Recipe for Swedish Meatball Sauce - Life is a Party (2024)

August 24, 2021August 10, 2023

Recipe for Swedish Meatball Sauce: quick and easy sauce to serve with frozen meatballs for Swedish meatballs without the trip to Ikea.

Swedish meatballs are such a favourite and always a hit with grown ups or kids. Your whole family will love these famous meatballs, with this creamy Swedish meatball sauce. You don’t have to wait until your next trip to Ikea to have them. There’s no furniture store visit necessary. Our easy semi-homemade version is a quick and delicious, great recipe, and quite easy to put together.

We used frozen Swedish meatballs from the grocery store freezer section and our easy homemade Swedish meatball sauce recipe. The sauce is a beautifully rich and creamy one and sure to be a hit. You can make the best Swedish meatballs at home, anytime you want to.

We served our Swedish meatballs as part of ourFrozen themed dinner and movie night -you can read all about it here. They were the perfect Scandinavian food to go with our theme. This dinner was a real hit with everyone. These are very similar to Ikea meatballs, so next time you’re craving the Ikea version, you can make this easy recipe at home.

Not A Great Slower Cooker Recipe

When I first decided on Swedish meatballs, I wondered about making a slow cooker version. Sometimes it’s great to know that dinner is cooking itself in the slow cooker, especially on a busy day. But my research convinced me that these weren’t a great slow cooker choice, for several reasons. For one, you would essentially be making the thickened sauce on the stove top and going through all the same steps, but just in advance, to create a thick traditional sauce, and then pouring it into the slow cooker.

So that made the slow cooker version no savings on prep or cooking times. Some slow cooker Swedish meatball recipes didn’t really thicken the sauce and come out with something far too runny and not the best sauce. The other problem is the high chance of the cream curdling if you add it at the beginning or things not being hot or creamy enough if you add it just at the end before serving. All these issues convinced me that it’s best to make the easy Swedish meatball sauce on the stove top, right before serving over your flavorful meatballs.

Recipe Tips for Swedish Meatball Sauce

The sauce itself has a roux base, which thickens the sauce to create the creamy gravy sauce. When you are creating the roux you let the roux base brown. If you don’t let it brown enough at this stage the sauce will be too white, but if you let the roux brown too long it can burn and ruin the sauce, so take care to get it to the right shade of golden brown.

We served our delicious meatballs with mashed potatoes, but egg noodles would make a great side to this dish as well. Some people enjoy them with a side of cauliflower mash. If you’re being very authentic be sure to serve easy Swedish meatballs with lingonberry jam too.

We used frozen meatballs to make this a really easy recipe. Choose your favorite, Italian meatballs, or Swedish meatballs from the freezer section. The frozen meatballs cook directly from frozen in the oven in a single layer on a baking sheet, making this a quite easy dish. We chose to reheat our frozen meatballs in the oven, and then add them to our finished creamy sauce in the sauce pan. You could make your own homemade Swedish meatballs if you prefer. Make sure your homemade meatballs are fully cooked before adding to them to the Swedish meatball sauce.

These tasty Swedish meatballs are the perfect creamy and hearty comfort food.

Place any leftover meatballs and sauce in an airtight container. Store leftovers in the refrigerator.

With this recipe for Swedish meatball sauce that’s so good, life really is a party!

This recipe was part of our Frozen themed Disney Princess Dinner and Movie Night -check out all the details about the whole party here.

Disney Princess Dinner and Movie Toolkit

Love Disney Princess dinner and movie nights? Buy our Disney Princess Dinner and Movie Toolkit. The Toolkit includes 6 different Disney Princess movie nights with menus, all the recipes, inspiration, and printables for each one. Check out more about the Disney Princess Dinner and Movie Toolkit by clicking here.

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