The Special Ingredient You Need For The Best Classic Cheese Ball

The classic cheese ball has a retro vibe to it, which is fitting since the original recipe dates back to the 1940s, and the appetizer was a popular staple of mid-century cocktail parties. While it fell out of favor around the time Ronald Reagan took office, the 21st century has re-adopted it as a charming bit of vintage kitchen kitsch. Also, it does taste good with crackers, so there's that. Mashed developer Erin Johnson's recipe sticks to the tried-and-true formula of cream cheese mixed with cheddar and coated with chopped pecans and parsley. Plus she adds pepper jack for a faint hint of heat. Her recipe also calls for lemon juice, which might not be something you'd think to use in a cheese-based dish.

As it turns out, lemon juice in savory cheese balls is no new thing since this ingredient features in a number of 1970s recipes. As Johnson explains (speaking for herself, of course, not those anonymous disco-era recipe creators), "I like to add lemon juice to my cheese balls because I think the acidity really helps to add a brightness and a little something extra, without making the cheese taste sweet or dessert-like." As her recipe calls for such a tiny amount, you won't really taste the lemon per se, but it instead adds a tiny bit of tang that enhances the slight sourness of the cream cheese.

Erin Johnson's creation is a classic cheese ball, so she's using lemon juice to sharpen up the other flavors instead of having it stand on its own. If you'd like a more lemony-tasting cheese ball, however, you can certainly take this idea and run with it to create a less classic, but equally delicious variant that showcases its citrusy side. One way to do this would be to zest the lemon before you juice it and add the rind to the pecan/parsley mixture that coats the ball. Lemon zest, rather than being sour, has a faint bitterness to it, but parsley, too, is a bitterish herb. The oily nuts, however, will help offset any excess bitterness so the overall impression will remain one of crunchy, creamy cheesiness.

If you really want to highlight the cheese ball's lemon flavor while still keeping things savory, one way to do this would be to swap out the cheddar and pepper jack for goat cheese. You could then eliminate the Worcestershire sauce and garlic, add some chopped fresh herbs that go well with lemon — basil, oregano, rosemary, and thyme come to mind — and increase the amount of lemon juice to a tablespoon or more. The lemon zest-enhanced parsley-slash-pecan crunch coating would also complement this cheese ball, although a coating made from walnuts and cranberries or almonds and dried blueberries would add a fruity dimension without venturing too far into dessert territory.