Any excuse to pull out the electric griddle is alright with me! After all of the meatball-style recipes in the Ground Meat and Sausage section, I was ready for a patty-style recipe again and 9-1: Spicy Beef Patties did not disappoint. I’ve never thought to put pickled beets into a burger before, but after trying this recipe, I would consider it again.
I love the little skinned potatoes they served alongside the patties in the example photo. I haven’t quite learned the technique to cook those yet. Their side salad is very photogenic, but not very filling. 3 tomato slices and 1 leaf of lettuce.
The TIPS section has some great advice. I added bread crumbs instinctively because I’ve made burgers that were too wet before.
Editor’s note: It’s my fault the bottom of this card looks wonky–I must have scanned it badly and never caught it until now. Since you can still read the recipe, I’m not going through the trouble of rescanning it.
The recipe called for “finely grated cold, cooked potatoes” so I got these frozen hash browns and let them come down before using them. Looking back, I probably should have nuked and cooled them again before adding them to the meat so the potatoes were cooked through first. I figured the potatoes would cook while the burgers were heating up so I didn’t want to over cook them.
Here’s the portion of the potatoes I used. I saved the rest in the freezer for breakfast that weekend.
Add an egg, some salt and pepper, milk and ground beef. Start mixing and you’ll come out with the burger base.
Here’s the burger base, let’s add some flavor to these Spicy Beef Patties.
I learned that you cannot chop the beets small enough! Keep chopping even when you think you are done. The bits need to be really small, but the flavor integrates better if the bits are smaller. I made this same mistake on the onions in this recipe. Smaller is better.
The onion chunks, relish, capers and beets go into the burger base to be mixed in. These ingredients add the spicyness!
This mixture produced 8 even sized burger patties. I put these in the fridge to firm up while I got the electric griddle out and set it up.
The smell of the griddle heating up makes me happy! I sprayed the surface with canola oil and put the burger patties down to cook for about 6 minutes on this side.
Flip the burgers and this is what you see! The griddle heats everything almost evenly across the entire surface which is good for cooking large batches of patties. Pans on the stove always have a hot spot and cold spots. This surface is warm the whole way across.
Ta-Da! I present the Spicy Beef Patty with a scenic side salad. These patties were a bit hit. I couldn’t eat these fast enough. Surprisingly, I really liked the pickled beets. I even ate some raw pickled beets when I opened the can. They’re not bad, with a quality I can’t quite explain. The root-y, earth-y taste is good, but also tastes of dirt at the same time. It’s a complex flavor and I think that’s why I appreciate the different layers it has. In the Spicy Beef Patty, the beet flavor is up against the pickled caper and onion flavors, so it all balances out.
GRADE: A+
