- So, I'm a big breakfast fanatic. I can eat it at any time of the day. And that's where the
Ultimate Brunch Burger inspiration came from. So, what is better than a beautiful burger with
good quality meat, good ingredients, topped with some bacon and a fried egg, on a bagel? I don't
really know. There's not much better than that in life. And so, that's where it came from. I just,
I love breakfast. And I think with burgers, you can get creative and kinda,
you know, top them with whatever you love, and one of my favorite things is breakfast.
So, I like to start my beef burgers with a ground chuck, and specifically I go to the butcher and
I say, "Hey, can you grind me the chuck roast?" This way you know exactly what cut of meat you're
getting. With ground beef, it could come from anywhere on the cow. And I like the chuck because
then I could cook it to whatever internal doneness I'd like. So if I like medium rare, medium,
it's a little bit safer to do that. And it's fresh. So if you have the time, ask your butcher
to grind it for you; he or she will gladly do it. Now we're gonna talk about all the ingredients
that I put into my Ultimate Brunch Burger. We're first gonna go with the wet ingredients. So,
I do a little bit of minced sweet onion. This is about a quarter of a large sweet onion, minced.
And what this does is, as the burger's on the grill and it's grilling, the onion will sweat.
And so, it'll add additional moisture to the meat, and we always want a juicy burger,
so that'll help there - and it tastes really good. Sweet onion has a natural, great sweet flavor.
Add a good flavor to it. Next thing I wanna do is a little bit of minced jalapeno.
This is one small jalapeno minced with the seeds. If you want it a little bit more spicy,
keep the seeds in; if you don't want the spice, throw them out. Let me go to Worceshire sauce or
Worcestershire or Worceshesher sauce, or however you pronounce it. This is a great sauce to use
with any burger type: it adds great flavor and has good savory notes to it. Good sodium count.
I love using it really in any burger that I'm making myself. Now, we're gonna do some pepper
and some salt, about two tablespoons of each. And we got about one pound of ground chuck here.
Now I wanna mix it all together.
All right, now we are going to form our patties. What I first like to do is kind of divide
my fixin's here into four equal parts and form them into little baseballs,
as tight as you can. Try to make them as even as you can. I like a pound for about four burgers,
because it's gonna give us not too thick of a burger, but not too thin of a burger. So
when you're doing an Ultimate Brunch Burger, we're adding a lot of good stuff on it. We got eggs,
we got bacon, we got tomato, we're doing it on a everything bagel. So we don't want to have too big
of a patty. These look pretty even to me. I'll add a little bit to this one.
But you don't wanna have too big of a patty 'cause that'll overtake everything. So, I got them evenly
squared out. So, the next thing I'm gonna do, if you don't have a burger press on hand, you're on
the go, just kinda put it down and flatten it out as thin as you can. And as you flatten it around
the edges, you can pick it up kind of around the edges yourself. And I try to go as thin as I can
'cause it will plump up on the grill. All right, I'm getting to a good place here,
I'm feeling good about all these patties; they're edged out nicely.
And then the last thing I wanna do is just give the center a little bit of a dimple, like so,
so as the meat hits the grates, it contracts, it tightens. And so, you ever been to a barbecue
where you see, instead of a burger, you see kind of like a meatball? So, this dimple will help
that contracting into a meatball and kind of keep it shaped as best as you can. All right, wanna
keep these in the cooler until we're ready to hit the grill because again, all the fat will start
to melt and render down, and it kinda can fall apart if it's too soft when it hits a hot grate.
So, we're gonna throw these back in the kitchen here, and then we'll get our grill preheated.
All right, we've preheated our Weber Traveler to 500 degrees on high.
And we also preheated it with a lovely cast iron griddle here, which is gonna be what we
cook our bacon on. So, I'm gonna get the bacon on first. I'm just gonna use my hands for this.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, so when you're traveling and especially, like, hiking, or you got an RV
or you're out in the elements, one of my favorite things to bring along with my cooking bag is a
griddle. The reason I like to cook the bacon in it is because as the bacon cooks, all the grease from
the bacon will get on that pan. And so, I've been on so many camping trips where people are like,
"We forgot the oil! We wanna fry an egg, what are we gonna do?" And so nine times out of 10,
everyone always has bacon, and so you use the bacon, you cook it, you get that nice grease
on the pan, and then you could fry your egg on it. All right, our bacon is - ooh, lovely crispy
right there. That's what we want. So, we're just gonna put it on a couple of pieces of paper towel,
let that grease drip off of it. Now we're gonna keep majority of this grease in the griddle.
We'll probably get a spoon here and take out a little bit after we grill our burgers. That's
gonna serve as a lubricant when we go and fry our eggs here in a bit. Let's go get our burgers.
All right. We just took our burgers out of the fridge, or if you're on the go,
took them out of your cooler. We're gonna get them on the grill. We're gonna grill
these over a high heat, so that's 450 to 550 for about three to four minutes a side. The
direct heat is where we're gonna go. So we're gonna hit the left side of the grate here.
When I went away to school, that's when I got into, like, the breakfast game, because we would
go up to Lake MacBride a lot, outside of Iowa city. And it's this big lake, and we would camp,
and the cheapest thing to bring and the easiest thing to bring is bacon and eggs and burgers. And
so, that's kind of where I got into breakfast, and in camping and bringing it on the go,
and doing like these brunch-themed burgers. 'Cause you wake up, you know, you stay up late,
get up early, go on a hike, you come back. It's usually around brunch time. You know that 11 to 2,
somewhere in that range. You're like, "Man, a burger with an egg sounds really good right now."
Now we're gonna add, the last 30 seconds, our bacon first.
So, I like to do the bacon first, kind of make it fit the burger.
And cheese over top. We're gonna do two slices of some cheddar.
Just will take about 30 seconds to melt. For me, you know, a cheddar cheese, like a sharp cheddar,
really complements the beefiness of the ground chuck, and it pairs really well with, like, the
spiciness of the jalapeno. Honestly, if you wanna go get some brie, some sliced brie on there melted
over the top of it, goat cheese. It's really a preference thing, and so whatever cheese you love,
I encourage you to try that, or you could put a variety out. All right, we wanna close our lid,
crank our grill back up, clean the grates so we can toast our buns. The burgers will rest for
about five to 10 minutes. While they're resting, we'll toast the buns, we'll grill up our eggs.
I don't know what it is, if it's I come from a big family, but even my brother was in town
and he's like, "Did you get bagels?" And I'm just like, everyone loves a good bagel,
right? And so if you have the time to go, actually get a really good quality bagel,
that'll even bring this burger to, like, another level. The everything bagel has
seasonings and different things on it in itself, and toasting that up and having that kind of be,
you know, the vessel that holds all your ingredients and your burger, it'll
take the burger to a next level. Really, like, the bun is just as important as the meat and all
the fixings. Doing an over-easy egg on this burger is crucial because there's something that happens
when that person goes to bite into the burger and the yolk just pops and you get that flavor from
the yolk and it's just like, you can dip the burger into it. It just adds another element
to the whole experience. All right, we'll close the lid and let it go for about a minute here.
You see how that grease helps more on that side?
All right, another 30 seconds, and then we will take these puppies off. All right,
let's check out the doneness of these eggs. Whoo! They're feeling good. Let's get the buns off.
And I'm gonna get my eggs off separately. I like Russian roulette, so I'm gonna flip them back up.
Oh, not gonna flip them back up.
All right. Now that we got our eggs done,
we got our bagels toasted. Now it's time to build the burgers. Let's get to it.
All right, we have all the fixings for our Ultimate Brunch Burger here.
We got some spicy mayo and some thin tomatoes. You can either make your spicy mayo at home by simply
mixing mayo and sriracha, or you can buy store-bought. I like to mix my own, but totally
is whatever you like to do. All right, we're gonna start building with the bottom bun first,
we're gonna go tomato first. I like to do a nice thin cut. Ooh! Then we're gonna do our burger,
again, that has got the beautiful cheddar cheese and bacon on it. And then we're gonna do a nice
over-easy fried egg on top. Look at how beautiful that is. Top it off. And that, my friends, is the
Ultimate Brunch Burger. Ooh, yeah. You just gotta kinda commit to these. Ooh, money. Mmm!
Mmm. It's gonna be a messy one, but man, it is worth it. Yeah!
So over the past, you know, nine, 10 years, I've probably - actually, over the past 20 years of my
grilling journey, I have cooked probably well over 10,000 different types of burgers. And
I will say the one that I love the most is the Ultimate Brunch Burger. It never gets old for me.
It's always a staple. The other ones, maybe at times, get old. But yeah,
the ultimate Brunch Burger is by far the way and the route that I always go.