Minnesota · Main
Juicy Lucy
- Intermediate
- 35 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts.
Ingredients
- 600g ground beef (80/20)
- 150g American cheese, cut in thick squares
- 4 soft buns
- 1 onion, sliced
- Salt and pepper
- Butter for the griddle
- Pickles and mustard
The skills inside
Allergen screen
Found: dairy · mustard
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Divide the beef into 8 thin patties. Season them.
- Place a folded square of cheese in the center of four patties, leaving a border.
- Top each with a second patty and pinch the edges tightly all around to seal the cheese inside.
- Griddle over medium heat 4-5 min a side: medium, not high, so the cheese melts before the outside burns. Pierce is forbidden. 5 min
- Set on buttered buns with onion, pickle, and mustard. Warn everyone to wait: the cheese is molten.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Griddle & plancha work 45 recipes
- Full contact with the metal: the food lies flat, with no dome in the middle and no curled edge lifting it away, so browning reaches the entire face rather than a ring of it.
- Contact is immediate and audible, and the food stays where it is put rather than sliding around in a slick of its own released liquid.
- The cooked face is an unbroken sheet of even colour: the whole surface browned, not a pattern of marks with pale ground between them, and not a dark centre with pale corners.
- The metal around the food is dry: no spreading wet patch steaming out from under it, nothing weeping onto the surface and boiling there.
- Turned once or twice and no more, and lifted while the crust is still brown: a piece flipped repeatedly never holds heat long enough to build one.
Where it goes wrong The surface was crowded and its temperature crashed, so everything gave up its water at once and stewed on the metal: pale, damp, grey at the edges, and stuck fast where the crust never got the chance to form.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Cabernet Sauvignon or Malbec
- Also Right
- Tempranillo (Rioja Reserva)
- From the Taps
- Amber ale
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water, make room
Tannin binds to seared protein and fat: each bite softens the wine, each sip resets the palate: the steakhouse equation.
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