This post does a quick dive into the world of Japanese-inspired chicken meatballs. We’ll look at Angie Rito and Scott Tacinelli’s recipe for Mortadella & Chicken Meatballs in Italian American: Red Sauce Classics & New Essentials (2021). Then I’ll share a recipe that I developed incorporating Rito and Tacinelli’s use of a cooked sausage to improve the flavor and texture of a chicken meatball. Definitions first.
In A Dictionary of Japanese Food (1995), Richard Hosking defines tsukune as meatballs. Although associated with chicken, tsukune includes ground or minced fish, fowl or other meat served grilled, simmered or fried.
Even when using wing, thigh or leg meat, chicken meatballs often benefit from additional fat and other ingredients to increase flavor and improve texture. When I make meatballs—whether pork, beef, chicken or shellfish—I typically add a number of ingredients to increase richness, such as finely minced onions sautéed in butter, grated cheese and whole milk. I add breadcrumbs for texture.
Even with these additions, I’ve never made a ground chicken meatball that tasted exceptional. To get better results, I tried incorporating traditional ingredients used in yakatori recipes. For example, Matt Abergel’s tsukune recipe in Chicken and Charcoal (2018) includes minced cartilage from the chicken’s soft breastbone. Other recipes add ground chicken skin (sometimes along with cartilage). In my household, these ingredients and their texture met resistance.
Then I came across Rito and Tacinelli’s tsukune-inspired mixture. Rito and Tacinelli turned chicken meatballs into something exceptional. They introduce their recipe in Italian American like this:
“We developed this dish as part of a special-occasion Japanese-inspired pasta omakase menu, feeling inspired by tsukune, the juicy ground chicken skewers popular as a drinking snack in izakayas. But it was so delicious that we now make these meatballs all the time, mixing ground chicken (ideally dark meat) and mortadella, the Italian-American version of bologna, which adds an extra dose of fat and flavor.”
Here’s their recipe for Mortadella & Chicken Meatballs, which makes about 28 meatballs.
2 cups nickel-sized chunks bread, crust removed (from about half an Italian-style loaf or baguette)
1 cup whole milk
½ pound mortadella, roughly chopped
½ pound ground chicken (preferably dark meat)
3 tablespoons Roasted Garlic Puree (on page 300 of Italian American)
1/3 cup finely grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
1 tablespoon kosher salt
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper
1/3 cup thinly sliced scallions, whites only (4 to 6 scallions)
1 large egg
1. Preheat the oven to 400°F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and spray the paper with nonstick cooking spray.
2. In a medium bowl, combine the bread and milk and soak until the bread is thoroughly saturated, about 15 minutes. Squeeze the bread in a clean kitchen towel to wring out as much milk as possible and discard the liquid. You should have about 1¼ cups of wrung bread.
3. Meanwhile, in a food processor, process the mortadella into small pieces, the same size as the ground chicken.
4. In a large bowl, combine the chicken, mortadella, bread, roasted garlic puree, parmesan, salt, black pepper, cayenne, scallion whites, and egg and mix by hand until well incorporated. Form into 1½-inch meatballs (about 2 tablespoons each) and place on the lined baking sheet.
5. Bake the meatballs until golden brown and firm, and a thermometer poked in the center reads 160°F, about 15 minutes.
Leftovers keep, tightly covered in the refrigerator, for up to 3 days.
Now, as delicious as these meatballs are, to my taste, they boarder on being almost...too rich. I’ve made Rito and Tacinelli’s recipe four or five times but now dial back the amount of mortadella. To my palate, the meatballs taste better with less added fat.
This made me wonder: what if, instead of mortadella, I made a chicken meatball kneading in a slightly leaner, lightly smoked, coarsely ground Japanese-style sausage called arabiki? I gave it a try and really liked the result. The pre-cooked arabiki sausage added just enough extra fat and a subtle, smokey flavor. Adding a cooked sausage with an almost crunchy bite to ground chicken also helps with the meatball’s texture.
After a lot of fine tuning, here's my take on a Japanese-inspired tsukune. You’ll see I use a few timesaving shortcuts. Replacing fresh bread with finely ground panko does away with the need to wring out milk-soaked bread with a kitchen towel. And hand-mincing the pre-cooked sausage eliminates the need to use (and clean) a food processor. The finished mixture weighs approximately 325 grams, which I use to form a dozen meatballs weighing about 27 grams each.
40 grams finely minced white onion
15 grams salted butter
pinch Diamond Crystal kosher salt
20 grams panko, finely ground
57.5 grams whole milk
5 grams finely grated Pecorino Romano cheese
5 grams tomato paste
2 grams mushroom seasoning powder
1 gram toasted onion powder
1 gram garlic powder
4 grams Diamond Crystal kosher salt
5 grams white sugar
1 gram ground black pepper
.35 gram yuzu shichimi togarashi
160 grams ground chicken, preferably leg meat
25 grams finely minced arabiki sausage
1. In a small pan, sauté the minced onion in the butter adding a pinch of salt to season. Put the cooked onions into a small bowl. Place the bowl into the freezer to quickly cool.
2. Put the finely ground panko into a medium size bowl and mix in the milk to make a slurry. Add the remaining ingredients. Add the cooled onions to the mixing bowl and knead the mixture by hand until well incorporated.
3. Take a small amount of the ground chicken mixture and fry in butter or oil to judge for seasoning. If necessary, adjust the mixture by adding salt or sugar to taste.
4. Form the mixture into small meatballs. I keep a small bowl of ice water at hand to help form the approximately 1½-inch meatballs. Place on a small tray or plate, cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 1 hour (or longer) before cooking. This refrigerator rest improves the meatball’s flavor.
Rito and Tacinelli bake their mortadella and chicken meatballs in an oven. I’ve never tried oven baking meatballs, but I see recipes that suggest this. Usually, I sauté meatballs. However, I’ve cooked these chicken meatballs in other ways (e.g., poached in a tomato sauce for pasta or simmered on top of rice and dashi in a Japanese donabe). I even pre-cook the meatballs by poaching them in chicken stock or dashi and adding the cooked meatballs into my dish of choice, such as an Italian timballo or lasagne. One constant: When using ground chicken, I always use an instant read thermometer to test a cooked meatball to make certain its center reaches 160°F.
A little information on the ingredients.
Queens-based Burlap & Barrel sells an excellent quality toasted onion powder and garlic powder. It also offers an interesting selection of hard-to-find spices and ingredients. (If you enjoy cooking Indian food, check out their Wild Hing powder.)
And finally, I am truly addicted to the yuzu shichimi togarashi mixture imported by The Japanese Pantry and made by the Yamatsu Tsujita Co. Ltd. located near Osaka, Japan. It’s fantastic to finish ramen, udon and tamagoyaki. It is also delicious on a fried egg sandwich. As I type this post, The Japanese Pantry is out of stock of this blend, but look for it.
I find these chicken and arabiki sausage meatballs as versatile as they are delicious. If you cannot find arabiki sausages, try the recipe with mortadella à la Rito and Tacinelli. This version tastes rich but not as decadent as a 50/50 mortadella/ground chicken blend. Of course, always feel free to adjust a recipe to your personal preference.
