Norway · Pork
Raspeballer (Norwegian Potato Dumplings)
About this recipe
Norwegian cooking reflects its long coastline and short summer: cured and smoked fish, preserved meats, root vegetables, dairy, and the sweet-bread traditions of Christmas baking. Ingredients are few; quality and freshness do the work.
As a pork dish, Raspeballer (Norwegian Potato Dumplings) works through the same fast-and-slow divide as other red meats — quick-seared chops vs slow-cooked shoulder — with the cut dictating the right cooking time and temperature.
The scaler above rewrites every measurement to your target serving count, with proper culinary fractions (½, ⅓, ¼) instead of decimals so the recipe stays measurable. Cook Mode steps you through it hands-free.
Recipe data is sourced from TheMealDB's open community database; ScaleRecipe handles the curation, the scaling math, the editorial commentary, and the conversion utilities woven into each page.
Translate this recipe
Reading in English
Listen to this recipe
No matching voice on this device
Method
- Raspeballer & (Optional) Salted Meat
- ▢
- If you're making pork knuckle, cook it in simmering water for about 3 hours, until the meat falls from the bone. Remove the pork and save the broth to cook the raspeballer.
- ▢
- Boil the boiled potatoes and peel once cooled. Also peel the raw potatoes, and then grate them or run them through a food processor. Use a paper towel to remove some of the moisture from the grated potatoes.
- ▢
- Mash the boiled potatoes in a potato ricer or with a masher. Make sure there are no lumps. Add the grated raw potatoes to the mashed potatoes in a large mixing bowl and stir together. Add the barley flour, all purpose flour, and salt and mix together with your hands until the mixture is fully blended.
- ▢
- You can cook the raspeballer in either vegetable or beef broth, or if you're making pork knuckle, cook them in the broth from the pork knuckle. Bring the broth to a very light simmer – you don't want it to fully boil because then the raspeballer might break apart.
- ▢
- Use a tablespoon dipped in cold water to shape each raspeball in your hand. Try to make them as smooth as possible and then gently drop them into the simmering broth. Dip the tablespoon in a bowl of cold water between each raspeball.
- ▢
- Let the raspeballer simmer for about 30 minutes. If you're making smoked sausage, you can heat the sausage in the same pot with the raspeballer. Top with fresh chopped parsley.
- Mashed Rutabaga
- ▢
- Peel the rutabaga and carrots and cut into small pieces. Boil in water for about 30 minutes, or until tender. Then drain the water, add the cream/milk, butter and nutmeg and mash until smooth.
- ▢
- Serve alongside the raspeballer and meat.
Cooking notes
When scaling protein-led dishes, weigh the meat rather than counting pieces, and remember that the pan size limits how much you can sear at once.
For volume-to-weight conversions of any ingredient — flour, sugar, butter, salts — use the ingredient converter. To translate the recipe's oven temperature between °C, °F and gas mark, see the temperature converter.
When you scale this recipe up or down, remember that cooking time does not scale linearly. A doubled cake takes longer, but not twice as long; a doubled soup takes roughly twice as long. The cooking-time guide gives sensible starting estimates by dish geometry.
Scaling notes
Scaling Raspeballer (Norwegian Potato Dumplings)
Raspeballer (Norwegian Potato Dumplings) is written for around four servings as it stands on this page — scaling it up for a party or down for a meal-for-one is the small math problem most home cooks face every week. Here's how this particular dish responds to scaling, what changes linearly, and what doesn't.
Pork shares scaling rules with beef — braising time is collagen-driven and mass-independent, while quick-cook methods like searing scale by the piece. Raspeballer (Norwegian Potato Dumplings) benefits from weight-based ingredient measurement when scaled up: pork roasts in particular vary significantly in actual yield, and a recipe written for "2 lb shoulder" can mean anything from 800 g to 1.1 kg of cooked meat.
When you scale the flour in this recipe, weigh it in grams if you can — a cup of flour can weigh anywhere from 113 g to 150 g depending on how you measure. The ScaleRecipe ingredient converter uses the King Arthur Baking reference of 120 g/cup for all-purpose flour, which is the same standard most modern baking books assume.
Butter is one of the easier ingredients to scale because it's sold in standardised sticks: 1 US stick = 8 tablespoons = ½ cup = 113 g. Any fractional scaling lines up neatly on a kitchen scale, and grocery-store butter packaging is already pre-marked in tablespoon increments along the wrapper.
Skip the math entirely — ScaleRecipe's scaler rewrites every ingredient line above with proper culinary fractions and smart unit promotion the moment you change the serving count. Open the scaler →
Beyond the recipe
Substitutions & make-ahead — Raspeballer (Norwegian Potato Dumplings)
Two things home cooks ask about most when they're outside the recipe's exact assumptions: what swaps work for which ingredients, and how the dish behaves when you make it ahead. Both depend on what Raspeballer (Norwegian Potato Dumplings) is doing structurally — here's the practical version.
Substitution ideas
Butter
For sautéing or browning, equal-weight olive oil or a neutral oil works directly. For baking, equal-weight coconut oil (melted, then chilled to the same softness the recipe expects) gives a buttery richness; a quality vegan butter brick is the structural match for cookies and pastries where firmness matters.
All-purpose flour
For gluten-free, a 1-to-1 gluten-free baking blend (one that contains xanthan gum) is the most reliable swap. For texture variations: bread flour gives chewier results; cake flour gives more tender. Avoid almond or oat flour as a 1:1 swap — they don't form gluten and most recipes structurally depend on it.
For weight-based swaps and arbitrary quantities, the ingredient density converter and the cup-to-grams chart cover most pantry staples.
Make-ahead and storage
Pork shoulder and slow-cooked pork dishes (Raspeballer (Norwegian Potato Dumplings) included if it falls in that family) improve overnight as the fat redistributes and flavours integrate. Cured pork — bacon, ham, sausage — keeps well refrigerated but loses its crisp edges in storage; re-crisp in a hot skillet or under the broiler. Quick-cooked pork chops are best served the day they're cooked; the meat tightens and dries through the refrigerate-and-reheat cycle.
Recipe video
Raspeballer (Norwegian Potato Dumplings)
Keep cooking
More pork recipes
Cooking aids
Tools to use while you cook this.
Each opens in a new tab so the timer keeps running. The math is auditable on the guide page below each converter, with worked examples and where the numbers come from.
Volume
Tablespoons, teaspoons, cups, ml, fluid ounces — every culinary volume unit, with US/metric/imperial cups handled distinctly.
OpenWeight
Grams, ounces, pounds, kilograms — exact for any ingredient, plus the volume-to-weight conversions for ~40 pantry staples.
OpenTemperature
Fahrenheit, Celsius, gas mark — translate any oven temperature, with notes on conventional vs convection.
OpenCooking time
The cube-root rule for scaling up, the differences between meat / cake / soup geometry, and sensible starting estimates.
OpenPan size
9-inch round vs 8-inch square vs 13×9. The math is surface area, not diameter — and the converter shows you both.
OpenLength
Inches and centimetres — for when a recipe says “cut into 1-inch pieces” and your ruler is metric.
OpenIngredient density
A cup of flour weighs 120 g; a cup of honey weighs 340. The full table of ~40 staples, with sources.
OpenOpen in main scaler
Edit the recipe text, scale by serving count, and copy the result. Same parser as the in-page scaler, more room to work.
OpenFrom the journal
Original essays on the small details.
The why behind the technique — original writing on the ingredient and equipment choices that separate a good cook from a frustrated one.
Reading a recipe like a chef
The 30-or-so recipe terms that show up most often, decoded
Read essayMay 4, 2026
Cooking for one — scaling principles
The math, the practical realities, and the recipes designed for one from the start
Read essayMay 4, 2026
How long do leftovers actually last?
Beyond the USDA's 3–4 days: the variables that actually determine the safe window
Read essayMay 4, 2026
Go deeper
Where this recipe sits in the wider tradition.
Each guide below is a real essay on the cuisine or the category — pillars, staples, techniques worth learning — paired with a curated grid of recipes filed under it.
Keep exploring
Ready to cook?
Scale it to your table, then get into the kitchen.
Send this recipe to the main scaler for further editing, or jump straight into Cook Mode for a hands-free walk-through with timers running.