Top 5 Burger Recipes for the 4th of July | superanon's Blog

With Fourth of July right around the corner, and millions of hamburgers about to hit the grill, all the heavy-hitters in the cooking world are putting forward their best hamburger recipes.

We picked out featured recipes and techniques from the top food magazines, TV shows, and websites, and found these top 5 recipes that will take your hamburger grilling to a whole new level:

image courtesy of pointnshoot (Flickr)

1. The Food Network (which also has the #1 cooking site) is in the fray with their take on “All-American Recipes.” Food Network has grilling chief Bobby Flay in its all-star team, and their featured burger recipe is the Hamburger with Double Cheddar Cheese and Grilled Vidalia Onion and Horseradish Mustard.(recipe)

The cheese here are thick slices of white cheddar AND yellow cheddar. Which are then topped with horseradish mustard (which is an easy mix of Dijon mustard and prepared horseradish) and grilled Vidalia onions.

If you want a tutorial from the Food Network on how to grill burgers, check out this video:

2. Food & Wine Magazine featured this recipe in their weekly e-mail: Scallion-and-Brie-Stuffed Burgers (full recipe). This recipe tops the burger with brie cheese for a creamier flavor.

The best thing here is the “special sauce.” Topping this burger is a Spicy Scallion paste which is really a mix of thinly sliced scallions, garlic cloves, a few spices for a kick, all mushed together with olive oil.

3. Epicurious.com's (from the same people behind Gourmet and Bon Appetit) featured burger for the 4th comes from their home page, and is the Jalapeno Cheeseburger with Bacon and Grilled Onions (full recipe).

The “special sauce” here is a creamy ranch sauce with a little green chile in a mayo and sour cream base sauce and some additional spices. The actual patty here is also pretty interesting, adding to a bit of Worcestershire sauce to the mix as well as some jalapenos.

If that wasn’t enough, there’s a Worcestershire-coffee glaze that tops it off. With a Worcestershire-ketchup base, the teaspoon of ground coffee adds a hint of smokyness to every bite.

The cheese here is sharp white cheddar. Bacon and grilled onions top the mix.

Epicurious also brings us an excellent video on how to form and grill hamburgers, points off for not letting us embed it.

4. Saveur’s weekly newsletter also featured Independence Day, and among the top grilling recommendations of this upscale magazine were the lamb burgers with mint sauce (full recipe).

As the name a key differentiator here is in the patty, going for lamb rather than beef. But its really the mint sauce that brings it all together into a rich, meaty, and somewhat refreshing bite. The mint sauce is simple – a mix of sugar, white wine vinegar, water and mint. For extra mintyness garnishing with a mint leaf is an option.

5. The folks at America’s Test Kitchen and Cook’s Illustrated took their usual scientific approach to grilling burgers, and feature a Well-Done Bacon Cheeseburger that is cooked well done but avoids being tough paddies with little flavor.

The solution they found was not in making the meat fattier since it did not lead to the meat retaining the moisture. Instead was to pack the burgers with a panade (the bread and milk paste used to pull meatballs together), and added flavor by throwing in some garlic and steak sauce in the mix. Another interesting tip: to avoid the burgers from puffing up on the grill like most burgers do, they suggest making “a slight depression in the center of the paddy” which will even out as the burgers cook.

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