Fresh onions can be added or pickled (vinegar, salt, pepper).
We recommend using lemon juice, apple cider vinegar, or wine vinegar instead of vinegar. They will give a less harsh and more sophisticated aroma and taste.
Onions can also be caramelized. To do this, melt the sugar in a frying pan, then, putting the onion in it, hold it for another couple of minutes. It is appropriate to add a couple more spoons of red wine.
For a change, make onions in batter.
Mix egg, flour, salt, add spices to taste. We recommend oregano. Onion rings should be dipped in batter and fried in a large amount of vegetable oil (deep-fried), and after a couple of minutes on the grill.
The sauce is a moment of creativity in the process of preparing any dish. Pesto (Italian – based on olive oil, basil, and cheese), salsa (Mexican – made from tomatoes and chili, with garlic and black pepper), dzatziki (Greek – based on yogurt with herbs and garlic). In general, play fantasy, prepare the sauce!
The most commonly used ketchup. You can do it yourself. One of the recipes: peel tomatoes (6 pcs.). Boil sugar (4 tablespoons) with vinegar (half a glass), add tomatoes. Add mustard powder (2 tablespoons), garlic (2-3 cloves), salt, pepper to taste, tomato paste (2 tablespoons), and chili pepper. Cook everything over low heat until the tomatoes soften – about 15 minutes. Turn into a homogeneous mass with a hand mixer, cool.
You will definitely need these rules to make the perfect burger at home!
The alpha and omega of a good burger is minced meat. Ready, of course, we do not buy under any circumstances. We choose moderately lean beef on the market (you can add pork and lamb to it) and ask the seller to scroll (or we do it ourselves). And – the main secret – add a little pork or lamb fat to the minced meat – also, of course, ground. Fat or lard should be 20% of the total. If you want to add cheese or bacon to your burger, reduce the percentage of fat to 10-15%.
What can be mixed into minced meat? Try adding bacon, raw sausage, smoked meats, or basturma; good are pine and walnuts (especially in minced lamb), pieces of cheese, fruits, and dried fruits (they must be wrapped in the center of the minced meat, otherwise they will burn when frying). Spices, herbs, onions, and garlic – no questions asked.
Rule number one – never press the patties while frying! Let the bad actors do it in cheap films about the American hinterland. By pressing the cutlet into the skillet, you squeeze the juices out of it, making the burger dry and lifeless. Rule number two – don’t flip the cutlet too quickly, let the crust fully form.
There are two options: either urgently buy a country house and install a stationary grill there, or get a good cast-iron frying pan with a thick bottom and a non-stick coating. It is tempting to use a regular grill pan, but, alas, in the case of burgers, it is not very suitable: the cutlet will not cook evenly. But on a cast-iron skillet (which, of course, needs to be warmed up properly), the cutlet will be exactly as it should – with a crust on the outside and soft inside.
Do not forget to lightly fry the roll on the cut so that the crust does not allow the roll to get wet from cutlet juices. With fillings, you need to balance between two fires. On the one hand, it’s silly to make a clone of a restaurant burger at home with a standard cheese and cucumber set. Try adjika instead of ketchup, jam instead of mayonnaise, pickled tomatoes instead of fresh ones, and lightly salted cucumbers instead of salted ones. On the other hand, you shouldn’t turn a burger into a multi-story structure with everything in the refrigerator. You will regret the guests, and leave something for your breakfast.
If you want to make the most delicious burger, then these tips will definitely come in handy!
Cheeseburger. Cheese addition is always appropriate. The classic recipes use hard varieties – cheddar and parmesan. It is necessary to spread it on the cutlet, when it is still on the grill, a minute before removing. This will melt the cheese well. Cheddar can also be used to make a sauce and soak a bun with it.
We also recommend using soft cheeses – Camembert, Brie, Dor Blue, Gorgonzola. This will make the taste more piquant. Place the pieces of cheese on the cutlet after removing them from the grill.
Wedgeburger. The recipe is as follows: grilled eggplants, zucchini, and bell peppers. Tomatoes and braised onions, tofu or mozzarella to taste, rye roll, and ketchup. All vegetables are pre-marinated in soy sauce.
Kids will love the fruit and berry fillings of sweet burgers (pineapple, mango, nectarine, kiwi, especially strawberries) in a soft bun coated with Nutella. You can also try turning a sweet airy donut into a burger by filling it with peanut butter and banana chunks.
Bread part. Choose from a soft, fresh, wheat or rye bun, with or without sesame seeds.
The halves are best dried first in a toaster or grill for flavor. And again mayonnaise, tomato, and meat juice will help to soften them. It is important not to overdo it, otherwise the irreparable will happen – the burger will fall apart.
Fresh vegetables, grilled vegetables. Basic set: green salad, tomatoes, fresh or pickled cucumbers, and onions.
You can add olives, olives, capers, pickled vegetables: sweet peppers in a pickle, in a tomato, pickled zucchini, eggplant, plums, etc.
You can mix the rest of the additives: eggplant, zucchini, bell peppers, avocado. Even a boiled or fried egg will add originality.
It is better to layout the vegetables before serving, otherwise, they will quickly lose their appearance from the high temperature.
It is better not to conjure too much with seasonings in order to preserve the juicy and aromatic taste of meat. The most basic – salt and pepper – is enough, but if you wish, you can add different spices and herbs.
Cutlets are quickly and conveniently molded using a special small press. You can find it in stores in the kitchen utensils departments. So the cutlets will be the same shape, clearly matching the size of the bun.
For frying, use a wire rack, barbecue pan, or a heavy-bottomed pan.
Delicious and tender burgers are made with chicken or turkey. In a burger with poultry, both minced meat and a juicy fried piece of fillet will be relevant.
Fishburger (from tuna, salmon or trout, with pike and pike perch) combined with a delicate sauce, lettuce and vegetables will appeal to lovers of healthy food.
Making the perfect burger is not as easy as it seems at first glance. In today’s roundup, we’re sharing some cool tips to turn you into a true burger expert. Take on arms!
Of course, the temptation is great on the way home to buy ready-made minced meat in the supermarket so as not to waste time cooking it. But in this case, it is better to immediately give up the idea of making a burger – in 9 cases out of 10 it will turn out to be dry and tasteless. To make the burger cutlet perfect, do not be too lazy to cook the minced meat yourself from fresh meat. Bonus tip: To make the cutlet juicy, cut the meat across the fibers and scroll through the large attachment of the meat grinder.
More, more fat. The burger is by no means a dietary meal. Therefore, do not spare fat: ideally, the ratio of meat to fat in minced meat should be 80 to 20 (80% meat and 20% fat) or even 75 to 25 (75% meat and 25% fat). For example, minced meat made from 2/3 lean beef (shoulder) and 1/3 fatty beef is perfect for a burger.
Only salt and pepper. The perfect cutlet requires no additional ingredients other than salt and pepper. No onions, garlic, and even more so bread, potatoes, and eggs, which housewives like to add to ordinary cutlets.
The ideal cutlet must be perfect in shape. If you cook burgers often enough, buy a special press, but if you don’t, a regular cooking ring will do. Do not forget that during cooking your cutlet will fry, so make it a little larger than you want to end up.
Chill the minced meat before shaping the burger patties. Otherwise, the fat included in its composition will stick to the mold and work surface. But not only the minced meat itself should be cold, but also the hands and the tools that you use. Therefore, keep the culinary ring or press in the freezer, and wipe your hands periodically with an ice cube while forming cutlets.
Once the cutlet is formed, forget about it until the very moment of frying: the less you touch the cutlet, the more chances that it will not fall apart on the grill or pan.
Fry burgers in a well-heated skillet or grill with a couple of tablespoons of vegetable oil.
The approximate frying time is 5-8 minutes on each side. Remember that the longer you fry the cutlet, the less juicy and flavorful it will be.
Choose the right bun. It’s simple: now in every supermarket, you can buy a special burger bun sprinkled with sesame seeds. But if you haven’t found any, then any will do, the main thing is that there are no additives in its composition that distract from the taste of the meat.
Don’t forget vegetables, cheese, and gravy. Any cheese you like will work for a burger. The main thing is its location: so that the cheese does not get too wet from the meat juice, put it on the bottom bun. Ideal burger vegetables: onions, pickles, lettuce (iceberg, lettuce, or romano), tomatoes. Traditionally, ketchup and mustard are used for the hamburger. But barbecue sauces, chili, and others are also great.
Delicious and juicy beef steak, it’s easy to cook if you know some tricks. Each chef has his own steak recipe, and you can endlessly try to cook according to these recipes, but we decided to introduce you to tips from four chefs in America, a country that knows a lot about meat.
Always take only high-quality meat. It is best to buy meat from the same supplier in which you are confident. It is better to take farm meat, on farms, cows grow on free pasture, which makes the meat more tender and tasty.
Before cooking steaks, the meat must be removed from the cold for at least an hour, or better for two, and allowed to reach room temperature, then during frying or baking, the steak must be cooked evenly.
While the steak is at the right temperature, season with salt. The salt will draw out some of the moisture, which will create a golden-brown crust during cooking.
Always use a heavy-walled cast iron skillet for grilling steaks. During frying, the meat reduces the temperature of the pan at the time of laying on it, this applies to any metal, except cast iron. Cast iron keeps the temperature without dropping.
Don’t shy away from spices. But you need to know when to add them. When the meat in the pan is already more than half ready (in time), you can add butter with various seasonings of your choice to the pan, thyme and rosemary are ideally combined with meat (the main thing is not to overdo it). Drizzle the aromatic oil over the steak as it cooks.
After you fry the steak, let it “rest”, that is, just lie down for 5 to 10 minutes (it is best to cover the steak with foil). The juices in the meat during “rest” will dissipate through all the fibers, and make the meat juicy and tender. Good appetite!
Want to make the most delicious burger ever? we will help you with this!
Depending on the filling itself, hamburgers, cheeseburgers, fishburgers, chickenburgers, veggie burgers (vegetarian), tofuburgers and others are distinguished.
Let’s start with the selection of meat for the king of all burgers – a hamburger, in the middle of which there is always a meat cutlet. Unlike regular cutlets in a skillet, the meat for a burger should not be greasy. When the meat is fried on the wire rack, fat will constantly drip onto the coals, burn, smoke, irritate.
Do not take young meat so that it does not come out dry and lean. If it’s veal, then half with pork.
When choosing meat at the market or in the supermarket, take not lean tenderloin, but a thick edge.
Minced meat should be cooked on your own.
Do not grind the meat too much. Elastic cutlet is much more stable to fry on the grate than fine crumbly, which, most likely, will fall on the coals.
Summer is getting closer, and with it the burger season. Appetizing, juicy, fragrant – no one would refuse a good burger? Perhaps this is the only dish that can be found both in countless fast food eateries and in expensive restaurants with a complex concept. And all why? Because burgers are divine. And since they are divine, then you need to treat them appropriately, and only the best should be cooked. How? Very simple.
Pay attention to temperature. And I’m not talking about the temperature at which we will cook our burgers – I think it’s already clear how important it is. No, I’m talking about the temperature of raw meat, from which we will sculpt cutlets. So, I have two comments on this. First, even if you’re hungry and your ground beef is frozen, don’t give up and don’t cook frozen. Just place the frozen block between a piece of paper and a saucepan filled with warm water. The meat will quickly reach room temperature. And second, when the package of minced meat is thawed, put it in the refrigerator before cooking. Here’s the thing: When you cook a steak, you heat it to room temperature, but the burgers must be at the same temperature as the refrigerator. Only in this way will the fat contained in the mince be in the consistency we need. Otherwise, it will evaporate all during cooking, it will grumble appetizingly in the pan, but the burgers themselves will come out overdried.
It might seem like any ground beef will work for burgers, but to make the best burgers, you only need to hunt a few specific types of ground beef. First, in terms of the meat / fat ratio, it should be in the range from 70/30 to 80/20. Ground beef Primebeef is a good option. Low fat burgers (5-10%) seem to be healthier, but by choosing them, you are depriving yourself of the recognizable flavor and tenderness of a burger. If you care about your figure, simply make a smaller cutlet instead of sacrificing flavor. Second, choose grain-fed marbled beef whenever possible. This type of meat is best suited to our mission of making the world’s most delicious burger.
Most people either add salt and pepper to minced meat, or use them only to grate ready-made cutlets, but few do both. For the perfect burger, season the minced meat, stir it, mold the patties, and season them again on both sides. What for? It’s simple: as long as you don’t sculpt the burgers as thick as a sheet of paper, they won’t be thin enough to be soaked in salt and pepper. In addition, rubbing the seasoning on the surface of the patties, you provide them with better browning, and at the same time an amazingly tasty crust. In general, you can do with black pepper and coarse salt alone. However, you can experiment by adding mustard, ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, onions, and even mayonnaise to the minced meat.
Each of us has thought at least once: how do chefs in a restaurant get burgers of such an ideal shape? No more guesswork: just use the lid from a large can (like a can of peanut butter). In shape and size, this lid is ideal for sculpting a burger. And remember: don’t be too zealous when squeezing meat into a mold. Using too much force can damage the meat fibers, and the burger can be too dense and dry.
And here’s a very simple and useful trick. When sculpting the patties, make a groove with your thumb on one side. In this recess, all the meat juice will accumulate and then be absorbed back, which will try to escape from the minced meat during frying. Otherwise, he would simply hiss uselessly in the pan while our cutlets lose their taste. Flip once – and only once. What’s the hardest part about making burgers? Show patience. We’ll have to watch the juicy cutlet brown appetizingly right before our eyes. You just want to touch it, check its elasticity or turn it over, right? Do not! When you flip the burger, you stop the meat fiber sealing process. To make our burger perfect, you need to caramelize it properly – and this process occurs only with direct contact with a hot surface. If you turn the cutlet over without letting it brown properly, all you will achieve is that all the meat juices will come out of it, and with them – the juiciness. A small note for all cheeseburger lovers. Cover the patties with cheese in the middle, or for of cooking, but not when the burger is already fried, otherwise the melted cheese will dry out your meat.
Give your burger a break. Remember what I said about patience? It looks like making burgers is the best way to train him. We swallowed drool for ten minutes while we cooked it, and now it is ready – but we need to wait a little longer. Just like the steak, the burger should rest after the grill so that the juices disturbed by the heat will spread over it and make it as divine as we needed it. All of these tips are designed to take your burgers to a whole new level. But maybe you have some other tricks that you use?
Homemade pizza like from a pizzeria? Is quite real. To make the perfect pizza in the most ordinary oven, it is important to remember the following:
The dough recipe is not so important, the sauce recipe and the type of filling are not so important as the baking temperature. Italian pizza is originally cooked in a wood-burning oven at a temperature of 450-550 C, no more than 1 minute, due to which it turns out to be crispy on the outside, with a thin elastic crust, it is not easy to simulate a wood-burning oven with such a high baking temperature at home, therefore such methods are used: preheat the oven to the maximum (250-300 C), instead of a baking sheet, use a special stone sheet, which is heated together with the oven. Pizza is baked on the stone for no longer than 10-15 minutes. Since I have no stone, I bake on a metal baking sheet, but at the highest temperature (250-300 C) in an oven very well preheated to this temperature. It takes 10-15 minutes to bake, depending on the size of the product. As soon as the sides of the dough are browned, and the cheese melts and begins to bubble, the pizza is ready. Take it out immediately! It is important not to overdry the pizza, this often happens if it is baked at medium temperatures (about 180 C) for a long time (20-30 minutes).
The pizza dough is made according to the simplest recipe for lean yeast dough with the addition of olive oil, the ascended dough is not crushed a second time but immediately stretched with the palms of the cake to the desired size. It is believed that the rolling pin destroys air bubbles in the dough, so it is not used. I still roll out the dough with a rolling pin, but I let the base “breathe” for about 20 minutes so that air bubbles inside again form.
To prevent the pizza base from becoming dry and greasy during baking, after rolling out the cake, place it on a baking sheet sprinkled with flour (you do not need to grease it with butter, only flour).
To prevent the base from becoming wet from excess moisture in the filling and sauce, after placing the dough in a baking sheet, first of all, grease the side on which you will spread the filling with olive oil, only then distribute the sauce and filling.
To make the pizza tasty and baked well in a short time, do not overload it with ingredients, distribute the cheese in slides at a short distance.
When baking pizzas in new modern ovens, use the oven manufacturer’s recommendations. See instructions. Why is it so important? Old ovens are almost always a little leaky and natural ventilation (convection) is provided during baking. In the old oven, it is enough to set the maximum heating temperature, warm up the oven itself well and the pizza turns out to be perfect – with dry crispy sides and a juicy cheese center. Furnace effect. Modern ovens are hermetically sealed and therefore with standard heating (classic heating top + bottom) moisture does not evaporate and the pizza turns out to be moist. The result is not at all the same. Therefore, I recommend using the mode for baking pizza, which is offered in the instructions for your oven, usually, it includes powerful heating + fan mode. I have such a mode called “Heating from below + ventilation heating” while the baking sheet should be placed not in the middle, but closer to the bottom of the oven. I set the temperature to 220C. The pizza turns out to be perfect, not wet, very tasty!
