Not Your Ordinary Meatballs, Cheese Stuffed Chicken Meatballs!

Because ground chicken tends to be very lean, chicken meatballs can easily turn into a dry pasty pucks of meat. When I made my chicken parmesan nuggets I discovered that stuffing the nuggets with cheese helped offset the leanness of the meat. That's because the fat from the cheese bastes the chicken from the inside, keeping it moist, while infusing it with tons of flavor.

It got me thinking that the same technique might work for meatballs as well. My first experiment turned out reasonably well, but the problem was that I found myself enjoying the melted cheese more than I was the shell of chicken, which still turned out pretty tough. While the cheese was able to keep the chicken moist, the lack of fat in the ground chicken itself makes it very tough as it cooks. It's like dipping boot leather in butter.

This got me thinking about how I could make the chicken mixture more tender, and I found my solution in the amount of breadcrumbs added. The bread crumbs do two things. The first is that it makes the meatballs more tender by reducing the density of chicken proteins in the mixture. The second is that it absorbs the juices from the chicken and cheese as they cook, in the same way that bread can be used to sop up a bowl of soup. By adding more breadcrumbs than I normally would to meatballs made with other meats, it made the meatballs super juicy and tender.

The trouble with adding a lot of breadcrumbs is that it can make the meatball so tender that they fall apart. Given that these have a molten cheese center, the result is a messy frying pan with hollowed out meatballs. My solution was to add an egg to help bind everything together. Then, it's just a matter of wrapping the cheese in an even layer of chicken meatball mix (this takes a bit of practice).

I glazed these meatballs in a tomato teriyaki sauce, but these are also delicious cooked in a marinara sauce for a few minutes after being browned. As for the cheese, anything that melts will work such as Gruyere, Emmentaler, Brie, or Mozzarella.