Albondigas Soup

Steps

1. Mix6 min
   gently, rolled to golf-ball size
   • beef
   • rice
   • egg
   • mint
   • cumin
   beef + UNCOOKED rice + egg + mint + cumin + 1 tsp salt, mixed just to combine and rolled — the raw rice is the dish's signature engineering: it cooks inside the meatball, drinking broth as it swells, which keeps the albondigas open-textured where a breadcrumb meatball would be dense
2. Sweat5 min
   medium, in the soup pot
   • onion
   • garlic
   • tomato paste
   onion in the oil until soft, garlic for thirty seconds, then the tomato paste fried a minute until brick-dark — a light tomato broth, not a red soup; the paste is seasoning
3. Simmer5 min
   stock in, brought to a bare simmer
   • chicken stock
   + stock + remaining salt, heated to the gentlest bubble before any meatball arrives — the soup must never boil once they're in, for the same reason as the wedding soup: a boil toughens what a simmer coddles
4. Poach10 min
   meatballs in raw, untouched at first
   • carrots
   • potatoes
   the albondigas lowered in one by one + the carrots + potatoes — poached raw, never browned first: everything a sear would have crusted onto a pan dissolves into the broth instead, and the broth is the point
5. Simmer20 min
   gentle, until the rice in the meatballs is tender
   • zucchini
   lid ajar — cut one meatball open to check the rice at the center; zucchini joins for the last 8 minutes so it arrives tender-green, not translucent
6. Top2 min
   at the bowl
   • cilantro
   • lime
   cilantro + mint + a squeeze of lime over each serving — the lime is to this soup what it is to pozole: the switch that turns it from rich to alive