It's a great day for America, everybody, and I'll tell you why. We're making patty melts! I love classic American food, and it doesn't get any better than this. It may look like a regular sandwich, but it's anything but regular. A perfect patty melt takes love and dedication. The result is greasy, meaty, cheesy deliciousness. I'm not often a big stickler for ingredients of the highest quality, but I don't make any exceptions when it comes to cheese. Real Swiss Emmentaler for me, none of this "Swiss" cheese for me. When it melts, the texture stays slightly firm and a little stringy. The patty melt also lends itself to variations. You could try creating a spicy mayonnaise or adding vegetables as well.
- 1/3 pound ground beef (85% lean)
- 2 slices rye bread
- 1/4 sweet onion
- Sliced Emmantaler
- Salt and pepper
- 1 1/2 tbs butter
- Olive oil
Instructions
We'll start by caramelizing the onions. Slice the onions into strips. Cook the onions in a pan on medium-low to medium heat with a bit of olive oil. Stir frequently so that the onions do not brown. Instead, we want them to get very soft and develop their own caramel color. If the onions look like they are drying out, add a little water to the pan. You can also add a tiny bit of sugar to help them along. I cooked them for almost an hour. Set the onions aside when done. Note that this is a pretty long process, so you can always caramelize the onions ahead of time.
Dry out the pan a little. Season the beef and form into a patty. Keep in mind that you are going to put it on bread instead of a bun, so try to make it thinner than you normally would to cover more area. You should also form it into an oval rather than a circle. As they cook, burgers tend to get thicker. Fry the patty on medium-high heat. Flip once the bottom is nicely charred. Cover with cheese and continue cooking. You can consider covering the pan to help melt the cheese.
Now, assemble the sandwich: bread, burger, onions, bread. You could also add a slice or two of tomato here. Melt half of the butter in the pan, and put the sandwich in. Cook until the bottom slice is crunchy but not burned. Take it out, melt the rest of the butter, and flip the sandwich. Fry until crunchy. Serve with a generous supply of ketchup.
Where is the Steak n' Shake Frisco sauce? (I kid)
ReplyDeleteGoogle tells me it may just be a combination of Thousand Island and French dressing. It seems like most "house" sauces turn out to just be a variation of Thousand Island.
DeleteThe so-called "Special Sauce" in a Big Mac appears to be a Thusand Island variant also. One and a half TBS of butter seems a bit high especially now in our lean eating days though. You should try leaner ground beef also. I think the leaner stuff is meatier tasting. Do you remember that in Yi Cheng where we boarded a ship to go up the Yangtze River, a restaurant at a hotel had Thousand Island dressing labeled as Kilo Island Juice. In Chinese, sauce and juice are the same word. If you take a Chinese translation for Thousand Island Dressing and then translate it back into English, you can actually understand what they did. Fun!
ReplyDeleteMmmmmmm... Kilo Island Juice.
ReplyDelete