" How To Make A Breakfast Smash Burger That Will Open Your Eyes | From The Test Kitchen | Bon Appétit"

Oh yeah. It's like talking to you. It's like, help me! It's like, oh god, help! So I developed this recipe inspired by an ideal pride brunch. My friends and I like to come together to eat and share a meal. I personally love a smash burger because the textures that you get as you press it into the griddle maximizes that kind of crispy, crunchy texture. And it only takes a minute to cook the burger on both sides. You have savory, you have a little bit of sweet happening, you also have that like really golden runny egg that's gonna marry all those flavors together. So this pickle is white onion and shallots. I really love a pickle because it captures acidity, which I think is really important to kind of cut through any type of fat. I like mixing my onion just because every onion has a different personality. A white onion's like that dependable friend, but they don't necessarily like always take the leading role in the ways that you think that they should. Shallots have a bit more of like a elegant perfuminess to them. You can use sherry vinegar, you can use red wine vinegar, you can make your own vinegars. That's not the show we're doing today though, so I'm just going to add this distilled white vinegar. I kind of eyeball everything when I'm cooking. The nice thing about this is like you can set it and forget it. I'm gonna put it to the side, it's gonna mellow out a bit. It's gonna start to become translucent, so when I check back in on it, it'll be like glassy, like you can kind of see through it. This recipe for me, like most of my recipes, is actually just a template for you to do kind of whatever you want. Here we have ground lamb. You can sub it out for what your favorite thing is. I love lamb because I think it pairs really well with the greens and the onions that we're using. And then we have these little sausage links, so I have a little bit of maple in it. I'm just gonna open the casings up. I'm going to add my toasted and ground fennel. I think fennel with pork and lamb is just like a really delicious classic thing. Same thing with the cumin, paprika, and then of course garlic. I'm not gonna grate it all the way, I'm actually gonna save the little nubs to do a little swipe of garlic on my buns. I gotta put my salt in too. Whenever I make a patty mix, just because not all ground meat is made equal, what I'll do is I'll just sear a little bit off and taste it to see if I've gotten to the flavor that I want. So I'll take a little bit and then I'll cook it off to see where we are with that. That's delicious. It's perfectly salted. I killed it. It's like I know how to cook or something. Oh my god. So now that we have our patty ground meat seasoned and ready to go, I'm gonna put my sheet tray directly onto my scale. They don't have to be perfect, but I want them to be as similar as possible because you want to make sure that you're getting the same surface area and the same spread across each patty. One palm is just for holding, and my hand is pretty loose. If you want to shake your hip to the side while you do it, just for added effect, you can. Now just checking to make sure that the pile didn't go out. The pan is quite hot. I like to always back with a little bit of parchment just that it doesn't stick to it. There is this really handy griddle press. Press it down and you can see the oil is already kind of buttering out and all over the counter. So we're gonna do it for 30 seconds, which has already kind of passed. So I'm just gonna season both sides. It's gonna start to curl, and then you really just want to scrape underneath. Then I'm gonna flip it. Get that really nice dark brown color. Maybe I'll put the little griddle over it again. Five, four, three, two, one. Okay so then this is our first patty. My favorite smash tool is the press. It also looks really cool. It also doesn't, like it keeps your hand away from the heat so you don't have to get all like burnt. It's so satisfying. Like if you're stressed after a long day of work, just smash the burger. The pork as it renders is gonna actually just become your little reservoir of oil as you cook. It also has all that flavor of the paprika, the cumin. You have your fennel actually infused in that fat, and so that'll be a great basis to then cook our eggs in. It's always nice to start with room temperature eggs so that you don't have to worry about bringing the temperature up. So this has been chilling, sitting out while I'm cooking. Also a trick is if you don't want to crack the yolks of your eggs, hit it on a flat surface instead of the rim of a bowl, and we're gonna cook them in our patty fat. I usually can do the one-handed, but maybe let's see. Oh yes! I'm a real chef, I can do one hand. Oh, I broke an egg though. That'll be mine, I'll eat that one. Crack a little bit of black pepper on each of these. Even the sad one gets black pepper. I don't want to overly salt anything, but I want to make sure that when that yolk breaks open that it does have a little bit of salt on it. I have my patties here, and so what I'm just gonna do is I'm just gonna add it to my patty. And so while the pan is still hot, I'm going to grab my buns. And you really don't want like a ton of color on this, you just want them to have structure. So whenever you hit this colored moment, you know that you're good. So that's looking kind of cute, this is looking kind of cute. That one just burned my finger, she's going into timeout. So I have my little garlic nub, so I'll rub it into like all those kind of grooves and cracks and crevices, just to add a funky umami, if people still say that, umami flavor. So we have our patties, we have our eggs, we have our buns all ready to go. So first what I'm going to do is I'm going to make my mayo with the help of Kewpie mayo, which is one of my favorite mayos, mostly because there's this really cute happy baby on the packaging. All I know is that it makes me feel really good when I use it, it tastes delicious. And then we're going to use our sriracha, but if you have a favorite hot sauce, you can switch the sriracha out for something else. And then paprika, which you may have remembered we used to season our patties, because I could be like professional and use like a whisk since it was so nicely placed here for me. Oh, oh my god, that's very good. Put it on like literally anything. I'm just going to add a little bit of the sauce to each, this will help make everything stick. When it comes to greens, I think arugula is more akin to breakfast, but if you're like moving more into lunch vibes, you can throw in romaine or iceberg. I actually really like to add herbs to my sandwiches too, just so I don't feel like I have like this gut-busting thing that I can't digest because I have no fiber in my life. I'm just going to take a handful of my pickled onion mix, I'm just going to add some of the salad. I'm so excited. Oh, oh my god. Wow. First of all, my face, please excuse me. She's juicy, she's spicy, the patty is so thin, and the spices in the actual ground beef mix, sorry if I talk with my mouth full, but I hope you understand what I'm saying, out of this world. So I'm getting that paprika, I'm getting that fennel, I'm getting that garlic, it's all kind of coming together in this really wonderful, beautiful way. Holy s**t, that's so good.