How to Make Japanese Chicken Meatballs

Female Thank you. So bar food means burgers and wings right? Wrong, we’re in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood in a new restaurant that takes bar food and turns it Japanese. The place is called Izakaya Ten and here, they serve all the little snacks that you get in sake bars and mom and pop eateries all over Japan. Here we are in the kitchen. I’m standing with the owner of Izakaya, Lanie Ahn. Hi Lanie and So Umi is the chef. And Su Umi is going to show us how to make chicken meatballs and Lanie is going to translate. Lanie: We’re mixing with egg and miso with the chicken and I learned that you really have to mix it up 100 times. So you have to put that effort. Female: So what’s the purpose of mixing it a lot, 100 times, what’s the reason behind that? Lanie: First of all it’s going to get more delicious and then also it’s going to stick together when you make the meatball. After you mix with the egg and miso, we mix water chestnut and onion and we put the cornstarch. The teriyaki sauce, we have four ingredients, water, soy sauce. Female: Regular soy sauce, not the low salt kind. Lanie: The regular soy sauce and the miren, the cooking sake, miren, it has a sweet flavor and sugar. To make the teriyaki sauce, you mix the ingredients and then you boil. So you need a spoon to make the meatball shape. We use it for the meatball shape, it’s a really simple, oval style and this is getting well oiled so you form the meatballs from the batter and you put it right into the sauté pan and as you sauté, you push it down with your finger a little bit to make that shape. About 5 minutes. We put into the skewer, we put three ounces of the teriyaki sauce into the hot pan. Female: Wow. That’s really good, it’s much lighter of a taste than you usually get from a meatball. You can taste the water chestnuts, it gives a little bit of crunch and that pepper is magical.