The World Table

An interactive culinary compendium: recipes, lexicon and study

New Mexico · Main

New Mexico Green Chile Cheeseburger

  • Easy
  • 30 min
  • roughly 2 of 4 for cost

gently hot · rich Leads with a warm current of chile, richness that coats and comforts.

Ingredients

  • 600g ground beef
  • 6 roasted green chiles, chopped
  • 4 slices cheese
  • 4 buns
  • 1 onion, sliced
  • Salt and pepper
  • Mustard and pickles

The skills inside

Griddle & plancha work

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

  1. Form the beef into four patties and season well.
  2. Griddle over medium-high heat 3-4 min a side. 4 min
  3. Pile chopped roasted green chile on each patty and lay cheese over to melt it into the chile.
  4. Toast the buns.
  5. Build with the chile-cheese patty, onion, mustard, and pickles.

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
Zinfandel or Tempranillo
From the Taps
IPA or amber ale
Zero-Proof
Root beer, no apology

A burger is seared beef plus fat plus bread: tannic reds do the steakhouse work, and a hop-bitter IPA scrubs the griddle richness between bites.

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Film school

This dish, cooked on camera Search films of New Mexico Green Chile Cheeseburger Search YouTube: J. Kenji López-Alt on New Mexico Green Chile Cheeseburger A YouTube search for J. Kenji López-Alt and this dish. No affiliation.