Love Child: Patty Melt
We will all mostly agree that cheese toasties and cheeseburgers are 2 of life’s greatest gifts.
Now imagine they have an illicit affair and produced a delicious lovechild. That’s a Patty Melt, folks.
These are excellent for mixing up to include your faves. Sometimes we'll add in bacon, halloumi, sriracha, a fried egg, the options are endless! But these are the our household standard and one of our faves.
Patty Melts (makes 2 enormous portions)
Ingredients:
4 slices of white bread
1 onion, chopped
1 tbsp olive oil
big knob of butter, plus extra for spreading your slices of bread
500g beef mince, I use the 20% fat stuff because I think it’s tastiest but dealer’s choice
1 tsp onion granules
1 tsp garlic granules
1 tbsp tomato ketchup
salt and pepper
100g mayonnaise
1.5 tsp smoked paprika
2 tbsp chopped gherkins, I use a couple of wee ones and chop ‘em
2 tbsp of the brine that the gherkins live in
1 tsp American mustard (proper mustard will make it nippy, butit’s also v nice)
6 cheese slices, we like the proper cheap nasty ones!
Method
First thing to organise is the mincey bit! Put the mince, onion granules, garlic granules, ketchup and mustard into a bowl and bring together with your hand. Cover and stick in the fridge to get to know itself while you get organised.
Chop the onion and cook in the the olive oil and a big knob of butter over a very low heat for 10-15 minutes. They’ll go translucent and sweet and generally quite stunning.
While the onions are cooking you should butter one side of each slice of bread and set aside, then make your burger sauce! Combine the finely chopped gherkin, gherkin brine, American mustard, paprika and mayo. It tastes like Big Mac sauce!
Get your mince mix out the fridge and split into 4 portions. Cut 4 rectangles of greaseproof paper roughly the side of 2 slices of bread side by side. Folk each bit in half to it’s around the size of a slice of bread. Squash a quarter of the mince mix in the middle of the folded greaseproof. It’ll shrink as it cooks so it’s okay if they’re big. They’ll be about 0.5cm thick. Do all 4 quarters for the 4 patties.
Fry each of the patties off for 2-3 minutes on each side. Remove from the pan, pat some of the fatty oil off and put a cheese slice on the hot patty. Try to do them 2 at a time so the cooked ones aren’t sitting too long.
Once your 4 patties are cooked and each have cheese on top, remove the vast majority of fat from the frying pan and return to the heat.
Lay 2 slices of bread butter side down in the pan, top with burger sauce, then onions then a slice of cheese. Top each bit of bread with 2 cheesy patties, a bit more burger sauce then the second bit of bread butter side up.
Fry off for 2-3 minutes then flip and fry off the other side for 2-3 minutes. Be careful when you’re flipping, it’s a very delicate operation.
Once they’re fried off and crispy then it’s time to shine! They’re delicious, and feel dirtyyyy.
