Monday, April 2, 2012

Foodish: The Dallas Burger


I am no great shakes at recipes, so for the most part, Food Network will do the talking.

This segment of "Foodish" is brought to you by my Facebook page, where each week I focus on a different ag product or commodity. By week I loosely mean I pick a new feature each Wednesday. For this week, I chose pickles and cucumbers.

And as this is the Meatetarian blog, what's one of the best ways to incorporate pickles and cucumbers in meat? In my opinion, that would be a burger.

So check out The Dallas Burger, created by the Grillmaster and Iron Chef himself, Bobby Flay.
Here's some things to note from the recipe:

  • Flay uses 80/20 ground beef. That means it's 80 percent lean muscle and 20 percent fat. While this is the type of ground beef that imparts the most amount of flavor, if you want a leaner burger, I suggest doing 85/15 or 95/5. If you want to be very extreme, some producers of ground beef make a 97/3 product. NOTE that when cooking leaner beef, since it doesn't have the fat, it is really, really easy to overcook, so watch the burgers closely!

  • Flay's beef also comes from the chuck area of the beef carcass. This is the area that on a human would be equivalent to the shoulder area. You can also find ground round (from the thigh/rump area) or ground sirloin (from the back) in your meatcase.




And where do pickles fit in? Well, they're on the burger. And if you want to be super inclusive of this week's featured commodity, you can slice up cucumbers super thin and add them to the slaw that's recommended to be served with pickles atop this barbecue-sauce adorned beef beauty.