Here's the way of making "authentic" Swedish meatballs.

It's quite simple to do it since no special skills nor any exotic ingredients are needed.

In Sweden we usually eat these with either boiled potatoes or mash, and ketchup or pickled cucumbers or lingonberry preserves as a condiment. They're often served with a brown gravy made in the frying pan (after the meatballs are finished) with a lot of cream, butter and some soy sauce.

Let's start....

Step 1: Ingredients

For a big batch of meatballs, enough for 5-6 persons you need:

About 900 grams of minced meat
Two eggs
One onion
3 dl of milk
1 1/4 dl of dried breadcrumbs
Almost 1 tablespoon of salt
About 1 teaspoon of ground pepper (I usually use mixed black and white pepper.)

Since I live in Dubai my local supermarket don't carry any pork products so here I used 100% ground beef meet. In Sweden I usually use a mix of 80% beef and 20% pork in the mince to get the meatballs both a bit juicer and more tasty.

Step 2: Soak the Breadcrumbs

Take a large bowl and pour in the milk and stir it with the egg, the bread crumbs, the salt and pepper.

Let this stand for about 5 minutes so the bread crumbs is soaking up the liquids.

Step 3: Chop the Onion

Chop the onion into small pieces. You know how to do that - right? If not, see this Dice an onion instructable, but make the pieces much smaller.

The pieces should be really tiny, you don't want large chunks of raw onion in you meatballs.

Step 4: Add Mince and Onion

Add the finely chopped onion and the mince to the mix and mix it well together with a large spoon.

Don't use an electric blender/handmixer to do this since it can become slimy and strange if you stir it too much.

Step 5: Rolling, Rolling (on the River)

Ok, it's time for the messy part. Rolling the meatballs into something that at least resemble a round shape.

It's not that hard to do - unless your mix is too wet. When I did this instructable I got it a tad to wet and the meatballs looked quite un-round at start. But during the frying they got a nice rounder shape. And it really doesn't matter if they are perfectly round or has an irregular blob-shape, the taste will be the same anyway.

I usually take a piece of tinfoil and grease it up with some vegetable oil so they won't stick to it before the frying.

Wet your hands to avoid the mix stick to them, take a spoon of mix and put it in the palm. Use the other palm to gently form a sphere and put in on the oiled tinfoil. Repeat until ready.

Step 6: Into the Frying Pan

In Sweden I'd just use margarine to fry them in, but here I mix vegetable oil with ghee (clarified butter, popular in India). Use the ghee sparingly if you're concerned of your health, it's almost 100% saturated fat and thus is a risk factor for heart diseases)

I prefer frying them in a cast iron pan instead of those non-stick thingies, I think the browning of the food is both faster and smoother in a cast iron pan. But a teflon pan is ok to use if you don't have the "real thing" ;-)

Fill half the pan with meatballs and fry them for a wile on one side, roll them around a bit with a spatula. After a while you can shake the pan to get the meatballs moving around and getting round and fried on all sides.

When they are deep brown and done all the way into the core, take them up and put them in a bowl and keep them warm until it time to eat.

Step 7: The Result

Serve, eat and enjoy....

The leftovers can be used to do a "köttbullemacka" (open sandwich with meatballs), Take a piece of bread, butter it, and put cold meatballs cut in half on it. Add thin slices of pickled cucumber (Gherkin) and maybe some good mustard. I prefer to eat it on a crisp bread, but any bread is fine.