Name: Beef Meatballs (BOH • lah BOH • lah)
Yield: Makes 20 meatballs (1½ inches/4 cm in diameter)
Cuisine: Filipino
Ingredients: ½ cup (120 ml) canola or other neutral oil; Steamed rice, for serving; 4 cloves garlic (about ½ ounce/12 g), peeled and minced; Banana ketchup, store-bought or homemade, or tomato ketchup, for serving; 1 pound (455 g) ground beef; 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour; 2½ teaspoons kosher salt; 8 ounces (225 g) russet potatoes, unpeeled; 1½ teaspoons coarsely cracked black pepper; 1 large egg, beaten; 1½ teaspoons fish sauce; 1 tablespoon soy sauce

Preparation info

Makes
20
meatballs ( 1½ inches 4 cm in diameter )

Difficulty
Easy

Appears in

Filipinx

By Angela Dimayuga and Ligaya Mishan

Published 2021

About

Filipinos are fond of repeating syllables to make new words, like Halo-Halo, a dessert named for its mix-mix of ingredients, and Turo-Turo, steam-table joints where you point-point at the dishes you want. (Linguists call this reduplication, and it’s characteristic of Austronesian languages like Tagalog, although English speakers do it too: no-no, hush-hush, boo-boo.) So bola-bola, little deep-fried garlicky meatballs, get the