Crooked Kitchen

This is part of a series of posts I’m bringing back from my previous food blog. The topics might not be as focused, but I think they still deserve to be republished in a current forum. Enjoy this post from February 2007 about my experiment with grinding my own burgers.

Inspired by some talk of homemade burgers, and that I hadn’t had a good burger in a while, I decided to make my own burgers - including grinding my own meat. I reviewed the Good Eats episode on ground beef, and tried to recreate that burger. Instead of Alton Brown’s recommended mixture of half-chuck and half-sirloin, I went with all chuck, a two-pound package of it.

I trimmed the fat and connective tissue off the meat, and cubed it into roughly 1/2″ to 1″ pieces (in the episode, Alton Brown says “inch and a half” but the on-screen text says “1/2-inch” - the chunks look like the former, though), and started to load up my food processor. The first thing I noticed is that my food processor must be a lot smaller than Alton’s. It got filled up with beef to the right level for chopping with much less meat, but that just meant I had to do the chopping in more batches. Anyway, I got the beef chopped up and into a bowl, and added some salt and Worcestershire sauce.

I formed the patties, trying not to get them too squished, but rather just shaped. Alton claimed each of his patties were 5 ounces, and 3/4″ thick by 4″ diameter (a quick check based on the density of water, of which beef is mostly composed, shows this is probably pretty accurate). That gives him 3 patties per pound of beef (minus trimmings). I got eight patties out of my two pounds of chuck (less trimmings), so each of my patties was less than 4 ounces. The largest was just about 3 inches in diameter.

I wrapped seven of the patties in parchment paper and ziplock bags, and put four in the freezer and three in the fridge. I chose a slightly smaller patty to test. I fried it in my cast iron skillet, medium-high heat, 4 minutes on each side. This turned out to be too much for my goal of medium-rare. The patty was fully cooked, but still juicy.

I deliberated whether I should have grilled onions or raw onions. I decided some thin slices of raw onion would be best now, and I’d do grilled onions later, along with some bacon. I built the burger with the bottom toasted bun first, smeared with mayonnaise, with a bit of freshly ground black pepper, then the meat, then onion slices on top, and some yellow American mustard. It was a really great burger - and I have seven more patties to experiment with.