Monday, February 27, 2012

Blackstrap Molasses Burger

Certainly sounded like a Pirate Burger ain't it? The quest to eating healthier has went on to find different ways to incorporate healthy ingredient into the meat dishes prepared at home. Nothing beats burger patty that are home made and you control the ingredients that goes into the marinate and preparation.
I have previously made some basic burger such as the one here and here.
Yummeh
TGIF or Chillis don't come close - ever
While the process in making differs minimally. The differences, again, is in the marinate. No burgers you buy or eat outside, as much as they claim to have marinate, doesn't. Only reason why you won't know is because the burgers are smothered in dressing and sauces.
Here is my marinate for Blackstrap Burger.
300grams of lean beef (Australian beef at some supermarket would offer the lean variety, about 5% fat)
1 tablespoon mustard seeds
1 tablespoon Blackstrap Molasses
2 clove garlic, diced
Olive oil with Balsamic vinegar immersed herbs - to taste
Looking good already, ain't it?
Mix all the ingredient well in a deep bowl. Use a fork as the Blackstrap Molasses will be messy if you mixes it up using your hand. For your info (FYI) i mixes my meat and marinate using hand, just like how a man should do it. But this time, with the sticky sweet molasses, a fork will do as well.
Well mixed up
Leave the preparation in the fridge for at least 4hours (so dinner time will be 8pm) for the meat to soak in the Blackstrap Molasses and the olive oil with balsamic vinegar. This will be a DARK burger.
Now, i know some of you are wondering what is Blackstrap Molasses. To put it simply, it is a thick viscous dark liquid which are obtained during the process to obtain white table sugar.
It is bittersweet and contains a lot of minerals and vitamins that would be readily absorbed by the body - as compared to artificially derived multivites and minerals supplements. Natural is the way to go!
Taken from this website
Impressed with the mineral and vitamin contents in just two teaspoon of Blackstrap Molasses? Simple sugar or the able sugar that most of us use are stripped off all nutrients except the simple carbohydrate in form of sweet sugar. To know why Sugar is bad for you, read this.
I believe replacing the usage of sugar with Blackstrap Molasses will great increase minerals readily absorbed by the body as opposed to spend more money to buy multivites and minerals. However, there are different school of thoughts on this and the decision is yours to take.
Back to the burger, 4 hours is bare minimum for any marinate to work. Longer would be better definitely.
Remove the preparation from the fridge and roll the mixture into two or three round meatball. Each portion should be about 120grams or a quarter pounder (or about 170grams or a third pounder if you make two) with the addition of all the other ingredients and would make a decent burger patty.
Heat up the pan or grill pan on medium heat. There is no need for oil for grilling as there are the fat in the beef and olive oil used for marinating to keep it from sticking to the pan. Here comes the interesting part - as the meat is in a ball shape, press them down slowly until you obtain the unmistakable burger patty shape.


Lightly grill each side for about 2 minutes and flip it two times (cooking time 8 minutes total) if you like them to be medium well. Flip it the third time (for total of 12 minutes) for well done. My preference is always towards medium well as eating too raw of meat could potentially be dangerous; especially if the meat is not fresh (however, the minced beef we got is packed the day we bought).
Blackstrap Molasses caramelized! Sweet! This is second flip!
Remove the patties from the heat once cooked (to your desired status) and leave it for a minute of two before serving. This is to allow it to cool down a little and to let the juice in the patty to settle a little. Eating too hot of a food could be bad (unsubstantiated, but based on observation on occurrence of Chinese loving hot soup and having higher statistic of throat/esophagus cancer).
Slice up some irresistible Avocado to be placed on top of the patty, the creamy texture with the bittersweet patty would be heavenly.
The burger was served on a slice of sprouted grain bread, it will provide additional calories for a dinner.

Nutritional information (per 120 gram serving on a slice of sprouted grain bread with half an avocado)
500kcal of goodness. By the way, a BigMac is 700kcal, for comparison.
Enjoy this other alternative to binging on heart-stopping artery clogging fast food! Here are some pics to tease your hungry tummy!
Food presentation not colorful enough
Moist, Tender, Juicy, Bittersweet, Creamy and with Mustard Seeds that burst in your mouth.


No comments:

Post a Comment