A Great Supermarket Burger Exists! (Plus 18 Burgers To Make For Labor Day)

If you're a fourth-generation ground beef purveyor, one thing remains certain: You will sell many, many great burgers in your lifetime — burgers you ground and shaped yourself. You've probably also heard the recent news about ground beef: The situation is dire. If you want to be a hero, you can devote your life to ensuring that the ground beef patty lives on proudly as a staple of American cuisine, instead of sinking to the bottom of the "don't buy from the supermarket meat case" list. (See also: soggy greenish tuna steak.)

Enter Schweid & Sons, a family-owned company since the turn of the century, currently out to vanquish the general lack of knowledge associated with buying burgers at the supermarket. Admit it: You don't know what's in there, and that gets increasingly less cool with each recall. If you can't make it to the butcher, keep an eye out for these. Executive VP Jamie Schweid knows his ground beef.

"There's no mass-marketed premium burger out there," says Schweid. "There's organic and grass-fed, but there's not anything premium in the meat case, regarding cuts of beef. It's all chuck and sirloin, and you don't know exactly what you're getting."

Not that there's anything wrong with chuck and sirloin — chuck contains a good dose of oleic acid, which provides the extra-beefy flavor you expect from a burger. But break into a Schweid & Sons patty, whether it's spiked with brisket, exclusively grass-fed or made with certified Angus, and it's exactly what you want to see: uniform throughout and light pink from well-incorporated fat (not that red tint that indicates it's been chemically treated on the outside and will most certainly be brown and oxidized inside). Also neat: the paper sleeve around the package that looks like butcher paper and shows the cuts of beef that went into the burgers. Even neater: the blazing sawed-in-half grill that serves as the backdrop for their website.

Peruse the site's highly innovative, burger-centric aesthetic — the design alone should convince you beyond a shadow of doubt that this company is dedicated to ending the scourge of the crappy supermarket burger — then fire up the barbecue and give these 18 recipes a spin. It's Labor Day weekend. Can you think of a better time to bring your A-game? Why don't you fire up a batch of homemade buns while you're at it?

We say it all the time: It's not a party spread until the mini cheeseburgers hit the table. This is no recipe for your typical chain restaurant's sliders, however. These are Wolfgang Puck's Oscar-worthy mini cheeseburgers. It's not hard to see why he's chef to the stars. 

The All-American Cheeseburger has certain non-negotiable elements: American cheese is one of them. Rather than unwrap individual singles, get sliced cheese from your nearest deli counter — it tastes better and melts slower and more evenly. Dill pickle chips, sliced red onion and tomato, crisp lettuce leaves, ketchup and mayo are also involved.

Angelo Sosa ups the fat content in his burger blend by adding brisket, then takes it on an Asian joyride with a Vietnamese-style glaze that leaves ketchup by the curb.

While watching this movie again it occurred to me that I wished I could have my very own Big Kahuna Burger. Now you can too.

Rosie French and Ellie Grace run their blog, Salad Club, and their restaurant French & Grace out of London, England. We've been cooking our way through their book, Kitchen & Co., to great success. We dare you to find one recipe in there that you can't make. Ever had a burger on a bagel? Do it right and you'll be handsomely rewarded.

New York has so many iconic foods, from pizza to cheesecake to the strip steak. But one item you'll see on just about any street corner is the pretzel, which inspired us to create the ultimate New York burger, the Pretzel Burger. Get the recipe, right this way...

Want a low-carb burger? Here you are.

Double the patty, double the fun.

Pick up these healthy foods from the American West and pack a little pride with your lunch!

You'll need fresh or jarred truffles and truffle oil, both of which are available at gourmet grocery stores. Enjoy!

Assembling a homemade burger is an art form. We break it down step-by-step.

Not only are these bison burgers better for you, they're also something different from your everyday fare.

Caramelized onions make a blue cheese burger happy
One logical shortcut might be mixing blue cheese crumbles in with the ground beef, but we've found that too much of the cheese melts out and what's left behind is overly salty. The addition of cheese throughout also prevents the burger from cooking evenly, so we recommend topping your patty with a couple of slices of Saga Bleu, gorgonzola or roquefort instead. Continue reading >>