When you bring a new toy into the kitchen, you must play with it for a few days and really enjoy it’s addition to your stockpile of gadgets.

So, we had to make and grill burgers!

Figgered it was going to be easy just grind up some good beef, add some flavorings and additions and grill!

We had 5 pounds of good mid grade beef, some stew beef and a small round roast as well as a couple cubed steaks. It was one of those combo packs that had been marked down on the last day. Still looked great, and it was half price, so we went with it. Jessy chopped it all up, and Maggie cranked.

We added Mexican shreded cheese to the mix, about 2 cups… and 8 slices of cooked and crumbled bacon… 4 tablespoons of fresh ground garlic and some season salt and BBQ sauce! Ground it again with the mix and made burgers!

I meant to take a lovely picture of the grilling burgers, or maybe one all dressed up and ready to devour, but we were hungry and I forgot! They were tasty!

However… they could have been better and after a bit of reading I found that our choice of beef to grind was probably the worse possible… very very very little fat. The burgers were tasty, but they lacked a certain well, taste or texture, not quite sure what. I’m sure, it was the fat content, it was too low. It made the meat almost crumbly, not as moist as you would think a burger should be. Taste was great, just texture and such was not quite right.

I did some reading afterwards and yep, just like the sausage, you need a heavily marbled piece of beef for really juicy ground beef. LIke a shoulder or butt roast, rump roast, something with a high content of marbling fat. I suppose in hind sight, we could have added some fat, but who just has fat laying around? I wondered if you could just add a couple spoons of lard, but I think it would be better to just start with the right kind of beef to begin with!

Next time… we’ll get it perfect! That’s the fun of learning to do stuff yourself, you tweak with it and make it work. And the flunked tests always still taste pretty good!