Three Meat Burgers

jfm0830

These burgers were called Three Meat Burgers from Raichlen's Burgers by Steven Raichlen. They hail from the Balkans, where they are called cevapcici. They are typically made with lamb plus any combination of either beef, pork or veal. This recipe called for beef, lamb & veal plus some seasonings, fresh parsley, beef broth & baking soda. The baking soda supposedly helps keep the mixture light. The beef broth made for a very soft squishy mixture which was a bit difficult to form into the sausage shaped patties. In fact the formed patties are refrigerated for two hours before getting grilled over high heat. The burgers are served on a crusty roll with diced tomatoes, onions & red bell peppers as condiments. Now originally I was going to make a BBQ pork burger that is sort of like a pulled pork sandwich burger from this same book, but when I spotted this three meat burger I knew it was right up my wife's alley. Well I did good, she declared it to be the best burger she ever remembers having. It didn't do that much for me, but the meat was extremely tasty & highly seasoned. For me: give me a smokey bacon cheeseburger, but as I said I did do this for my wife and I chose well. Onto the pix...

We got about 2" of snow in the time from when I started prepping the burgers until when I cooked them. We all know a little snow doesn't even phase the Egg. Plus I learned something about the grill gazebo too. The bad news is that with light snow and a little wing the snow does get inside the grill gazebo as you can see. The good news is it doesn't get in the main aisle where I stand.

The ingredients for the burgers are gathered: Equal parts ground beef, lamb & pork, Italian parsley, onion, beef stock, salt & pepper, ground coriander & an addition by me: ground cumin.

I used my Kitchen scale to weigh out equal portions of the meat.

The ingredients for the patties are all measured out. Believe it or not that is 8 oz of the lamb, beef and veal. They each had widely different densities and therefor volumes, which is why I used a Kitchen scale. 

Everything but the beef stock has been placed in a mixing bowl. Once these ingredients are mixed the beef stock gets added in.

The beef stock has been added in and the patty mixture is a tad soupy. With a little work I formed the meat into 8 sausage shaped patties around 2 1/2" long and a little over 1" in diameter. They were placed on a tray & chilled in the fridge for 2 hours.

It is now dark. The snow has continued to come down and the Egg has been heated up to 550. I preheated it with the CI half moon griddle in it so I could toast the rolls. I did those first as a separate operation for several reasons. The first, as you can see, is I could only toast one roll at a time so I didn't want to keep having to open and close the lid while the burgers were cooking. Secondly at 550 these rolls would toast up in no time and I wanted to be able to keep an eye on things and not burn 4 rolls at once. I am still learning my Egg.

The buns & griddle are off and the meat is on. The meat firmed up nicely in it's two hours in the fridge. 

The patties cooked for about 2 1/2 minutes a side & were taken to 160 degrees internal as measured by my instant read thermometer. I'd sprayed the grill grate with PAM for grilling & these soft patties gave me zero sticking problems. That is always something to be concerned with when you have soft mushy patties like these.

I let the meat rest 2 minutes and then served it with the diced tomato, onion & red bell pepper.

When building the burger, you used two patties per roll and then topped them with the diced tomatoes, onions & peppers To be honest these patties were rich & tasty enough by themselves, that no condiments were really even required.

These were real tasty burgers & I could definitely taste the cumin I added to the mixture and I liked what it added. I hit a home run with my wife: she just got up a few minutes ago and the first thing she said was: "Those were the best burgers ever".

Jim