The Alchemical Kitchen: Sunday grilling: Homemade burgers with lavender and mint, among others

This week’s grilling experimentation: Homemade burgers. Surprisingly, we had never done this before - it’s actually just about as easy as people claim! Us being us though, we thought we’d spice things up (hahaha!) by making three different varieties: smoked paprika/cumin/coriander/hot chili, dried lavender/mint, and celery seed/fennel (lavender, mint, coriander, celery seed all homegrown by Herbmaster Christian :)

We used ground chuck, but I’ve heard ground sirloin is supposed to be even better. I think you don’t want something too lean here - the extra fat really helps with keeping the burgers juicy. We started with three pounds (a pound for each variety) - which ended up being dinner for both of us, plus about two extra dinners (we ended up just freezing the additional uncooked patties).

I think the key here is lots of chopped onion and garlic! (Really, when has anyone ever gone wrong with lots of onion and garlic?)

Portrait of a red onion from our CSA... isn't it gorgeous?! I'm getting into this food blog photography thing.

I cooked them a little bit first (on low heat) until they softened up a bit - for fear that they might stay raw in the finished burgers otherwise. But perhaps someone can tell me whether this is really necessary or not.

More gratuitous onion shots.

In the meantime, Christian ground the spices in the spice grinder (repurposed coffee grinder). Like pretty much everything else that we do, the exact amounts/combinations/etc are really up to you! Like the onion and garlic, I’m in favor of “the more the better”.

At this stage I combined all the ground beef, tossed in the softened onion and garlic, and tossed gently to combine. You really don’t want to overwork the meat, so be gentle. Then I re-separated this into three batches, and seasoned each one. Lots of people say to refrigerate the meat at this stage for about an hour, so this is what we did (though we might not have made it to an hour).

In the meantime, we marinated some onion slices in red wine to grill along with the burgers (love grilled onions!) I got this idea from Clean Eating magazine. Luckily we had some cheap red wine leftover from Christian's blackberry cabernet sorbet that he made (details in a future post).

After it's been refrigerated for a while, take the meat mixture and form it into patties. The internets say that you should really just gently pat the patties together without overworking them, but we found that if we were too gentle, the patties started to fall apart... so there’s a fine line. We made ours of sort of medium thickness - I didn’t want them too thin in case they dried out. Pat down the middle a little bit with a finger or two to prevent them puffing up on the grill.

And grill! We found 5 minutes per side was just about perfect.

We were actually shocked by how delicious these turned out - both of us thought these would fail miserably, but they were actually fantastic - super moist and flavorful.

We had so much meat mixture, and they were so good fresh, that we decided to freeze the remainder of the uncooked patties. Philosophical side note: I’ve been thinking a lot about this notion of your “present self" having different priorities than your "future self" - sort of like this video, but in a more general sense than just procrastination. Several years ago I really chose my actions more for my "present self" (leaving my clothes on the floor to save time in the morning, leaving dishes in the sink after dinner, etc) than for my "future self". By the next day of course, my now-"present self" was rather annoyed at my now-"past self" ("damn roommates, who left the dishes in the sink... wait, I don't have roommates anymore...") After years of this, and routinely finding myself cursing out my "past self" (and living with Christian, who made me clean up my act :) I put a lot more effort now into keeping my "future self" happy, even to the seeming-detriment of my present self. (When I was sick, I had a lot of time to think about a lot of things related to life optimization, some of which may find their way into this blog from time to time. Hey, it's (half) my blog (and I like nested parentheses...)). Anyway, my "future self" will be very pleased at the homemade burgers in the freezer - the only thing better than eating a nice meal once, is... eating it twice.

Anyway, if you haven't made homemade burgers, you should - they are easy and WAY better than store-bought. I now leave you (well, the one of you who is actually reading this... Hi Dad!) with Scenes from Sunday, which convey it best. :)

Christian shows off his "bird pepper" plant, along with the awesome apron I bought him. :)

Close-up of the bird pepper plant.

Ahhh... Sundays!

Christian's hollyhock plant is really tall. Indian shown for scale. (Oh, come on, I'm not that short. Well... maybe. But that's irrelevant here - the plant is really tall!) You can see the rest of our backyard and Christian's garden.