02 August 2018

Qui faut-il connaître...

...to get a turkey burger around here? Well, Walt and me, I guess. You pretty much have to buy turkey and grind it yourself. That's what we've done this week. In the local supermarkets, you can buy freshly ground beef or packages of ("industrial" is what they call it) ground beef. You can buy packaged ground pork to use in stuffings. But, until recently, that's been about it.



It's true that over the past month or two I've seen packages of "industrially" ground veal and even turkey in the supermarkets, but it's not something you find everywhere or all the time. Years ago, I wanted to make a Greek dish called moussaka, which is best made with ground lamb. I went to the supermarket over in Noyers-sur-Cher and told the butcher I was looking for affordable lamb cuts and told him why. He'd never heard of moussaka.



I explained that moussaka was made using ground (minced) lamb, and he immediately told me he couldn't grind lamb in his meat grinder, which was used exclusively for beef. I told him not to worry, I had a meat grinder at home. I just didn't want to spend a fortune on fine cuts of lamb just for grinding. It all worked out.



It worked out this week too. I bought a turkey breast filet at LIDL on Tuesday over in Romorantin. It weighed a kilogram and cost €7.99. I brought it home and the next day I cut it into pieces that would be easy to put into the meat grinder. We ground it and made burger patties out of it for lunch yesterday and for the freezer. Because it was very lean turkey breast, I ground some fresh pork belly (bacon, or "side meat") with it to add some fat.



Anyway, it turned out really good, as you can see. The buns in my photos are the ones I made about a week ago and put in the freezer. They are definitely better than supermarket hamburger buns. And the sauce is one I found in a recipe on the 'net. It's a blend of mayonnaise and Thai sriracha sauce — three parts mayo and one part sriracha (which is a flavorful hot red pepper sauce). Delicious. Walt diced up a cornichon and added it to the sauce.



With the turkey burgers, cooked on the grill, we had some grilled (guess what...) zucchini cut into thick slices, and some French fries. The weather is very hot right now, and we're cooking on the grill out on the terrace. We also put the fryer out there and cook the frites outdoors. It's summertime living, and we're enjoying it.


10 comments:

  1. Does the butcher have another meat grinder for pork? Or does he grinds only beef? Or are beef grinders so special they cannot grind any other meat?

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  2. The butcher in that market in Noyers said that if he ground lamb in the grinder, he'd have to take it all apart and wash it before he could grind beef in it, and beef is the meat he sells in ground form. For some reason, I've never heard of anybody ordering freshly ground pork. It's always ground beforehand and sold in styrofoam trays wrapped in plastic. In our home grinder we can do any kind of meat (or even fish or vegetables) that we want to grind. There is a poultry vendor (or used to be) at the Sunday a.m. outdoor market in Noyers who sells ground volaille but only that one day a week. Anyway, I'd rather grind the meat myself or see it being put through the grinder so that I can be sure that the meat looks good.

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  3. Oh, I'll bet adding that pork belly to the mix really gave it some flavor and juicy punch. Turkey burgers from breast meat are usually too dry for my taste (though I love roast turkey breast at Thanksgiving!... just not ground and made into a burger).

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    1. I had bought the fresh thick-sliced bacon a while back. We cooked some of it on the grill one day, but we didn't especially like the result. The rest was in the freezer, so I got it out and ground it up with the turkey. It wasn't very fatty, but the little bit of fat it did have, I figured, could only improve the turkey burgers. I also put in a small piece of smoked pork belly (breast — poitrine fumée) for flavor. In all, I had a kilo of lean turkey breast and about 400 grams of pork. Now we have 6 beef burger patties and 4 turkey burger patties in the freezer. I'm going to have to make more buns if we want to grill them and eat them as burgers.

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    2. Oh, and more than 500 grams of the ground meat mixture went into a tomato and rice stuffing for eggplant lasagne. The six turkey/pork burgers weighed 150 grams (5 oz.) each.

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    3. Well, I called it lasagne but it's not really. It's a eggplant au gratin. More in a future post.

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  4. That seems like a very reasonable price for a kilo of turkey burger! Your home-made buns look delicious.

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  5. The homemade burger buns look excellent. And I like the idea of mixing it up a bit to make the turkey less bland.

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    1. The turkey here in France might be better — less dry, I mean — than U.S.-raised (industrial) turkey. Even so, the smoked pork added flavor and the fresh pork added some fat, and it was very good. We have four more turkey burger patties in the freezer. We're trying to do a lot of grilling during this heat wave.

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