Turkey Burgers: or, Discount meat leads to strange places

Today, we are having fun with the food processor!

Turkey Brunch Burgers 6 English muffins Brown mustard Leafy greens of choice* 6 slices Cheddar cheese (or whatever cheese you like), or ½ cup shredded cheese Tomato sauce: 1 clove garlic, minced 1 tsp thyme 1 tbsp olive oil salt and pepper to taste 1 tsp balsamic vinegar 8 plum tomatoes Turkey patties: 1 tbsp cooking oil 2 tbsp onion powder 1½ tsp dried sage 1 Granny Smith apple, cut into 1"(ish) cubes (no need to peel) 4 slices smoked bacon, cut into 2"(ish) long pieces ¼ tsp nutmeg 1 pound ground turkey Salt and pepper to taste ¼ tsp liquid smoke For the tomato sauce: Blenderize all the ingredients except the vinegar. Put in a small, heavy-bottomed saucepan or frying pan and bring to a low boil. Reduce heat and simmer uncovered for an hour or two, until thick enough to spread. Stir the sauce, scraping the bottom of the pot, every 15-20 minutes. When done, remove from heat and add the vinegar. This can be made a few days ahead and refrigerated. It also freezes well. For the turkey patties: Heat oven to 350°. Line a baking sheet with foil. If the pan does not have raised edges on all sides, fold up the foil on all sides to contain any juice that runs out. Cut the bacon slices into 1" lengths and the apple into ½"-1" cubes (no need to peel them). Run the bacon and apple through the food processor. Mix the apples, bacon, turkey, and all remaining ingredients. Form into 6 patties. (The mixture may not be firm enough to hold a shape very well until after it is baked.) Bake about 20 minutes, or until a food thermometer reads 165°. Place cheese on top of each one about 5 minutes before they're done. When done, cover with foil. Make sure the foil doesn't touch them or else the cheese will stick to it. (You can put little loosely-crumpled wads of foil between the patties to keep the foil on top from making contact.) Let them rest 5 minutes. To serve: Split the muffins. Warm them in the microwave, or spritz the cut sides with cooking spray and toast on a griddle. Spread the tops with mustard. Spread tomato sauce on the bottoms, then place a patty and greens on the bottoms. Close and serve. *Baby arugula if you want to strictly follow the original recipe. Or, use avocado (mashed and seasoned to taste) instead of leafy greens. Adapted from Food and Drink, autumn 2016, Liquor Control Board of Ontario

This recipe begins with clearance turkeys. We purchased two of them when the price dropped to 45¢ per pound. Like the ham, I argued it was false economy to spend $25 on two turkeys when no one would actually eat them. I was overruled on this, and the birds spent several months in the chest freezer. While everyone forgot the $25 of unwanted poultry sitting in the chest freezer, it needled at me. The birds bothered me. Their presence irked me. Eventually, I thawed one with no plans for it.

Then, on a night when I was feeling unusually energetic, I pulverized the whole thing. You should know that your average household-use food processor is not meant to pulverize an entire raw turkey in one long slog. The food processor survived, but it made whining noises as we reached the end of the bird. Despite mechanical protestations, we had an entire ground turkey. Unfortunately, no one here likes ground turkey. But somehow, ground turkey seemed easier to work with than a whole bird.

I think this is what they call "having a normal one."

In looking for recipe ideas, I didn't want to (not-so-)secretly swap in turkey for beef. That always ends up tasting like an apologetic "At least it's good for you." With that in mind, I found this in that Canadian food magazine I pinched from the airport the first time I went up north. 

Most of the magazine's pictures are relatively generic, but this recipe's photograph is very Canadian. It could not unironically come from anywhere else. We've got someone in flannels, serving the food on a slab of dead tree. My friend who lives in Canada had only one correction:

This was in a themed article about creative new spins on Thanksgiving ingredients. I don't know about you, but attempting a "creative new spin" on a Thanksgiving recipe is a risky move for most people I know. The tableside fallout could persist for months. But we're not making this for Thanksgiving, so that doesn't matter.

The recipe starts by roasting tomatoes. Since I don't live in Canada where the nightly temperature is still dipping in and out of freezing as I write this, I took issue with baking the tomatoes for four hours at 250°F (140°C). Some online investigation told me that I could put the tomatoes in a slow cooker and leave them all day. 

My only problem with this (which is true for everything involving a slow cooker): it smelled really good several hours before it was done. If I used a slow cooker often, I would plug it in outside so the smell of food didn't follow me around the house all day. 

On a related full disclosure: You will need to soak your slow cooker in bleach water overnight. If you don't have a yard or an apartment balcony, consider using another cooking method.  Otherwise, your house will smell like an indoor public pool.

We were next directed to grate apples. This seemed maddeningly tedious, but it turns out you can shred an apple really fast. Of course, I didn't bother peeling them since I figured the cheese shredder would reduce the peel into tiny flecks anyway.

I don't understand why the recipe tells us to core the apples before shredding them. It's a lot easier to just shred the apple until you've exposed the core on all sides, and then throw it out. Maybe whoever wrote this recipe typed "peeled, cored" after the word "apples" on autopilot.

 

It's taking a while for this recipe to look normal, isn't it? 

We are now directed to mix our apple shreds with a respectable amount of onions. By the time the juice in the pan evaporated, it looked like I had made a semi-successful attempt at hash browns.

At this point this gets into recognizable burger territory. Mix your meat with whatever you're adding to it, shape it into patties, and take it to the grill. Everyone who has ever complained about a dry turkey burger will love this recipe's solution: adding lots of raw bacon. Either our burgers would be flavorful, or they would set the grill on fire.

I'm not an expert on grilling, but I could already tell that grilling this would be a miserable ordeal. The meat was gloppy and runny. If anyone tried to grill it, the turkey burgers would stick to the racks, fall apart, and land on the cinders. 

I could have wielded a spatula over the flames and gotten more and more angry and defensive as supper ruined itself while complaints arose around me. But even though that is a traditional rite of the summertime, I decided to skip it. Instead, I would bake our dinner.

Doesn't this look manageable?

I managed to shape the meat into patties, but it was like trying to pat extra-sticky fruit preserves into tidy mounds. I didn't know if these would fall apart as they baked or not. But since I wasn't trying to grill them, we wouldn't watch our grocery money crumble through the racks and go up in flames. If our burgers fell apart, I figured I could put the surviving meat-clumps onto a bowl of lettuce and halfheartedly call it a salad.

To my own surprise, the burgers cooked up really nicely. They may have been as gloopy as undrained cottage cheese before baking, but they came out all right afterward. Granted, the random shreds of cheese I sprinkled on top looked bad after they melted. But that would be covered with a bun anyway. Speaking of, I dropped the English muffin onto a hot griddle to make it extra-toasty in the middle.

After final assembly, the burgers were... not bad. However, like the last time we mixed raw bacon into food, the bacon stayed oddly squishy and faintly... un-right. Like, yes, the pork germs were definitely dead, but the bacon didn't seem cooked. And the chopped onions were out-of-place. It was like someone tried to pretend a slice of meatloaf was the same as a burger patty. The flavor was good, but the execution was unimpressive.

But no one liked the roast tomatoes. They tasted all right, but they were slithery and slimy when we ate them. We ended up mashing the tomatoes with a fork, which eliminated the slimy texture problem. The resulting mashed spiced tomatoes tasted a lot like the homemade tomato ketchup we made from Miss Leslie's cookbook. And yes, we used avocados instead of baby arugula. Avocados were 45¢ each, and baby arugula was priced on the other side of the stratosphere.

But as much as I liked these burgers, they were a lot of effort (even if you exclude shoving an entire turkey through a food processor). And so, I decided to simplify things. First, I replaced the onion with onion powder. The fresh onions made the meat too watery anyway. Second, I added a bit of liquid smoke since I had no intention of trying to grill these. 

Third, I tried to let the food processor do all that apple-grating and bacon cutting. On my first attempt, I just dropped everything into the machine in its natural state and turned on the motor. This may have worked if I had a commercial-grade food processor. Instead, I got a lot of tangled, sinewy bacon strings and wads of half-chopped apple. I had to take the whole mess out of the food processor, hack at it with a knife, and put it back into the machine. 

But on a later batch of turkey burgers, I got out the cutting board and gave the food processor a bit of starting help.

We ended up with perfectly pulverized apples and bacon. Even the apple skins turned into tiny speckles that I could pass them off as herb flecks. Unfortunately, our food processor success looked terrible.

I think that pulverizing all the non-turkey components of these burgers makes it easier to see why this meat was never going to hold itself together on a grill. There's too much ground-up produce and too little meat.

I don't know why our Canadian recipe writers were so hesitant to just chuck the ingredients into a food processor. Although food processors are both expensive and frivolous (unless you get lucky at a thrift store), this magazine seems like it's aimed at the sort of people who probably have one.  

And for those who can't imagine eating burgers made with beige paste, they looked perfectly fine after mixing them together. They just would have been hopeless on the grill.

Since electrical pulverization seemed to help a lot with the burgers, we took a similar approach with the tomatoes. Instead of slow-roasting them in the oven (or slow cooker), we blenderized them and put the resulting froth in a small frying pan over a low burner. 

After several hours of simmering, we had a really good tomato spread. Its flavor was concentrated and intense. As mentioned above, this reminded me of making making ketchup like it's 1837.

Having corrected the recipe's faulty handling of its ingredients, these are easily the best turkey burgers I've ever had. They tasted a lot like breakfast sausage, except without the excess salt and greasiness. 

I think they're so much better than other turkey burgers because they're not trying to be hamburgers. Yes, you have a cooked meat patty stacked on a bread bun, but there the similarity ends. So instead of tasting like the absence of beef, they are actually good. I hesitate to recommend them for summer grilling unless you have one of those cage-on-a-stick things people use for grilling fish. But since these aren't even trying to be burgers anyway, it's no loss to bake them instead of grilling.