About The Rolled Plate

The Rolled Plate is a recipe site for one family of food: things you shape with your hands. Meatballs and polpette, Swedish meatballs in cream gravy, kofta pressed onto skewers, falafel and akara dropped into hot oil, arancini packed around a cube of cheese, gyoza and pierogi pleated at the counter, matzo balls bobbing in broth. Different kitchens, the same small set of skills: a mix that holds together, even sizing, the right heat, and knowing when the middle is done.

Who writes it

Five home cooks write here, each about the food they cook most often at home.

• Gianna Russo writes the Italian-American pieces: Sunday meatballs, arancini, ricotta and grinding your own mix.
• Diego Salazar covers albondigas, croquetas, kofta, falafel and anything that wants smoked paprika or a grill.
• Beatrice Okoro writes about weeknight meatballs, akara and puff-puff, spice blends and cooking for children.
• Sam Whitlock handles batch cooking, freezing, reheating, air fryer timings and safe temperatures.
• Odile Moreau writes about dumplings of every kind, Swedish meatballs and the gravies and dipping sauces that go with them.

None of us is a professional chef, and we do not pretend to be. The recipes come from years of cooking for family and friends, from the cookbooks we trust, and from a lot of trays that came out too dry before they came out right.

How a recipe is put together

Every recipe card on the site follows the same rules:

• Ingredients are listed in US measures with a metric switch, and oven and oil temperatures are written in both Fahrenheit and Celsius.
• Times are honest, including chilling, soaking and rolling.
• Ground meat recipes give the USDA safe minimum internal temperature: 160°F (71°C) for beef, pork and lamb, 165°F (74°C) for chicken and turkey. Check it with an instant-read thermometer in the middle of the largest piece.
• We say where a recipe is our own home version of a dish that many families make many ways.

If something does not work in your kitchen, tell us. The contact page goes straight to the people who wrote the recipe, and corrections are fixed first.

Partner links and how the site is paid for

The Rolled Plate is free to read. Some pages carry clearly labelled partner notes that link to shops such as kitchen appliance and book retailers. When you buy something through one of those links, the shop may pay us a commission. The price you pay stays the same, and a partner never decides what we write or which recipe gets published. We only point to things that make sense for the dish on the page, and every partner link is marked as sponsored.

The privacy policy explains which cookies a partner shop may set after you click one of its links.

Writing to us

You can reach the kitchen at kitchen@forkandballs.com or through the contact form. We read everything, though we cannot answer urgent food safety questions one to one; for those, the USDA Meat and Poultry Hotline or your local extension service is the right place to ask.