I’ve been jonesing to try my handy dandy new Kitchen Aid meat grinder attachment, and now that it’s grilling season, I finally had an excuse. Always the obsessive researcher, I scoped out several articles to figure out how to approach it and ultimately relied on Mark Bittman’s article and Tyler Florence’s recipe for grind your own brisket burgers.
Turns out grinding your own burgers is a bit of manual labor but not really hard at all, and it made for AMAZING burgers. The big perk to grinding your own meat is that you actually know what cuts of high quality meat are going into your burger, you can control fat content, and you can actually cook them to medium rare without fear of imminent ebola-like illness.
The key to grinding meat is to have it and the equipment nice and cold. Put the meat in the freezer for about 30 minutes and the grinding equipment for about 20. The hardest part of the whole process is cutting up the semi-frozen meat into smaller pieces to feed the grinder, so just work up a bit of a sweat before you eat those juicy, fatty burgers! Then grind the meat into a bowl placed over ice. Run it through twice on the coarse setting for a good mix of fat and protein. With just a little salt and pepper, these burgers were beyond juicy and oh so flavorful. Yum! Our guest said they were top 10 burgers of all time for him – now that’s a compliment!
I paired the burger with caramelized onions and herbed horseradish mayo from the same burger bar recipe, and a simple salad of heirloom tomato, mozzarella, basil and olive oil – delish and so easy!
