So here at CCG we love burgers! So I was watching Guy's Diner, Drive-ins, & Dives doing a show regarding best hamburger joints. During the show he he found a place that actually smoked their burgers and another that put the cheese on the inside of the burger.
So me being me thought how about we smoke a burger that has the cheese in the middle! So after a brief conference (Ron, we doing burgers in the smoker with cheese in the middle) we went for it.
First we thought we would do two sets of burgers, one with no cheese and the other with the cheese in the center. We thought we would need a control group to see the difference, like cheese oozing from the burger wouldn't be enough.
So here at CCG we prefer that our burgers are made from 80/20 hamburger and are cooked to a final temp of 160 degrees.
Each patty was 6.4 ozs and for the cheese in the middle we split the patty in half. We used Kraft American Singles for this go round. For this attempt we basically folded the cheese into a rectangle and laid it on the bottom portion of the patty, placed the other half of the hamburger on top and shaped the patty. The cheese ran end to end on the patty, so it was close to the outer edge of the patty. This turned out to not be a winning idea.
We smoked the burgers for an hour and then transferred them to the grill to sear the outside.
The burgers looked great and smelled smokie. So I was really looking forward to see how they tasted.
The results:
As I took that first bite I was so looking forward to the ooey-gooey cheese running out and down my chin. To my surprise, it didn't taste cheesey! Neither did the second or third I looked inside and there was no cheese. Well we found the cheese.
Obviouly we will need a different plan. /
So being one not to give up a few days later I tried again, though this time I just stuffed them with cheese and used by grill. The results were a little different.
These were delicious, although didn't have the smoked flavor. We will do this again, But this time we will use the Santa Maria Grill to get our smoked goodness in the meat.
