Fun Things to Throw on the Grill: Or, Our Korean Burger Bender

Seriously. It's so hot.

Grilling, to me, is the answer to a lot of our summer cooking needs. Our house isn’t air-conditioned so turning on the stove or oven on a 90+-degree day is a pretty major undertaking. Clean-up tends to be fairly minimal even for ambitious meals. And sometimes we eat dinner on the deck, which always feels like a bit of a vacation and lends itself to sitting there afterwards sipping on something and watching the day wind down. Also – let’s face it – I’m kinda lazy sometimes, and grilling means that while I do the prep, David does the actual cooking, so I feel like I’m getting away with something. Note that these reasons are not necessarily listed in order of importance.

Naturally there are some challenges, such as John’s refusal to eat any piece of meat with a bone in it and his intermittent hatred of seafood. David’s dietary restrictions mean that we’re skipping a lot of grill-friendly seasonings and sauces (and rubs and salsas and sides and marinades….). And there’s always the issue of variety: you can only eat just so many brats and burgers before wishing for something a little different, something super easy, something still fairly cheap because your kids eat like stevedores and the money tree in the backyard hasn’t sprouted up yet.

The answer: fancying up your burgers big-time (and I don’t just mean the outsides). We’re already devotees of the Hamburgers of Doom, a year-round favorite that includes bacon, chutney, goat cheese, and a complicated backstory. Our most recent favorite is one of David’s finds from the depths of the internet, a burger based on elements of Korean barbeque that hits the sweet spot between crazy-flavorful and “plain burger” and means that every single one of us will eat them without complaint, sometimes twice in a week. If you scale the recipe up and eat the leftovers for breakfast and lunch the next day and then dinner another night and actually have to go to the store for a second jar of kimchi…. Well, who am I to judge? I certainly won’t say anything if you make them again the next week. And the next.

Random note: I impulse-bought a burger patty maker online last year and got laughed at – ha ha, how hard can it be to actually shape a burger? We need a special tool for this? But this nifty little Cuisinart burger press does a really nice job of making burgers that actually stay flat when you cook them without packing the meat into a hockey puck-like mass. They all end up roughly the same size, which cuts down on the at-table fighting (well, it shifts the topic of the fights, anyway). It’s a fast way to make a big batch of these, which you could theoretically freeze and have on hand for days when even a little bit of prep work feels like too much. If you’re feeling really ambitious you can use it to make stuffed burgers, which I think sounds completely amazing and yes I’d love to accept that dinner invitation.

Korean Barbeque Burgers

½ cup chopped green onions
1 ½ tablespoons brown sugar
1 ½ tablespoons minced peeled fresh ginger (this is a great justification for keeping ginger paste in your fridge. We buy it at the Asian or Indian market; it’s much more convenient than dealing with fresh ginger and is a fine substitute for most applications.)
3 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon dark sesame oil
½ tsp freshly ground black pepper
2 garlic cloves, minced (this is a great justification for keeping garlic paste in your fridge. We buy it at the Asian or Indian market, where it’s much less expensive than the Christopher Ranch brand at the regular grocery store and is available in different textures. Be sure to the get the paste, not the minced chunky one, which smells and tastes a little weird and isn’t a great substitute.)
1 ½ pounds ground sirloin

Combine all the ingredients and shape into 6 ½-inch thick patties. Grill about 6 minutes on each side and let stand for a few minutes before serving.

Serving! That’s the best part. You could grill some split burger buns and top these with the traditional lettuce-and-tomato combo. You could top it with some kimchi and thinly-sliced radishes. You could peel and seed some cucumbers and marinate them in rice vinegar and pile them on top. Or make (or buy) a quick seaweed salad. Or shred carrots. You could do any combination of the above and wrap this up in a big lettuce leaf.