Pan-Asian Turkey Burger?

caliking

For the past few weeks I've had thoughts of turkey burgers, gochujang,  and trying the "umami" burger floating around in my head. Pulled out some ground turkey from the freezer, and got to work.

Started with these - miso, black bean and garlic paste, and a tub of gojuchang.

There was a thread on the bbq brethren site about green chile cheeseburgers recently, and that got me thinking. Cut a few onions up and sort of caramelized them before adding some gochujang.

Mixed up a couple of tablespoons each of the black bean garlic sauce, fish sauce, and miso paste with about 1.5 lbs of ground turkey. Made into big patties (maybe too big) so that I could cook them all in one go. Found out that my smokeware large-dial thermo was WAY off, and so had to improvise.

Keepin it low-carb and kinda healthy, so the "burgers" were assembled on sandwich thins. Shmeared some Japanese spicy mayo on one side, patty, lettuce, tomato, and the gochujang onions on the other side of the thin. Sesame haricot verts that SWMBO whipped indoors.

A very different kind of burger for me, but it was a hit! Got rave reviews from the crowd

Legume

Yeah, that looks killer.  Nice job.

Skiddymarker

Excellent - man, you must mainline that red pepper paste, I've only ever used it in a jar - often wondered who could use the ice cream sized tub! No fish sauce?

caliking

Skiddymarker said:

Excellent - man, you must mainline that red pepper paste, I've only ever used it in a jar - often wondered who could use the ice cream sized tub! No fish sauce?

I've had dishes cooked with gochujang in them, but I had never cooked with it myself. Had been meaning to buy some for a month or two, so I figured I would go all out and get the tub. Now I have  plenty to experiment with

The fish sauce didn't make it in the line-up pic, but I did add some to the meat. A Serious Eats article recommended adding grilled eggplant to turkey burgers, which I want to try sometime. 

Skiddymarker

I knew there was some fish sauce in there somewhere... Eggplant is pretty mild and might take on the flavours you want while adding great texture. Go ahead with your experiments, Doctor Turkenburgerstein!

HendersonTRKing

That looks awesome.  I'd have kicked it up with this stuff.  It packs a serious punch and is great on anything asian and burgery or sammichy.  

caliking

HendersonTRKing said:

That looks awesome.  I'd have kicked it up with this stuff.  It packs a serious punch and is great on anything asian and burgery or sammichy.  

oooh that looks tasty. I'll look for it. Pretty sure that's something I would like.