Burger Marinade

G’day mates! I’ve long been wanting to share my secret sauce/burger marinade glop I use for burgers and steaks! Since I have a bad habit of not measuring things, I decided a pictorial tutorial was the best route. As you can see in pic one(1), there are six ingredients I use (which you can see in action in our post about making CorvinBurgers <em>(Coming soon–Ed.)</em>). All of these happen to be Kroger brands… but not necessarily because we exclusively use Kroger brand. We happen to live in an area (Oregon) where one of the big grocery chains is Kroger owned (Fred Meyer) and quite frankly, they put out some quality products that don’t taste like pureed cardboard, used motor oil, and ground pencil erasers and won’t force you to take out a second mortgage on your cat in order to enjoy flavorful food that is reasonably healthy. But use whatever brand you like! No one is judging you. Well… maybe your cat is.

I’ll be adding the individual globs in a not-stolen-from-a-restaurant salsa bowl, which is about one cup for those of you who need to know these things for reasons.

Now, this is the two-burger edition so when it’s all said and done you should wind up with about ⅔ or ¾ of a cup. For marinade you’ll need to examine the amount of meat you are intending to slather up and adjust accordingly. We often will buy a family pack of steaks and slather them all at the same time and freeze whatever we don’t cook for later. Sometimes we don’t even cook any. We’ll just impulsively buy a pack of steaks because they’re on sale for the sole purpose of slathering and freezing for an undetermined dinner date. And YES, you can freeze your steaks in marinade. It’s AH MAZE ING!!! Thaw out a pre-marinated steak sometime and cook it up on the grill and I guarantee you a bonafide carnivorous mouthgasm that’ll make your neighbors’ property taxes go up!

Oh, and for extra glopular results when using as steak marinade, mix in fresh diced onion and slather away! Ya gotta have that oniony goodness. No really, you do! Stop whimpering and put it in already! (We’ll cover all that in another post.) The only reason I didn’t do it for the burgers this time is when we made this particular tutorial, I forgot to mix them in so I just threw a handful into the pan instead.

AT LAST, THE BURGER MARINADE RECIPE

Ok, so here we go! First I’m gonna squirt in a healthy blob of the Fat Free Zesty Italian Dressing. This is also the main base for my chicken marinade but I won’t go into that right now because I’ll need something for content on this site later. I just wanted to drop that little hint to keep y’all interested enough to come back some other day.

Next, I’ll squeeze in a little glob of plain old yeller mustard. You don’t want too much because it just makes it awkward. Mustard has a way of intruding on the rest of the flavors in a way that isn’t necessarily bad but makes everyone in the room uncomfortable for reasons no one can explain.

Now it’s time for some BBQ sauce. I am currently infatuated with the Kroger brand Hickory Smoke flavor. Seriously, the day is coming when you’ll find me huddled up under a bridge guzzling this shit straight from the bottle and hollering at pigeons because it’s just that good! In this particular instance, I used up the rest of the bottle which happened to be about the last ⅓ of it. That’s why it’s such a mess. There was some wild flailing involved to get out as much as I could. I swear you always end up wasting at least like ¼ of a bottle because it clings to the inside like it’s made of coagulated axle grease. Maybe it is! I DON’T CARE IT BECAUSE TASTES SO FRIGGIN’ AWESOME!!!

Next we’ll be adding a few dashes of worcestershire. Yup! Worcestershire! If you haven’t put worcestershire in something by now I feel so sad for you. Eggs? Worcestershire. Fish? Worcestershire! Your shoes? You better believe it! I put it in damn near everything I cook. It’s not just for fancy people! What, you think I’m fancy? Shut up! You’re fancy! You and your fancy pants! Mleh!

Time for some steak sauce!!! Yes! Why? Hello!?! Burgers!!! It’s all moo-cow-fuck-beef! Go ahead and put some steak sauce right in it! It’s not just a meat accessory! Cook it right into those magnificent muscle fibres! It’s delicious! Yes I know it looks like a big glob of poo! Try not to think about that. Look toward the light at the end of the tunnel. Okay, that might be a bad analogy. Just try not to stare at it too long and think of unicorns or something non-poo related. You got this!

Last but not least, a few dashes of chipotle pepper sauce! There is nothing like the combo of worcestershire and chipotle pepper sauce. Don’t believe me? I’ll fight you! Also, and I kid you not, the Kroger brand pepper sauces stand up to a certain name brand that shall not be named. Ok, it’s Cholula. There, I said it. FYI the Kroger smoky chipotle pepper sauce is the shit! Why am I not using it here? Because I’m trying to use up the regular chipotle sauce before it goes bad.

Pro tip: don’t bother looking for Kroger brand pepper sauces in the ethnic food aisles in Fred Meyer stores. They’re with the condiments because Fred Meyer stores almost never make any sense.

GLOPPY GOODNESS

Okay now take out your favorite mixing utensil of choice and whisk it into a frenzy of relative uniformity and you’re done! Hooray! Now you’re ready to slather this burger marinade on some cow flesh! As I said before, this is about enough for two or three burgers. Four if you really stretch it. If you are hosting a backyard BBQ and inviting the entire cast of famous naval battle reenactments you’ll want to dust off the ol’ TI-54 and calculate what you’ll need to feed an entire fleet of mostly single, middle-aged white guys who don’t have much else to do and will probably come back for thirds.

Enjoy, and please feel free to embellish on this recipe, or make up your OWN burger marinade, and let us know the results! ~C

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