March 25, 2011: Welsh Rarebit Pub Style Burgers

Not "rabbit," "rarebit!" Jeez!

I found this recipe in a burger cookbook I purchased at Barnes & Noble on a recent "vacation" to Naperville. The recipe, itself, is rather odd and I found it to be a very interesting endeavor. I sent my girlfriend to Miejer to pickup some "prepared mustard," which I assumed to be Grey Poupon, and Worcestershire sauce and the next day I was cooking away. What an odd cookbook...

Before you think I butchered my own bunny or went out hunting with my .22 to get some rabbit meat, let's talk about what "Rarebit" is. Welsh Rarebit is an interesting concept. As Toki (that adorable Mini-Rex I put in the pan) so beautifully demonstrated, it is phonetically very close to the word "rabbit." And there's good cause. Citing the Oxford English Dictionary like the English nerd that I am, we see that the word actually comes from the word "Rabbit" and refers to a dish of cheese and toast. The origin of this slant on the word rabbit is believed to have originated from the fact that the Welsh people were so oppressed by the British that the closest thing they had to rabbit to eat was melted cheese and toast, according to this British newspaper article. But, I'm making a burger variation.

Our first step is to make some burger patties. Simple enough. I use 80/20 ground beef and I often spice my burgers the same way: brown sugar, paprika, ancho chili powder, garlic, salt and black pepper. Next, brown them patties up.



After browning the patties, the next step is to add in the sauce. The recipe called for these ingredients.

Taking a page from Micheal Ruhlman's time at the Culinary Institute of America, I tasted the sauce every step of the way and ended up adding beer and flour to it, making it a bit more like Alton Brown's Welsh Rarebit.

I really should have forgone the Cheddar Cheese sauce and just made a béchamel or roux and melt cheese into it, but... ah well. The way the sauce was made was by pouring off the excess fat/grease from the burger and combining the ingredients in the pan with the burgers. The burgers then completed cooking in the sauce in a sort of braising method.

I ran into a couple of problems, though. Instead of incorporating the flour as a roux, I simply placed it in the sauce. This produced horrible clumping. I had to remove the burgers from the sauce, pour the sauce in one of my glass bowls and whisk it until the lumps came out. Unfortunately, I don't have a non-stick safe whisk, so this awkward step had to be taken. Another issue I ran into was that I put too much liquid in the sauce, so it took extra long to cook down. I also put in too much Grey Poupon and made the sauce extremely "mustardy." When mixed with the meat it tasted great, but when served on toast like traditional Welsh Rarebit, it was very overpowering. Also: my fries didn't make it. They were done about 20 minutes before the burgers and were eaten before then, so I threw some Green Giant "steam in bag" veggies in a pot and called it a day. I also neglected to get any "buns" for the burgers. Usually I just toast bread and place my burgers on that, akin to the original Louis' Lunch, the birthplace of the hamburger. I intended to place these on English Muffins, like the recipe called for, but due to my habit of eating burgers on toast, I completely forgot.

This was the final product:
That brownish color in the sauce is from the beer. It's plated as an open face sandwich, intended to be eaten with a fork and knife and presented in a way more inline with traditional Rarebit than a burger. I also put less sauce on the cheese than most recipes pictured for a semblance of it not being a terribly unhealthy meal.