Just Add Rice to Your Ground Beef! The Mexican Meatball Soup My Mother Made Every Sunday

every recipe in this kitchen written down (372 pages): https://berthascookbook.com Mija, come here. A pound of ground beef and a handful of rice are already a soup for six, and it is the soup my mother made every Sunday. You add the rice to the beef RAW, roll the meatballs, and simmer them in a red chipotle broth until the rice cooks inside the meat. And at the end, the one thing my mother hid in every meatball, the secret my husband asked her about for a whole year. ⭐ ALBÓNDIGAS IN CHIPOTLE BROTH (serves 6, about 1 hour, book page 200) For the meatballs: • 1 lb ground beef (not the leanest), or half beef and half pork • 1/3 cup plain white rice, RAW, rinsed and drained • 1 egg • 1/2 small white onion, grated, and 2 garlic cloves, minced • 2 tbsp of the secret, chopped very fine (it is at the bottom of this description, watch first) • 1 tsp salt, a little black pepper, a pinch of cumin For the broth: • 4 Roma tomatoes or 1 can • 1 or 2 chipotles in adobo + a spoon of the sauce • 1/4 white onion, 2 garlic cloves • 6 cups chicken broth (or honest bouillon) • 1 tbsp oil • 2 carrots and 1 potato in chunks (or zucchini and corn, if you are a corn house) To serve: lime, chopped onion, cilantro, warm tortillas ⭐ THE METHOD 1. Mix the meatball ingredients with your hands only until it holds, then STOP. Overworked meat turns bouncy like a rubber ball. 2. Wet hands, roll gently, a bit smaller than a golf ball. About 18. 3. Blend the tomatoes, chipotles, adobo, onion, garlic. FRY in the oil 4 to 5 minutes until it darkens. 4. Add the broth and vegetables, gentle simmer, salt it until you would drink it from a cup. 5. Lower the meatballs in one at a time. Lid partly on. Do NOT stir for 10 minutes (young meatballs break, set meatballs hold, page 299). 6. 30 minutes in all. Cut one open: no pink, rice soft, 160°F. Ground meat gets no medium rare, ever. WHY THE RAW RICE WORKS: it drinks the juices leaving the meat and the broth coming in, swells soft, and keeps the meatball tender. And a third of a cup makes a pound of beef feel like a pound and a half. THE HONEST WORDS (because I will not oversell you): • Meatballs broke → your simmer was a boil. Let the pot barely smile. • Hard and bouncy → you squeezed the meat. • Crunchy rice → meatballs too big, or 10 more minutes. • Flat broth → more salt. A big pot drinks a lot of it. WHO PROFITS: the whole pot is about $11 at my store and feeds six, under $2 a bowl. A can of meatball soup is about $3 for one or two, and you can count the meatballs on one hand. THE HABIT: make the whole pot on Sunday. Albóndigas made Sunday are better on Monday (page 299). Freeze the rest in its broth. ⭐ THE SECRET (spoiler, so watch to the end first) Fresh MINT, hierbabuena, 2 tablespoons chopped very fine, into the meatball mix (book page 200). A small pinch of dried mint works; cilantro if your family is nervous. And the red broth dried on the pot? That is the other half of my life: 🧼 Clean The Mexican Way → [link to cleaning channel] If your meatballs ever came out hard or fell apart, it was never because you were careless. Nobody showed you. Tell me in the comments: did you guess the secret before I said it? I read every one.