Yeah, you read correctly! Vegan meatballs!
For all of us who gave up meat, this is a really exciting recipe and if you are a meat eater, give this a try and you won’t regret it.
The secret is chia seeds blended into a fine flour.
A good friend brought this for me from Brazil, and I had to admit, I had no idea what to do with it!
But what better place to find a recipe than the back of your bag.
If you can’t get this flour, you can just blend normal chia seeds until its turns into fine flour.
As I mentioned in a previous post one of the great properties of chia seeds, is that it produces a gel 10 times its weight and can be used to replace animal protein.
So I promise you, these “vegan meatballs” are soft and tender on the outside with a little crunchy crust in the outside.
With the warm weather coming, this is a great dish to share and enjoy on a warm weekend day! Hope you enjoy it!
Ingredients
- 80 grams chia seeds flour
- 3/4 cup of soy or almond milk
- 1 small onion
- 1 Tsp of salt
- 1/2 cup of breadcrumbs
- 3 Tbsp of corn starch
- Pinch of dry oregano
- Pinch of dry thyme
- 2 Tbsp nutritional yeast for serving
- Fresh Basil for serving
- 1 can of your favourite tomato sauce, mine is an organic basil sauce.
Method
Pre heat oven to 210 C.
Thinly grate the onion and add the breadcrumbs and chia seed flour. Mix the soy milk, salt, oregano, thyme and corn starch.
Add to the mix of onion, breadcrumbs and chia flour. If the mixture is too liquidy you can add a few more breadcrumbs, or if it’s to dry add more milk. Mix well.
Leave the mix to rest for about 10 min so the chia seeds can expand.
With your hands form the meatballs and place onto a baking tray with non stick baking paper.
Bake for around 20 minutes until they turn brown, dry and crunchy.
After the first 10 minutes have passed take them out of the oven and roll them to the other side so they are evenly baked.
Mix with the tomato sauce, serve with nutritional yeast and fresh basil.
Enjoy!
