Hamburgers

Homemade Burger on the left, Kroger Hamburger on the right

Hamburgers are the ultimate, easy, universally loved grilling meal.  We usually make our hamburgers fresh at home with ground chuck, but I have been awfully tempted a few times, when I was in a rush, to just pick up one of those bags of frozen patties.  “How bad can they be?”, I wondered, “They just contain beef and a few flavorings like the homemade variety.”  Granted, these frozen packaged patties do not look very appetizing in the bag, but then raw beef is never very appealing to me.  So, this past weekend we invited my in-laws over for a comparison of homemade patties, made with my husband’s secret ingredient, (recipe below) and a bag of Kroger brand frozen hamburgers.  Let me just say, there was a definite winner!

Ben’s A1 Burgers

My husband has always had a strange penchant for A1 steak sauce and would probably eat it on just about any meat, but he especially likes it as a topping for hamburgers.  He had the brilliant idea recently of adding the sauce to the meat before cooking the hamburgers and it made them so flavorful, even for those of us who aren’t obsessed with steak sauce.  The warm water is my addition because I’ve found it makes the burgers extra juicy.

1 pound ground chuck

2 Tablespoons A1 steak sauce

Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper

warm water

1.  While your grill is heating, place the ground chuck and A1 in a medium mixing bowl and mix well with your fingers, adding a few dashes of salt and pepper as you mix.  When everything is almost combined, add a coupe tablespoons of warm tap water to the mixture and finish combining ingredients.

2.  Form the beef into 4 patties, making sure to keep them nice and thick.  Place on an oiled grill and grill for about 5 minutes on each side for medium-well, a couple extra minutes if you want them well done.  Serve with toasted buns and toppings.

Sometimes, on this blog, I have been surprised at how good store bought food can be.  Most recently I was amazed at how well store bought barbecue sauce tasted next to homemade and how many people preferred pancakes from a mix.  This is not one of those posts.  The homemade hamburgers were better than the frozen patties in every way.  They were juicy, flavorful, and tender where the frozen patties were dry, chewy, and bland.  The frozen patties also were not any cheaper than homemade.  At $9 for a bag of 12 quarter pound hamburgers and $3 for a pound of ground beef, the frozen hamburgers were almost exactly the same price as homemade.  Of course, store bought burgers are a bit easier to prepare as they don’t involve any mixing or cleaning of bowls and they also cooked a little faster since they were thinner than the homemade ones.  But in the end, there was only a few minutes difference between the preparation of frozen and homemade hamburgers, certainly not enough of a time saver to be worth the difference in flavor and texture.  Just a few things to think about next time I’m tempted by those convenient, perfectly round frozen hamburgers.

The prices below are based on 4 hamburgers.

Ben’s A1 Hamburgers                     Kroger’s Frozen 1/4 pound Hamburgers

Cost:  $3.50                                              Cost:  $2.99

Time:  15 minutes                                   Time:  10 minutes