Chicken Teriyaki Meatballs
an easy air-fryer recipe
I resisted ground chicken for a long time, not loving the standard fare I saw at the grocery store. A couple of months ago I noticed ground chicken at Guido’s in Great Barrington in their frozen meat section. It’s ground in-house, and they sell a choice of ground breast meat or ground thighs. Not many places grind their own poultry because of the effort involved in cleaning the machine to grind beef, pork or lamb, so finding a butcher that does is a real score.
Arguably, the ground thighs would have more flavor but thigh meat is higher in fat which is sometimes a challenge to balance when tracking macros, so I opted for the ground breast meat. As I write this, I realize a happy compromise would be combining the breast and thigh meat to make my own blend of sorts. I’ll have to keep that in mind for next time.
You can also choose to make these meatballs with any ground meat of your choosing—beef, pork, lamb, turkey would all be fine, just a reminder that the nutritional information below will be vastly different with a different kind of meat.
If like me, you need to avoid soy, I love the Coconut Secrets line of sauces. You could make your own sauce, as I sometimes do (the recipe for stir-fry sauce is here) but it’s also nice to have a ready made product in the pantry for when I run out of the homemade stuff, or just don’t have time to make a batch.
As we head into summer grilling season, you could skip the air fryer instructions, and put the meatballs on a skewer to cook on the grill. In that case, I’d baste them with some extra teriyaki sauce so it caramelizes as they cook.
Oftentimes I serve these tossed with some extra sauce, and some charred broccoli and rice. You could also add them to a crunchy shredded cabbage salad, and toss it with a sesame vinaigrette. Making the vinaigrette is an easy tweak to this recipe—just add a few shakes of sesame oil, and up the soy sauce or coconut aminos by a few extra shakes, too. —xo, j.
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