you disowned.

Of course, this presented a problem when I stopped eating meat. Back then, in the dark days of the vegan meat industry, there was no chance you’d find a vegan (or even vegetarian) Swedish Meatball anywhere in sight. You had your frozen crumbles, your frozen chick’n (which somehow often had dairy in it for some reason), and maybe, if you were lucky, you had some sad attempt—by someone who seemingly had only read about them—at Italian Meatballs. No, if you wanted something else, or even just better than all that nonsense, you had to make it yourself. So, knowing that my family standing was on the line, I set out to make my own Swedish Meatballs—sans meat.

My first few attempts resulted in failure—they were edible, but hardly good. I ended up trying all the vegetarian and vegan meatball recipes out there. I made meatballs out of beans, nuts, mushrooms, tofu, seitan, and tempeh—sometimes all of them all together. Some had the right flavor, but the wrong texture. Others had the right texture, but the wrong flavor. But slowly, over nearly 15 years of research and experimentation, I built up a recipe that I could be proud of—a recipe I could serve to my “meat and potatoes” father and get a “you know, that’s pretty good” in return. Basking in the glow of fatherly approval, and because I never really understood why a bunch of “Norwegian Americans” were making “Swedish” meatballs, I decided I’d call mine what they really are—Kjøttkaker (Norwegian for “meat cakes”). They’re a bit larger and flatter than their Swedish counterparts, but otherwise very similar.

The basic composition of these Kjøttkaker—a seitan made with tofu—became the foundation of all of my vegan meats to follow, and remains the foundation of those recipes to this day (with the exclusion of my TVP crumbles, of course). So, I suppose it’s only fitting for me to kick off this here recipe blog with the one that started it all.

So let me be the first to say, “Velkommen til smacksby” (welcome to flavor town).

Fuck yeah, let’s do it.