Home-ground beef burgers

Thanks to this post over at Cooks Korner, I was inspired to make hamburgers last weekend. Fortunately, now that my husband eats red meat again, I can devote a little time to doing it right, since I don't have to worry about making a separate meal for him.

These burgers were made from scratch with beef blade (that's "chuck" if you're American) that I ground myself. They were tasty, spiked with chopped garlic, canned chipotles and oregano, and I'll probably make them again some time. With the summer grilling season just around the corner, I don't imagine "some time" will be that far in the future. This time, though, it was just easier to pan-fry them, because the weather outside wasn't really appropriate to grilling.

I was surprised by how well they held together despite the total lack of any binder. I'm tempted to think this has something to do with the use of fresh-ground beef of known origin, but I don't actually have any scientific basis for this belief. And since I haven't made burgers with store-bought ground beef in a really long time, I don't really have any basis of comparison either. (Nor is that likely to change!)

Even after making four 150-gram burgers, there was roughly a pound of beef left over that I used to make tacos the next night. All in all, not bad for less than $8 worth of beef blade!

Oh, and I also managed to start an interesting - if at times heated - discussion on Cooks Korner about the virtues of undercooked hamburgers and the risks of E. coli.