Smashed patty cheeseburger

I’ve had the flu for the last couple of weeks and only just coming out of it this weekend (I hope). Streaming The Menu during the week made me want to lift my cheeseburger game.

And it ruined my life. I will never buy a burger again.

These are ingredients and directions for 1 burger. Scaling up to 2, 4 or 8 or 12 is simple ingredients-wise. The logistics is the trick. 

It all happens very quickly, so you’re much better off doing 4 beautiful burgers, followed by another 4, then another 4, rather than doing 12, serving them all together with only 4 of them properly cooked.

Doing 4 burgers (8 patties) is about the limit for 1 pair of hands (or at least for clumsy ones like mine) beyond that, you’ll need to enlist the troops so you can concentrate on smashing those patties.

Fat hack

Burger mince, especially when you’re smashing the patty rather flaming it, needs at least 20% fat to keep it moist and getting that gorgeous crust.

This is no problem if you’re buying from a butcher. But not so easy from a supermarket where often 17% is the highest fat content available.

Not to worry. You have options.

You can oomph it up by chopping up some bacon fat, or adding slivers of dripping. In my example I had home-made beef stock in the freezer and scraped off some of the clarified fat and mixed it into my supermarket-source beef mince.

Ingredients

1 65g brioche bun

110g beef mince, at least 20% fat

2 tbsp vegetable oil

2 slices American cheese

3 very thin slices tomato

2 leaves baby cos lettuce, halved

1 eschalot bulb, thinly sliced

1 tbsp very thin slices cucumber pickles

1 tsp mayonnaise and wasabi sauce

1 tsp chilli and tomato chutney

For assembly

1 cocktail skewer

Method

This is 90% assembly and 10% cook. But the 10% cook is very, very important.

To get the assembly right, room temperature is your friend. The lettuce - fresh, crunchy, room temperature; the tomato thinly sliced, juicy, room temperature etc.

Having everything ready for assembly lets you concentrate on the cook.

On one board, lay out your assembly items: lettuce, tomato, pickles.

On another board, lay out your cook items: two patty balls 55g each, sliced eschalots, cheese

Halve and lightly toast the bun. I do this under a grill. I don’t want the buns to be browned, but to be crisp enough to hold it’s crispness once the juices begin to flow.

Once they’re ready, apply the salad sauce (mayo and wasabi) to the bottom bun and the bbq sauce (chilli chutney) to the top bun.

Now you’re ready to cook.

There’s really no timing involved here other than - the moment you’ve done one step, move to the next step.

Put a non-stick frying pan on a high heat. Add the oil. Once the oil starts to smoke, add the first patty and squash it down with a steel spatula to about .5cm thickness. Quickly, do the same with the second patty.

Season the top side of the first, add the sliced onion. Do the same to the second. Flip the first, keeping as much of the union underneath the patty as you can. Do the same with the second.

Season the new upside of each. Top each with a cheese slice. Remove from heat. Stack first on top of the second.

Avengers - assemble!

Bottom bun

(Mayonnaise and wasabi)

Lettuce

Tomato

Patty and cheese stack

Pickles

(Chilli sauce)

Top bun

Press the burger down gently, so that the juices cascade through. Gravity is also your friend.

Spear with a cocktail skewer, and you’re ready to chow down.

Olive and basil focaccia

This is very much a “day at home” thing as the dough requires three rises of about 45 minutes. But it’s basically: mix the dough, roll it out about three hours later, smash and apply the topping ingredients, put in the oven. Just think of all the washing and action-movie watching you can do in the meantime!

About the flour - regular, all-purpose flour has about 8% protein. Bread-making, or strong, flour has 12% or more. Think of the wheat protein (gluten) as the scaffolding of your bread. Once you get the bread to rise, the scaffolding will hold the shape so it remains soft and fluffy and doesn’t collapse back down.

Ingredients

Bread

• 600g bread-making flour
• 360g filtered water
• 1 sachet dry yeast (7 grams)
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

Topping

• Handful fresh basil leaves
• .25 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 3 cloves garlic
• 4 pitted kalamata olives

Method

In a mixing bowl, combine the bread ingredients. Kneed just enough to combine the ingredients into a consistent ball of dough. Cover with damp tea towel and set aside in warm place (or in the oven at 40ºC) for 45 minutes.

Now it will have doubled in size. Wet your working surface, and with wet hands stretch and fold the dough four or five times. Cover, and set aside in a warm place for another 45 minutes.

A good size baking pan for this is 20cm wide by 30cm long and at least 5cm deep.

Oil the pan bottom and sides.

Smash the topping ingredients using a mortar and pestle.

Now dry and lightly flour your working surface. With a rolling pin, shape the dough to match, more or less, the shape of you baking tin.

Place in the tin and push and stretch the dough to reach the sides of the tin, then and cover with the topping, smoothing across evenly with the back of a spoon. Now you want to make little indentations in the dough for texture. You do this with the fingers of both hands, like you’re playing the piano, working all the way down from the far side to the near side.

Cover again and return to warm place for another 45 mins.

Remove from oven (if this is your warm place) and crank up the heat to 200ºC. Once the temperature is reached, remove the damp towel and place the tin in the oven.

After 12 minutes, turn it around for more even browning and bake for another 12 minutes.

Once done, it needs to rest on a wire rack so the bottom doesn’t get soggy. To safely remove it from the hot tin, use the double-wire-rack flip technique.

Place the hot baking tin on a wire rack. Put another rack on top. Hold the two racks together with the tin in the middle, and flip. Take off the top wire rack and carefully remove the upside down hot tin. The bottom of the loaf will now be revealed, all golden brown. Put the wire rack upside down on top, and flip again.

And there it is - resting on a wire rack.

Before serving, sprinkle with grated Parmesan and a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil.