Sunday, June 26, 2011

Grilled Big Mac

Filed under:  "Hell, why not?"

I think that a lot of people can remember when they were a kid and had their first Big Mac. It was kind of a rite of passage, graduating from a plain small burger to a “grown up” burger (or so we thought).

The Big Mac isn't really a bad burger in concept. Usually it's execution that's the problem. So on a whim yesterday, I decided to make grilled Big Mac style burgers for lunch.   These are intended to be a Big Mac clone, just a grilled version of them.

Photo taken "Pre-smush".  To fit it in my mouth I had to "smush" it so it wasn't so thick.

Want the recipe? Here is is

two all beef patties
special sauce
lettuce
cheese
pickles
onions
on a
sesame seed bun.

What? Seriously that was about it.

The special sauce I made was an adaptation from TopSecretRecipes.com
½ cup Dukes mayonnaise
2 Tbsp ketchup
1 Tbsp white wine vinegar
2 teaspoons sugar
1 teaspoon sweet pickled jalapeno, diced
1 teaspoon dill pickle, diced
1 teaspoon Vidalia onion, finely minced
pinch of salt
pinch of black pepper

Whisk it all together and put in the fridge for 1 hour.

Instead of just using chopped onions on the burger, I grilled some and chopped them up. Grilling them concentrates the already sweet flavor of the Vidalia onion.

I grilled my buns. I cut the top off of a top bun and the bottom off of a bottom bun to make two “middle buns”.
My buns are toasted!

I used my normal burger mix (1 egg, 1 tsp salt, ½ tsp pepper, ½ tsp garlic powder, 1 Tbsp worcestershire sauce, and ¼ cup bread crumbs per pound of ground chuck) to make 3 ounce patties. Grilled them for 8 minutes total.


Then it is as simple as putting it all together.


I'll be honest. I grilled a Big Mac kind of as a spoof. I was killing time before I started to smoke a few pork butts overnight. Turns out it was a very good burger, not anything like what I've ever gotten at a drive through. Everyone devoured theirs and asked that I make these again sometime. 

It did put me in a “food coma” for an hour or more afterward though.