Broiler Cheese Burgers

August 4th, 2010

Here’s a recipe and another how-to on freezer cooking.

Once again, we ate it up before we got pictures.  Doh!

When you go buy your big pack of ground beef and brown it up all at once, you’re also going to buy another big pack of ground beef.  This one is for burgers.  After you brown all that other ground beef and set it in the fridge to cool, then turn your attention to the burger prep.

Dump the whole bunch of raw ground beef into a big glass bowl (use a metal pot if you don’t have a bowl big enough).  Mix in some burger seasoning mix – we’re currently using Emeril’s Bam! Burger Mix but we’re not partial.  Mix it in really well.  Lay out a long strip of wax paper on the counter.  Then patty out the ground beef however large you want them.  Lay them out lined up on the wax paper.  Then start tearing off plastic wrap (I don’t have a great method for this, suggestions?)  Currently I tear off the size I’ll need that will wrap one patty completely.  I start setting them all around on the counter tops – not touching so they don’t wind up all wadded up together.  I wrap each patty individually, stack them, and set aside.  When they’re all wrapped I stack them into my freezer – you can put them into freezer gallon bags if you’d like and date them, but we eat them up so quickly that I skip this step most of the time.

Now, to the cooking part.

When you want them for a quick dinner, pull out however many you’ll eat at a meal, unwrap, set frozen into a large casserole dish not touching.  Set your oven to broil.  Set them under the broiler (with the shelf halfway down – you don’t want them right under the broiler) and set the timer for 10 minutes.  When the timer goes off, squish ‘em flat and flip them.  Set the timer again for 10 minutes.  Squish, flip.  Set timer again for 10 minutes or less – depending on doneness.  You can tell they’re done when the juices run clear when you squish them.  Keep squishin’, checkin’, and flippin’ until done.  When they’re done add sliced or shredded cheese and set back in the oven until cheese is melted.

When serving this time we added precooked bacon you can buy in the store, tomatoes, lettuce, pickles, mustard, mayo, and buns (toasted or not – your preference!).  We deep fried some Rally fries you can find in the freezer section (really good, by the way) and added shredded cheese to the top, sometimes we salt and sugar the fries instead of adding cheese – mmm!

Cook ahead meal and walk away, unattended burgers all in one!