Chicken Cordon Bleu Meatballs

Working with ground chicken is a little different than working with ground beef. It’s a leaner meat so it’s a little looser and a little stickier than ground beef. A helpful tip when working with ground chicken and ground turkey for that matter is to make sure the meat is cold. The colder the meat the easier it is to work with. I also always have a trusty can of cooking spray handy to spray my hands with during the meatball rolling process. It helps prevent the meat mixture from sticking to your hands making rolling out the meatballs a lot easier and a lot quicker.

The other addition to this recipe to watch out for is forming a meatball around a ham-wrapped piece of cheese. One great tip is to take the ham slices and dry them off with a paper towel. Sliced deli meats can be a little slippery so having them dried out before trying to form a meatball around them is helpful. I learned this helpful hack when making pickle rollups – a Minnesota classic for any get together.

We make pickle rollups here in Minnesota – not sure if that’s a thing outside of our state or our Midwestern region – and one of the things I’ve learned over the years is that it’s really helpful to dry off the deli meat before working with it. For pickle rollups you are spreading cream cheese on sliced deli meat, usually corned beef, and rolling that around the pickle of your choice. When you dry the meat off before adding the cream cheese it makes the cream cheese so much easier to spread.

The same idea applies here when you’re trying to form meat over meat. The drier the ingredients to start the better when it comes to stuffing meatballs. If you’re not familiar with our state appetizer – the pickle rollup – they are amazing. It’s a simple recipe of pickles, cream cheese and corned beef. That’s the OG recipe – you can make it with your favorite lunch meat like turkey or ham too. I’ve heard people call it Minnesota sushi which is a little sad given we’re better than that here.

Once you have all of your ingredients well mixed you can flatten out the meat mixture so you can place a ham-wrapped cube of swiss cheese in the middle and roll the meat around the cheese until you have a nice little ball. The trick to these meatballs is to work delicately and don’t rush. It’s a lot to ask to wrap meat around cheese stuffed meat, so take your time. When you start keep the seam side of the ham wrapped swiss cheese into the flattened meat in your hand. This will help keep all the ingredients where you want them to be as you form your meatballs.

This is such a fun recipe once you get all the meatballs made. There is such a nice salty and nutty surprise in each ball once they are cooked with the ham and swiss on the inside of the meatball. They totally taste like a little Chicken Cordon Bleu. 

You can choose your favorite sliced ham for this recipe and you can also choose your favorite swiss cheese. If you want to get fancy and spend some money on a really nutty swiss cheese that will just make this recipe better. The more you love the ingredients you choose to make these meatballs the better they will turn out. 

These little buggers make a great little appetizer before dinner or they also work well as sliders as the main dish. This classic meatball recipe is a great version of the classic Chicken Cordon Bleu recipe. My goal with most of my meatball recipes is to create a memory in one bite. I think I have become a little obsessed with the concept of an amuse-bouche – that one bite that incorporates everything you want in that one bite. This idea of an amuse-bouche has inspired me with a lot of my recipes. I also really like the idea of taking things that people are familiar with that are recipes that we grew up with and making them into something unexpected in a meatball form.

More Recipes By Category