Not Cheddar: Stuff Your Ground Beef With This Creamy Ingredient For Juicier Burgers

When you're unsure what to eat for lunch or dinner, burgers are such a classic, satisfying option, serving up the perfect measure of meat and carbs. If you want to make your all-American cheeseburger just a bit more "extra," you can take the party inside by stuffing the patty! More specifically, placing cream cheese at the center of your meat is an exceptional way to add richness, moisture, and ooey, gooey creaminess. Think of it as a juicy lucy's extra-decadent cousin.

This tasty cream cheese hack works for any burger variety, whether your jam is a traditional beef hamburger, a leaner ground turkey or chicken creation, or a flavorful alternative like bison. To add the dairy product to the center of your patty, you can flatten out a portion of meat and place a dollop in the center, enclosing the cream cheese inside. You can also place it between two already formed patties and seal the edges around the filling.

While not all chefs do this, it's advisable to chill your stuffed patties before cooking them — either in the fridge or the freezer — so the cream cheese solidifies. This slows its melting, giving your meat more time to cook before the stuffing liquefies and helping keep the creamy filling where you want it: inside the burger. Alternatively, you can form discs of cream cheese combined with any spices and other add-ins you're using in the filling, and then freeze or refrigerate these on their own before placing them inside your patties for cooking.

There's a lot of versatility when stuffing your burgers. Your favorite store-bought cream cheese can stand alone inside your patty, or its high moisture content can help it melt beautifully with other cheeses. You can grate some varieties that melt well, like Gruyère or Havarti, into your filling mixture for extra richness and flavor.

Blending your cream cheese with herbs is a great way to add delicious depth of flavor. For a tasty shortcut, you can buy a premade cheese ball (the kind you traditionally spread on crackers) and use that as your filling, yielding a "holiday burger" kind of vibe by bringing the flavors of that favorite party dip to your burger feast. Since it already comes fully flavored and prepped, you're left with nothing more to do than portion it out and add it to your meat.

You can fold chopped onion and/or garlic into your cream cheese for added savoriness, or press a full onion slice into your meat along with the cream cheese. Capers can bring salty, briny tanginess to the flavor party, and chopped bacon is always a good idea. The simple addition of mustard, from ordinary yellow to Dijon to spicy brown, is an easy way to add flavor dimension, as well.

If you're taking a leaner approach, such as using ground poultry as your protein base, you can use Neufchâtel in place of the cream cheese. Side by side, the products look almost identical (right down to their packaging), and they function in virtually the same way, but Neufchâtel is lower in fat and slightly higher in moisture, pairing nicely with leaner meat.