Every year judges comment on the lack of seasoning, so the trick is to test your burgers to make sure you use enough.

Salt and pepper are the most standard seasoning but you could also use other flavours such as fresh herbs or spices to develop more depth. Rubs are great to use on the meat.

A few tips:

• Freshly ground or grated spices have a more intense flavor than stuff that has been grated or ground ages ago – this is true for freshly ground black pepper and freshly grated nutmeg.
• Play around with the different types and coarsenesses of salt. Coarse sea salt, fine sea salt, flaked salt and herb flavoured salts all work and taste differently.
• Dry rubs are combinations of dry ground spices and or chopped herbs. When applied liberally to a good piece of meat add a wallop of flavor. When cooked at high heat the rub will create a crust of flavor that locks in the juices and flavors the meat inside.  You can be quite generous with your layer of spice rubs because the intense flavour of the spices is mellowed by cooking

Wet rubs contain almost entirely dry ground spices, but they are then moistened to the consistency of a loose paste by the addition of small amounts of liquid, often water, wine, or stock.  Where dry rubs tend to be best cooked at high heat, and or seared to create a crisp outer crust, wet rubs are best cooked slowly, at lower heat.   So it’s most likely you are going to want a dry rub for your burger.

Finally, it’s good to experiment  - some strong flavors like mustard and ginger can swing from a great addition to a rub, to completely overpowering.  Try it first to get it right!

A chef taught me that

‘food should be a symphony of flavours working together in your mouth – not a food fight where many flavours are competing and you can’t work out what they are!’

I think that is pretty cool advice – simple is good!

 

Tags: burgers for kids, Claire Gourley

This entry was posted on Monday, July 11th, 2011 at 4:41 pm and is filed under Burger Competition. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.