An evolution of the hamburger

This is sort of a continuation of the pesto thread I started. It’s another recipe from Massimo Bottura’s MasterClass. The way he makes the burger is completely new to me. The basic recipe is 1kg ground beef, 300g Parmesan, 30g gelatin. He gets his gelatin by cooking cotechino sausage. :exploding_head:

I get gelatin as a bi-product of several things I make frequently. My plan was to make a burger using it the next time I had some. Ideally it would have been from a smoked beef or pork product.

Last night I made sous vide chicken wings. Those make a ton of gelatin. So as a proof of concept I thought I’d give it a try. I just used store ground beef. In production I’d probably grind dry aged beef myself.

The proportions he used didn’t seem correct when I started putting it all together. I used 170g beef, 20g Parmesan and 20g chicken gelatin plus salt. I formed the burger and put it back in the fridge for thirty minutes to set up.

I pan fried it. The burger was juicy and very tasty with a slight hint of chicken flavor. As a proof of concept it was a success. I’m definitely going to explore this technique further. I’m thinking smoked brisket gelatin in ground brisket point would be killer.

OK, I gotta go learn something new!

I made smoked pork ribs on Saturday so I saved the liquid from the two hours wrapping in foil. I put that in the fridge. Today I separated out the gelatin. I mixed it in with a chuck steak that I ground for burgers. I added 10% gelatin by weight to the beef. I cooked the burgers on the grill.

These were way better tasting than with the chicken gelatin. It added a nice smokiness to the burgers. It also makes a very juicy burger. You could probably cook well done and it would still be juicy.

This method doesn’t work as well on the grill because it makes the burger more crumbly. I’d stick with a griddle. I still want to try this with brisket gelatin.

The meatloaf I made a couple of months ago using the Serious Eats recipe uses gelatin.