I love burgers. Love ’em. If you look at my Instagram page you’ll see it’s mostly food sprinkled with pictures of my dogs and sometimes some coffee or my nails. But mainly just food. And if you assess the food situation, honestly? It’s mainly just burgers.
Oddly, I almost never make burgers at home and this is for various reasons. For one, I don’t really have a good set up for my grill. I have two balconies and the one that’s off the balcony where I store my grill is off one of my bedrooms, instead off the kitchen. Makes no sense, right? I just found I rarely used it and it was taking up space so I moved it. Also, I don’t really know how to use it or how to cook effectively on a grill. I mean I think I can turn the grill on but then I’m not sure where you place the meat or how long to cook it. Sigh.
For two, I don’t really keep hamburger buns or bread on hand. And though I’ve had bun-less burgers during low-carb spurts, I prefer a burger with a bun.
Aside from grilling burgers like what other way is there to cook them to make them taste really good? In my mind there were none. I was not about to pan-fry my burger.
If you look in my freezer you’ll see I have an inordinate amount of hamburger meat. There’s a lot of meat in general but really – an obnoxious amount of hamburger meat. One time there was a sale on grass-fed beef where I bought 3 pounds for $5! So I bought 6 pounds. And around that time I bought a pound and a half of ground chuck from Walmart because Walmart is the only place where I can find ground chuck around these parts of the world and I am a biiig fan of ground chuck!
I have this bad habit of buying meat, putting it in my freezer and then leaving it there. And then buying fresh meat to make for a recipe that needs fresh meat in that instant. I decided I needed to make a dent in all that meat in my freezer and pulled the ground chuck out so I could make some burgers and free up some space (but admittedly not very much).
It occurred to me that I aside from grilling a burger and pan-frying a burger I could cook the burger in the oven. And I found the perfect looking recipe at Foodie Crush (incidentally, she’s one of the many foodies I follow on IG).
ingredients.
- 1 lb ground chuck
- 2 ciabatta rolls, sliced in half
- Worcestershire sauce
- garlic salt
- kosher salt
- freshly ground black pepper
- 4 T. butter, divided
- 4 slices Cheddar cheese (or your favorite kind of cheese)
- 8 pieces of cooked bacon
- 2 T. butter, melted
directions.
- Preheat oven to broil and place baking rack in middle of oven. Prepare a baking sheet or broiling pan with foil.
- Divide ground chuck into 4 equal portions and pack together into a nice ball of meat and then form the meat into a hockey puck like shape. You want the burger to be big enough to cover most of the roll.
- Place rolls face up on baking sheet and brush with melted butter. Place a meat patty on each roll. Score the top of the patty, criss-crossing twice. Drizzle Worcestershire on each patty and then season with garlic salt, salt and pepper. Top each patty with a tablespoon of butter.
- Place in the oven and broil for 11 minutes for medium-rare (longer if you like your burgers cooked more). Add a slice of cheese to each burger and two pieces of bacon and cook for 1 minute more. Remove from oven and serve immediately.
Oh my heaven. I’ve never had an open-faced burger that I can recall. But in this instance I didn’t mind only having half of a bun because I wasn’t wanting to eat all that many carbohydrates anyway. What I wasn’t expecting was to love the burger so much with only half a bun. I found I didn’t miss the other half of the bun at all because the burger itself was so amazing. I attribute that to the very tasty ground chuck and the thick burger cooked medium-rare which is the only right way to eat a burger.
If you don’t have a grill or are looking for a way to cook your burger, this is a mighty fine option.
Recipe rating:
Food Snob 