Homemade Hamburger Patties

It takes a little time time out of your day but making homemade hamburger patties is well worth while.  Although I’ve heard some good reports on various frozen burger brands I have yet to taste one that would bring me back a second time.

I don’t know why some memories remain engraved on the mind forever but my memory takes me back to the first hamburgers my mother made for us when we were just kids. You have to keep in mind that the early Italian immigrants hadn’t a clue on what a hamburger was, I suppose because all their ground meat was used to make meat balls.

I vividly remember the day.  My sister and I had invited the two girls next door over for lunch and we wanted to impress them with homemade burgers. We would have done better with meatballs that day!  This is not to say that the hamburgers were not good, it was just that they were as thick as mattresses, impossible to get our mouths around and even more impossible to finish eating in one sitting.

My mother’s hamburger making has come a long way since then!

A good policy on the matter is to choose the best meat you can and mix in a whole lot of flavour!  Make them as big as you want but on the thinner side making them them easier to eat and totally cutting down on cooking time. This recipe incorporates some of the flavours we like best but by no means lessens the possibilities of other choices.  Mixing different kinds of meat gives more complex flavour, it doesn’t have to be all beef all of the time.  The additional ingredients can go as far as individual taste to unimaginable creativity!

One thing is for sure, for most delicious results, grilling these patties on the barbeque is not optional!

Homemade Hamburger Patties
I usually don’t measure the ingredients exactly but for this post I used three pounds of meat and measured out the remaining ingredients.  All ingredients can be adjusted to taste if desired.

3 pounds ground meat (your choice)
1 egg
½ to 3/4 cups grated cheese ( parmiggiano or other hard grating cheese)
½ cup dry breadcrumbs
2 medium cooking onions roughly grated
1 1/2 tablespoons salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
1 1/2  tablespoons Montreal Steak Spice

1. Mix all ingredients well and form into eight 6 ounce patties.
2. Use the same day or line a baking sheet with plastic wrap and place formed patties in a single layer.   Freeze until solid.
3. Remove frozen patties from sheet, place pieces of wax paper to keep patties separate, wrap in freezer paper, label and return to freezer.

 







One of My Favourite Tools

There are plenty of hamburger patty making tools on the market but I found the plastic lid from a bowl I no longer own works perfectly.  When first using the lid, removing the patty proved to be a little difficult. The suggestion to line the lid with plastic wrap for easier removal came from my daughter Elizabeth.
It’s true…two heads are better than one!