Of all the ways to enjoy a meatball, you could say they’re at their most comforting bobbing in broth.
Not that there’s anything wrong with spaghetti and red sauce, miso and Ritz crackers, or any of the other 45 million or so meatball variations that exist.
It’s just that spooning up a morsel of meatballs – whether they’re as tiny as marbles or as big as a baseball – in steaming soup feels immensely soothing in a tidy, calm kind of way, the very opposite of a chaotic and joyfully messy sub.
This lemony Greek meatball soup, a riff on youvarlakia avgolemono, looks especially quiet in the pot. Yet every spoonful vibrates with flavor: the brightness of citrus and dill, the depth of the chicken stock, the velvety richness of egg yolk.
In the United States, we tend to think of avgolemono as a soup made with chunks of chicken and grains of rice. But, in Greece, adding meatballs to the broth is just as traditional. This recipe substitutes ground chicken for the usual beef, making the whole thing a bit lighter. Ground turkey works just as well.