Burgers and Buns!

There is nothing quite like a good hamburger, on a quality bun. I woke up this morning and almost immediately had a craving since we had not had burgers in a number of months. So down into the basement I went and hauled a couple of packages of ground beef out of the deep freeze, and came up and set it out to thaw. I then got out the bread machine and started on a batch of dough to make buns. Whole wheat, of course.

For buns I use my basic dough recipe, that I use for bread, buns, pizza dough, cinnamon buns and more. It is extremely versatile, as you can see. When the machine is done with the dough, I take my little kitchen scale and weight out 83g balls. The recipe makes a kg (2.2lbs) of dough, and 83g per makes an even dozen. When you are weighing out exact amounts of dough like this, you sometimes end up with one big piece, and then 2 or 3 little pieces added to it in order to make up the full amount. In a case like this you really have to give the new ball a quick 5 or 10 second knead to make sure all of the pieces that make it up are fully integrated. If you just try to squeeze it together in your palms like making a snowball, it will at first look like it worked, but as the buns rise the pieces will separate again. Arrange them on a well greased sheet or pan, cover, and allow to rise in a warm place for one hour. Then preheat the oven to 350F and bake 20 minutes. I turn off the convection for my buns so it does not dry them out.

For the burger side of things I always like to mix a little bit of this, and a little bit of that into my ground beef before forming the burgers. This time around I had some fresh herbs in the fridge that my wife had just picked up at the farmer's market, so I took some dill and basil, and tossed them into the mini-chopper food processor. They were joined with half a large onion, an egg, a half teaspoon of salt, and maybe 1/8 tsp of pepper, and about 1/4 of a red bell pepper. I buzzed the whole thing until it was well minced, and then added about a half cup of course oat flour that I'd made just prior to this by putting rolled oats into the same mini-chopper.

I then dumped all of that into my Kitchen Aid mixed with the 1kg of ground beef, and used the mixer blade on low to combine everything well. I wanted all of my burgers to be the same size, so I used my kitchen scale again. I put a small piece of tupperware on it and hit the "zero" button, and proceeded to weigh out 100g chunks of beef until I was down to the last chunk. I weighed it at 150g and decided that rather than make 1 larger burger, I'd make 2 smaller ones, so I divided it in half.

And of course I fried the burgers up on the propane grill that I got for free as an Earth Day present to myself last year. A quick and easy way to turn a cheapass grill into a luxury cooking appliance, is by using one or more of these cast iron griddles.

For fixings, some home canned relish, mustard, ketchup, sliced home made kosher dills, some sliced cheese, some fresh dill, and of course lettuce.

Yum!