Chokladbollar

Chokladbollar are a Swedish sweet made by binding rolled oats with butter and sugar and rolling the mixture into cacao-colored balls. They are made without baking and chilled to set their shape. The singular is chokladboll, meaning “chocolate ball.” Bite through a surface coated with white coconut or sugar granules, and inside you find oat grains and the soft mouthfeel of butter.

Bringing the Mixture Together With Rolled Oats and Butter

The oats used are rolled oats, which have been processed flat. Cacao colors the whole mixture brown, and vanilla or a little coffee deepens the aroma. Some recipes use water instead, and coffee is not essential.

Softening the butter at room temperature keeps large lumps from remaining during mixing, so the mixture comes together evenly. Sugar is worked into the butter, and then cacao, oats and a small amount of liquid are combined to form a single mass firm enough to roll. To make the grains feel lighter, finer processed oats may be chosen, or the oats may be briefly ground before mixing. With granulated sugar, its grains can also be felt against the teeth. Powdered sugar gives a more even, smoother mouthfeel.

Some methods melt the butter and bring it briefly to a boil in a pot before use. In that case, the mixture is chilled after the ingredients are combined and rolled once it has firmed slightly. The order of work differs between shaping the mixture right away from softened butter and chilling the melted butter once before shaping. As it cools, the melted butter solidifies again, and the mixture containing oat grains also becomes firm enough to hold its shape.

Texture That Changes With the Coating

The shaped balls are rolled in coconut or pearl sugar spread on a plate. Coconut adds a light, fibrous texture, while pearl sugar adds the hard crunch of sugar. Sesame seeds, cacao, chopped nuts, colored sugar sprinkles and other coatings are also used, so even with the same interior, the mouthfeel changes with the surface material.

Sizes vary as well, from small balls rolled at home to ones large enough to serve with coffee in cafés. For professional use, there is a recipe (ingredient proportions and method) that standardizes each ball at about 45 grams, and there is also a technique of quickly dipping the rolled balls in melted butter before applying the decorative coating. This preparation does not form a thick chocolate shell and makes the most of the oat texture inside.

Chokladbollar coated in pearl sugar. White sugar granules cover the brown mixture. Photo: Arild, 2011-07-01, location unknown. Original image / CC BY-SA 2.0. Reduced-size version from the source, no additional processing.

Early Records of the Name and Changes in Method Since Wartime

The Swedish name chokladboll has a recorded usage from 1928. The name was in use before the wartime recipes that survive today. However, it is uncertain whether the sweet of that time had the same formula as today’s.

In Denmark, a closely related sweet is called havregrynskugler, a name combining the words for oat grains and balls. A 1942 advertising booklet for households included chocolate balls with the same composition as today’s, and the 1943 publication “Ingenuity in Times of Crisis” contained a recipe under this name. It added substitute cocoa and flavoring to oats, butter and sugar, along with enough liquid substitute coffee to allow the mixture to be rolled by hand.

During the Second World War, when imported confectionery ingredients were scarce and people were reluctant even to spend money on running an oven, sweets that could be made without baking were useful. After the war, they also became a staple of Christmas konfekt. When people in Sweden began making them is not clear.

In Sweden as well, in December 1943, a newspaper published oat-and-cacao balls as a sweet for children. That version was made by warming the ingredients in a pot, rolling them, letting them dry and then dusting them with powdered sugar, a process different from today’s method of mixing butter brought to room temperature and chilling the mixture. In 1956, a recipe that a 10-year-old child sent to a newspaper also shows the method of mixing butter, oats and cacao and coating the balls with pearl sugar. Today, they are still made at home with children and are also served in cafés.

From a Discriminatory Former Name to the Current Name

The current name chokladboll means simply “chocolate ball.” A racially discriminatory alternative name was also used in the past, but the 2006 edition of the Swedish Academy’s dictionary recommended chokladboll in the entry for the former name, and the 2015 edition removed the former name. The name of this same sweet, made by rolling oats and cacao into balls, has also changed within society.

Glossary