How to Make Spice-Crusted Steaks and Grilled Bacon Burgers with Caramelized Onion

today on cook's country christy and bridget unlock the secrets to fool-proof spice-crusted steaks adam reveals his top pick for electric griddles jack challenges bridget to a tasting of supermarket bacon and ashley makes julia the ultimate grilled bacon burgers that's all right here on cook's country though we call black pepper a spice it's actually a fruit in fact black white and green peppercorns are all from the same flowering vine pepper grows in tropical regions and is native to india but today vietnam leads in production producing over a third of the world's supply now prior to the 1900s americans were not big consumers of pepper the highest import amount was around 65 000 pounds a year and that sounds like a lot but by the late 1930s that amount grew to 50 million pounds yeah americans love their pepper and in world war ii when servicemen complained about the lack of pepper in the mess hall due to rationing the spice was quickly returned to the table for the sake of morale well we've got good morale today because we're celebrating pepper and using a good dose to make spiced crusted steaks so let's head into the kitchen with christy to see how it's done [Music] you want to cook a steak well what do you want you want it to be tender and juicy and full of beef flavor well you can't beat a rib eye for the job and it comes from the cow just on the top part of the rib right behind the shoulder now i like to think of it as a miniature prime rib it's that good but kristy's hair she's going to show us how to gussy it up a bit right we're going to come up with a really great spice blend that's going to stay on the steaks and it's not going to burn when we cook them great so these are two one pound boneless ribeye steaks they're one and a half inches thick and that's really important so that they'll cook evenly there's a lot of fat going through the ribeye and that's great and you'll see the pockets of fat inside we don't have to worry about those it's fat that's on the outside these are very nicely trimmed already you just want to make sure there's not more than about an eighth of an inch of fat along the outside of the steak so we can go right to the spice blend good now we wanted to grind our own pepper but we found if we used a pepper mill it often ended up too fine and it would burn so we're going to crush our own i have a zipper lock bag one tablespoon of peppercorns now here's the fun part i'm just gonna rock and roll nice so we just want to have a nice coarse grind you're just cracking them open really what we really wanted was a good all-purpose spice blend so i have two tablespoons of chopped rosemary that's fresh fresh yes then i also have two teaspoons of grated lemon zest two teaspoons of ground coriander okay so this was one of the warm spices that we used and one and a half teaspoons of dry mustard we have to have a tablespoon of kosher salt we didn't salt the steaks right and then the last thing is dried red pepper flakes it's one teaspoon so we'll just mix this all up so we have the blend now normally after we've trimmed the steaks the first thing we'd do would be pat them dry but we found that if we just let them be that their surface moisture became a really great adhesive to keep the spice blend on the steaks okay making it work for us so i'm just going to rub this all over the steaks and i'm using all of this that is great they get messy here i think we've adhered as much as we're going to adhere all done thank you i'm just going to clean up and then we'll come back and we'll cook them great so bridgette i've added a tablespoon of vegetable oil to the 12-inch nonstick skillet and i've been heating it over medium heat now we're looking for it to be just smoking before we add the steaks so i'm using a fork instead of tongs because it does less damage to the spice coating i'm going to cook these for 10 to 13 minutes but the key to getting a nicely toasted outside is to keep flipping them so i'm actually going to flip the stakes every two minutes and you're building a crust during that yes okay we're just at two minutes i think we can flip seeing some color there already and notice very little spice left behind the pan gorgeous and we're cooking these to medium rare so we'll cook these until they're 125 degrees we have flipped over the course of 10 minutes now it's time to check they look gorgeous so we're just going to attempt this along the side of the stake and again we are looking for about 125 for medium rare and i think we're yeah yeah great good great all right so now i'll transfer these to a rimmed baking sheet where i put a wire rack in it because we have this nice crispy crust if i put this on a plate it would kind of start to steam and sog out right you don't want that we have to let these rest for five minutes so i am going to just tent them with foil right so they stay warm but they don't steam right so you don't want to wrap it too tight no so five minutes let's spend five painful minutes you said it i'm just judging by the look on your face yes yes so it is time to slice but we needed that time so that the juices would redistribute so we don't have cutting board juices so now we're just going to cut these between a quarter and a half of it oh my goodness beautiful sorry i just can't even talk between a quarter and a half oh my goodness all right first piece gorgeous [Music] it's like the lemon kind of hits you first there's so much going on in the spice blend that i'm catching that lemon is really coming through and just enough of that warm spice the ratio of spice to steak is so nice absolutely perfection thank you thank you if you want to make these beautiful steaks and you do you need to start off with one and a half inch thick rib eyes and then coat them with a mixture of cracked black peppercorns grated lemon zest fresh rosemary warm spices and of course salt and then cook any non-stick skillet flipping over every two minutes until the steaks are medium rare tint them under foil for just five minutes slice and serve so from cook's country to your kitchen what i would call the ultimate spiced crusted steak these steaks make them today using an electric griddle is a great way to take the pressure off your stovetop when cooking for a crowd and today adam's going to tell us which brand is best when i was a kid and the electric griddle came out it was always a joyous event because it meant that the pancakes were not far behind we put together this test of six different electric griddles the price range was 29.99 to 99 and we tested them by making buttermilk pancakes french toast and burgers the pancakes and the french toast told testers a lot about how evenly they heat so they went across the cooking surface of each one with a surface probe thermometer to take the temperature across the cooking surface and they were really inconsistent the worst of these things varied by 80 degrees wow from one corner of the cooking surface to the other one corner was 319 degrees the other corner was 399 degrees which is why testers were getting pancakes that were raw and overdone from the same batch of pancakes on this one that's not good the best one of all varied only by about 10 degrees that was way better the pancakes were nice and evenly browned good and fluffy let's also talk about the size of these things because when you're cooking for a crowd size is important all but one of them had at least 165 square inches of cooking space and that was usually enough for eight pancakes not always enough for a full recipe of french toast which is eight slices of french toast two of them were a little larger this one has 234.6 square inches of cooking space this one has 252.9 square inches inch cooking space that looks nice and big that's definitely a good big one of course testers also paid attention to how easy these were to clean and that got down to two factors one is whether the power cord is detachable yes because you don't want to have it plugged in when you're washing it this one was the only one where the power cord was not detachable that's not good the other cleaning factor was grease drainage if you're doing burgers or maybe bacon you'll want the grease to drain off most of these are flat cooking surfaces and they would allow accumulated grease to sort of pool around the food and if it got hot enough it could even start splattering sputtering two of them had answers to that and that is that you could prop up the back legs just a little bit and that creates a gentle tilt on the cooking surface which facilitates the grease running down into the grease trap that's pretty clever this one did the same thing so this is actually our winning electric griddle this is the broil king professional electric griddle with a backsplash which fits on like that so that you can contain some of the grease from splattering it's 99 and it was great it was the second biggest one we had so you could fit a lot of pancakes or pieces of french toast on there it was the thickest cooking surface it heated the most evenly with just a 10 degree variance from spot to spot and it solved the grease drainage problem with legs that you could prop up now in case you don't want to spend 99 on one of these things there's also a best buy which is this one this is the presto 19-inch electric tilt and fold griddle it's a lot less expensive at 43.99 it was actually the biggest cooking surface of all of them there are three caveats that we wanted to mention with this though it didn't heat quite as evenly as the winter there was a little cold spot towards the center number two it took a little longer to heat up and three is that the back legs fold and that's to make it a little easier to store but our testers found that they would accidentally buckle even if you wanted to move this a couple of inches while you were cooking so just keep it put while you cook and make sure that it cools down completely before you try and move it when you're done cooking all right so there you have it brand does matter when it comes to electric griddles our favorite is broil king professional griddle with backsplash at 99. or there's our best buy which is a presto 19-inch electric tilt and fold griddle at 43.99 [Music] it's estimated that americans can eat up to 18 pounds of bacon per year i'd call that a good start so jack's here he's going to tell us which supermarket bacon is best i've known bridget 20 years if i had to sort of describe bridget's food preferences to a stranger i would begin the list with bacon sure i think that's fair enough i might end the list with bacon as well so this is a mix of regular and thick cut okay i've brought three samples you can just get in there and start munching yeah you know it's bacon they're all going to be delicious some are going to be a little saltier some are going to be a little sweeter some of them may have natural smoke some of them may have artificial smoke the biggest thing you're going to notice is because it's a mix of regular bacons which are roughly two to two and a half millimeters in thickness as opposed to the thick cut which is somewhere between 3.2 and maybe getting closer to 3.8 millimeters thick is that their textural differences it is crispier versus chewier the thicker cut holds onto more moisture the lean protein has a lot of water in it and it is less likely in a thick slice to evaporate and so it's less brittle and crumbly and more like you know got a tug at it right which some people love i will tell you right now half of the studio audience picks are top rated regular bacon the other half picked our top rated thick cut bacon oh really so and nobody else picked the ringer that's in here well it's not turkey bacon is it it's not turkey bacon it's just it's it was the least favorite of all the bacons in here there is believe it or not in my research a real oscar meyer he was an immigrant from germany who was the first person to sort of turn the slicing and packaging into a business there were a couple of people who had had the idea before he did but he was the one who really took it and ran it made bacon so much more accessible to americans and bacon consumption went up this was in the 1920s before that you bought slabs and you cut them at home they weren't that well preserved i mean this packaging keeps things fresh until you open them and of course you can get much thinner when they're sliced by machines so anything that you're liking here yes yeah i mean this tastes very familiar to me i actually like the fact that it's not too thin i like the fact that it still feels quite greasy it should it's bacon and this is lovely this is um this is what i would have with my eggs and the reason i like thick cut bacon with my eggs i use it in place of toast to scoop up the eggs because you know why fill up on bread when there's bacon i'm kind of with you i like this one too but it's it's paper thin it's almost like bacon chips so i would just stay with these too okay i'm not passing judgment at least for the next 10 seconds where would you like to go i'm going to go with this one which i think was a mistake no it was not a mistake this is oscar meyer regular bacon it was our overall favorite it's familiar to me it was our favorite of the regular bacons half of the audience chose it as their favorite and is very classic perfectly balanced of salt and sweet and porkiness it reminds me of the blt's my mom used to make all right where do you want to go next uh let's go down here to the thick cotton and this is oscar meyer thick cut this was the runner-up in our thick cut i wanted you to see both of the oscar meyer products we like a brand called sugar dale was our number one choice among the thick cut by one and you just sort of see the two oscar meyers the other half of the audience this is what they picked right and this is it's not bad bacon but it's nobody gave it its top choice okay it's still bacon it was really thin and it seemed less substantial it's gossamer thin well i learned i really like bacon i think we knew that already so if you like bacon why not get the winner it's oscar meyer naturally hardwood smoked bacon and at 6.99 for a 16 ounce package [Applause] [Music] any novice can throw bacon on top of a burger and call it a bacon burger but ashley's no novice and today she's gonna show us how to put bacon inside the burger i sure am so we tried many different things so we started with this most simple thing first and that was to chop up some raw bacon and incorporate it into the ground beef make a patty and eat right see it sounds simple turns out by the time we got the bacon evenly dispersed in the ground beef it was overworked the ground beef was too tough so then we tried the opposite we tried cooking bacon first dispersing it through the ground beef but then it was like super pebbly and crunchy like a bacon bits burger yeah which sounds kind of good but it wasn't perfect and we were striving for perfection so what we ended up doing was finding a way to process the bacon and that's with a little help from our good friend mr food processor and you don't have to cut the bacon first before you put it in there nope hole is all you need process this for one minute until a smooth paste forms that looks interesting it does look interesting all right so now we are going to cook this bacon over medium heat for about five minutes and the bacon's still to be pink at that point that's a good thing you only want some golden brown spots you don't want to take it to the point where it's super brown and you think it's done because at that point it's going to be too crunchy in the burgers all right so par cooking the bacon so as you can see we do have some golden browning just in some of the spots but the rest of it is still pink looking better looking better so i have a fine mesh strainer set over this bowl and using my spatula i'm going to slowly pour the bacon and that liquid gold grease into the strainer so i'm going to set that aside because i need to prepare an onion we're going to be caramelizing some onions to put on our onion burger bacon burgers exactly i'm just going to trim the root end right there slice this right down the center by trimming the sides first you have a really nice stable workspace and there are a few different ways to slice an onion we want to do pull to pull and what i'm going to do is i'm going to hold my knife parallel to the board and you have these lines these striated lines and i'm gonna use them as a guide and just follow them around the onion and when it gets a little wobbly i turn it over just so it's nice and secure on the board all right so now i'm going to set this pan over medium heat one more time and here we have our drained bacon so i'm going to grab this plate that i went ahead and lined with some paper towel and then we should have about two tablespoons of bacon fat all right so the bacon fat is now shimmering it's time to add the onions we're actually going to take these for about 20 minutes until the onions are nice and well browned i'm going to add a quarter teaspoon of salt all right so 20 minutes over medium heat yep well things are definitely looking up all right so i am just going to take these transfer them to this serving bowl here for later and now we have our beef one and a half pounds of 85 lean ground beef okay so that was one and a half pounds of beef and eight ounces of bacon so that's a three to one ratio of beef to bacon yes that's right so let's season the beef we have an eighth of a teaspoon of salt a teaspoon of pepper and you'll notice i have it on a rim baking sheet which is a little different but this is the best way for us to incorporate everything evenly into the beef without overworking it because overworked beef makes a tough burger so here i'm going to add our par cooked bacon now a couple forks i'm going to use these forks instead of my hands and that's one more way of not over working the beef and i'm just gently tossing the salt the pepper and that bacon in with the beef all right now one last step before we go outside we need to make these look a little bit more like a burger don't you think so i gently put them into four mounds so they're about the same size yep same size and again not overworking that meat and then from here you kind of gather it with your two hands and then we're gonna shape them we're going for four and a half inches by three quarters of an inch thick okay i'm at three quarters of an inch thick let's see you're pretty good all right these are almost done we are going to do the remaining two but we do need to put a divot into the center the divot burger when you put a divot in when it goes onto the grill that divot fills in and you get a flat burger if you didn't put a divot you'd come out with a softball just about a quarter of an inch all right there we go all right so now we're going to just continue to make these burgers and it's time to head out to the grill all right so the grill has been heating on high for 15 minutes and now it's time to oil and clean the cooking grain all right oh it's a hot grill you can see the heat coming off the grill grate now this grill looks pretty clean but oftentimes like if it's in my backyard the grill is a lot dirtier than that and it's much more effective to clean the grill grate right before you start cooking while it's good and hot than when it's cold all right so i'm using this wad of paper towels and these long grill tongs just gonna dip this in some oil nice neutral oil canola oil and run it over the grates and that helps to create a non-stick surface there's nothing worse than a sticky grill it's almost time to put these burgers on i'm gonna just sprinkle them with a bit of pepper just before we put them onto the grill all right so you notice i have the divot side up and i'm gonna flip them divot side down so i'm gonna cook these until nice and well browned uncovered will take about three minutes time to flip all right so here i have four ounces which is one cup of chilled and crumbled blue cheese so let's talk about those divots one more time the divots were little perfect tea cups that are going to house the crumbled and chilled blue cheese so i'm going to do about a quarter cup per patty all right that's pretty clever fill the divots with cheese yeah so i'm going to cover the grill and continue to cook these until they register 125 degrees for medium rare or 130 for medium which will take about two minutes longer all right so it's been two minutes let's check the temperature again we're looking for 125 degrees for medium rare and 130 for medium i hope you're going for medium rare i am awesome perfect all right here i'm gonna bring the platter closer thank you all right now i'm gonna let these patties rest just for a few minutes but while i do i'm gonna toast the bun yes what's a burger without a toasted bun right and the buns go fast they just take about 30 seconds to prevent it yep all right let's get these buns off this looks amazing thank you let's go eat all right [Music] ashley these look amazing i'm so excited all right no more talking let's get eating all right i'm gonna grab a bun oh yeah baby oh don't uh don't skimp on the onions on top okay because we're not gonna put ketchup or mustard on this burger it's too beautiful it wouldn't go with blue cheese the onions take the place of any other condiment this looks like what i call a shirt killer yeah yeah that's all right whoa the bacon is in every bite but it's not overpowering the whole thing just kind of melts in your mouth it really does bacon and beef and blue cheese and onions ashley these are something else well done so to make the ultimate bacon burgers start by grinding eight ounces of bacon in a food processor to a fine paste then cook it quickly in a skillet and mix with one and a half pounds of ground beef shape the burgers pressing a divot into the centers and grill over a hot fire fill the divot with blue cheese while it's still on the grill and serve with caramelized onions and toasted buns from cook's country the ultimate recipe for bacon burgers i'm in the heart of it now thanks for watching cook's country from america's test kitchen so what'd you think leave a comment and let us know which recipes you're excited to make or just say hi now you can find links to today's recipes and reviews in the video description and don't forget to subscribe to our channel see you later alligator

Channel: America's Test Kitchen

Views: 246,607

Keywords: beef, steak, burgers, bacon burgers, perfect steak, cooks country, americas test kitchen, recipes, learn to cook, how to, cooking show

Id: 9DqAng7PJso

Length: 23min 49sec (1429 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 25 2020