Staff Blog
TEST DRIVE: IKEA eats
posted by Felicia D'Ambrosio
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| Assemble at home. |
| Photo l Michael Persico |
We are lucky in Philadelphia to have venerable Swedish megastore IKEA so close to hand. Hundred-count bags of tea lights, those fluffy, creepy sheepskin throws and enough disassembled particleboard furniture to keep the entire student body of Drexel, Penn and Temple occupied for years — how convenient.
Part of the appeal is the built-in grub options. The inexpensive breakfast and lunch items are popular with both weary shoppers and fixed-income seniors, who will hang out all morning with one 25-cent coffee. We’ve written before about how spectacularly cheap breakfast and lunch are, in upstairs cafeteria-style eatery to the checkout hot dog haven. Fifty-cent hot dogs? With free relish? Come on. In lean times, we skip shopping and come just for lunch and a chance to skateboard in the parking lot.
Which brings us to the take-away food. The frozen köttbullar (Swedish meatballs) have tempted me for years. At $7.99 for a hefty 78-count bag of the little guys, I couldn’t resist. I threw in the $1.99 packet of powdered gräddsÃ¥s (cream sauce), too, but did not spring for the $4.99 jar of lingonsylt (lingonberry jam). It just seemed wrong to schmear meatballs with preserves.
The frozen balls are fully cooked, so all you have to do is heat them through. Twenty minutes in the oven at 375 degrees produced dense köttbullar with the bouncy bite of a vending machine Superball. These are labeled gluten-free, and the lack of breadcrumbs was evident. Each meatball was a tightly packed flavor delivery system, and overall, not bad.
The packet of gräddsås sauce was the biggest surprise. The directions instruct you to bring one cup of water and one-half cup of cream to a boil, but I substituted 1 percent milk and added a pinch of flour to thicken things up. Poured over the hot köttbullar and homemade mashed potatoes, the sauce added richness and hint of allspice to the heap. Once I dug in, I realized that the lingonberry jam is necessary to add some brightness and tart acid to a seriously heavy meal.
Total cost, including 4 potatoes for mashing, and milk added to sauce and mash: $10.98. The nutritional information suggests 6 meatballs as a serving, with a calorie cost of 210. Accompanied by cream sauce and a heap of mash, this is a great, cheap meal to precede a night of drinking. We still have dozens of meatballs hanging out in the freezer, waiting for the weekend.
IKEA, 2206 S. Columbus Blvd., 215-551-4532, ikea-usa.com
Ugh, seriously? You LIKE the food at the IKEA cafeteria? I went there once with my family expecting to be impressed, but found all of the food over-salted/over-cooked and plain all-around bland. And for the price of dinner for all of us, we could’ve gotten better food at any philly joint for the same cost at twice the quality.
The meatballs are not gluten-free. I assume they package/sell the same meatballs nationwide. I was at the IKEA in Plantation, Florida and the ingredients lists on the package include wheat flour. They do have a touch screen monitor by the foods they sell and they have a field for Gluten and whether the product contains it or not. There are a couple of frozen desserts, an almond cake and blueberry pie/cake that was gluten free and some chocolates with marshmallow that I noticed.