Home Ground, Grilled, and Consumed Burgers

Much fuss has been roused recently by doctors, dietitians, experts, and not so experts on the dangers of red meat. That might be all true, these people all know a lot more than I do, but no matter what they say it won't change the fact that red meat is delicious. So what's a healthy carnivore to do? Well, as much as I love burgers and steaks, it's just too expensive to eat them every day anyway, so it's more of a special occasion thing anyway. And when I do have them, I like to make them so good that I forget for a moment that it's probably killing me. And by using good ingredients, hopefully it's a little less toxic than it might otherwise be. This is how it's done.

First, a good burger has bacon. So let's cook up some bacon.

Now, burgers are lonely all alone. They like to be with friends. So let's marinate some of their friends before continuing on so that they won't be all alone come chow time.

Now, to get on with the burger itself. We decided to try grinding the meat by hand, like back in the day. I once had a pasta sauce in Italy from some tiny mom and pop lunch spot, and the hand-chopped meat was so succulent and tender I figured the secret was in the preparation. So we start with cubes of beef with a little pork thrown in, and start chopping.

While one of us is chopping the meat, we also want to add some other goodies to the burgers, including caramelized onions.

Here's the breakdown of the burgers. The burgers contained minced shallots, jalapenos, cubes of butter, and crumbled bacon bits.

On the grill, the bits of fat and butter makes for some nice flare-ups. Which adds flavor to the corn on the side.

Once they're done, it never hurts of course to add more bacon, and onions.

And here is the glorious, finished final product. The result: a burger that has wonderful texture variation, thanks to the hand-chopped meat, and bursting with the flavors of the add-ins (like ColdStone, but done right) all highlighted by the richness of butter.