Feature: Tart Cherry Habanero
Main Dish:
Scarlet Smash Burger
Two smash patties, melted cheese, gooey caramelized mushrooms and onions, and a fried egg are pure catharsis
Yield: 2 servings
Ingredients
Burger
- 8 ounces ground beef
- 2 3-inch square slices of cheese
- 2 buns
Sauce
- 2 teaspoons salt
- 1/4 cup butter
- 4 cups diced sweet onion
- 2 cups mushrooms
- 1/2 teaspoon black pepper
- 2 teaspoons garlic puree
- 1/4 tart cherry habanero pod (crushed)
- 1/4 cup tart cherry juice (unsweetened)
Directions
Sauce
- Saute all sauce ingredients except tart cherry juice in a large sauce pan
- Saute on medium until the cartoon amount of mushrooms and onions has reduced to a regular, reasonable amount.
- Remove from heat and add tart cherry juice, then set aside
Burgers
- Divide the ground beef into 4 equal sections
- Form each ground beef section into a ball, being careful to avoid overworking the meat (if the fat melts onto your hands, you’ve handled it too much)
- Add butter or, ideally, bacon grease to a pan and heat to medium-hot, or until the fat melts and wants to sizzle, but before it starts to discolor or smoke.
- Dip your smashing implement of choice in the melted fat or spray with cooking spray.
- Add one beef ball at a time to the pan and smash it right away and keep smashing until the beef holds its new pancakey shape when you can wiggle your smasher.
- Flip, repeat, and remove from the pan. Repeat for the three other beef balls.
- Add two beef pancakes back to the pan, top each with cheese, then top the cheese with the remaining two beefcakes to make two beefy-as-the-bread grilled cheeses.
- Smash both beefcakes with your smasher until the cheese has melted and completely permeated the beef to blue
Notes
At first glance, the volume of mushrooms and onions seems super excessive for the amount of ground beef this recipe calls for. Trust us on this, because they both cook down a lot, and they’re so good that you will be so, so very sad if you skimp on them!
Smashing implements can be anything from sturdy-handled metal spatulas to well-cleaned smaller pans. If you ever come across a Real, Antique, Cast Iron, Bacon Smasher though, you should snatch it up, because takes aaall the work out of the smashing!
The type of cheese doesn’t really matter. One of us likes pepper jack smash burgers. The other likes limburgers.
We both LOVE this recipe with maitake mushrooms, but feel free to use any kind of mushroom you have on hand or whichever species came out of the woods with you this week if you’re a human who is sentimental toward woodland tagalongs.
I don’t want to tell you what to do, but also 100% PUT A FRIED EGG ON THIS BAD BOY RIGHT NOW.
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