The Mother of All Burgers: Sunday, October 2, 2011

Anybody with two hands and some ground beef can put together a burger. Actually, if you did not have hands I bet you could use your feet but then the burgers would taste pretty gross. Maybe that explains Hardee’s?  I will check out their kitchen and get back to you on that one. In the meantime, let me tell you about burgers that you will actually want to eat.

As I watch the food channels and go out to dinner it appears as if everyone has some new, innovative twist on this old favorite. Different types of meats, wild toppings, and even stuffing the meat with a prize inside are all cool new ways of reinventing the burger. As a dedicated carnivore, I am a huge fan of all of these innovations and would like to share the version that Chris and I have been making for a few years now. 

And yes, I did say “we”. Even I can put together one of these burgers.

Meat Prep

Historically we have used ½ ground chuck and ½ sirloin in our burgers. The sirloin gives us great flavor and the chuck provides the juicy goodness. On this particular Sunday, however, we had to go a different route. Our local Ingles stinks and had no sirloin available in any form. Seriously, you call that a meat department? However, this inspired a fun twist to burger-making fun time.  Sirloin was substituted with boneless beef short ribs and introduced to Chris’s meat grinder.

Ok, so now that we have our meat in order, here is what we put together…

1+ pound of ground chuck

1+ pound of freshly ground beef short ribs

¼ onion ground up with the rib meat (not just for flavor but it also helped keep the meat grinder clean)

5 slices of applewood smoked bacon

1 egg

5 ounce package of bleu cheese

Salt & Pepper

21 drops of Big Daddy’s Flaming Lips hot sauce

This was mixed all together and covered and put in the fridge until we were ready to cook our burgers. This was done so, in Chris’s words, “the flavors can start to love each other”. I could not argue with that logic so I made a snack and went and watched football for a while.

Burger Time

Usually these burgers are cooked on the charcoal grill but Chris has been itching to use our iron skillet for our burgers lately, so we switched it up and kept the process indoors. Two ½ pound patties landed on the skillet and were grilled to perfection.  Chris topped hers with brie and pickled onions. I covered mine in American, Cheddar, and Pepper Jack cheeses, chopped onions, and a little ketchup. They were served on toasted buns that were almost too small for the burgers they were assigned to hold.

Taters On The Side

You cannot just have a burger for dinner… well, actually I could but Chris made a side dish anyway. It was a simple, healthyish vegetable that complemented our burgers nicely.

Red potatoes, cut into small chunks

1 small sprig of fresh rosemary, chopped

Salt and pepper

“Good smatterin’” of olive oil

Mix all and roast in oven at 425 degrees for 35-45 minutes (or until it is done to your liking)

The Result

This was one of those meals where we ate in silence. Sometimes this happens because we are tired or I said something stupid earlier in the day. Ideally though, it is the result of a dinner that is so good that we are too busy eating to catch our breaths long enough to speak.  Fortunately, this was one of those occasions.

There are a lot of things I like about this recipe.  One is the simple fact that I love a good burger. I especially love them at home because I am not limited to the restaurant rule of “nothing cooked under medium well” which usually translates to “dried out hunk of ground beef”.  Medium rare never killed anyone in our kitchen.

I really like the combination of flavors mixed into the burgers. Toppings are fun but they can get messy. A little onion, bacon, and cheese inside the burger is perfect to me. The flavors permeate every bite and every so often you get a bite with a little extra treat hidden in it. It makes standard fare such as a burger just a wee bit more exciting this way.

Also, I think this concept is fun because you can switch things around a bit. I like the idea of pairing different flavors of meat together to see how different cuts complement each other. I would like to try feta cheese instead of bleu one day to see what kind of difference that makes. I might want to substitute jalapeno peppers in lieu of the onions in the meat grinding process, just for a little added zing. Any way you slice it, though, these were good darn burgers.