GRILLED LAMB BURGERS

Lamb burger with tzatziki, green salad, and barley salad

GRILLED LAMB BURGERS

After a weekend of lazing by a campfire in the great outdoors, everything tastes better. The need to eat is urgent, pressing, now! Hunks of watermelon are like Technicolor to the senses, and a meal consisting wholly of grilled corn is no hardship. And grilled meats—oh, the burgers! Let’s linger here, and consider the humble burger. A basic ground beef burger with a slice of melted cheese is nothing to sneer at. But a burger can be made from almost anything, not just meat: lightly mashed beans, shredded zucchini, or one of my personal favorite iterations, a combination of ground meat and cooked grains. First thing you must know: grains like bulgur, barley, quinoa, or millet keep the burger light and juicy. The grains hold in cooking juices and create an airy structure. Additionally, it stretches a pricey meat further. It helps as you're mentally transitioning to buying organic, hormone-free meats (“happy” meats, as we like to call them) to feed 5 to 6 generously with just a pound of meat. (A great cookbook on the subject is Almost Meatless, available wherever books are sold.)

This weekend a package of ground lamb ensnared my husband with its siren song. A fairly hefty purchase comes with no small responsibility: we had to do it right. We settled on a grain-heavy burger, which yielded about 7-8 patties. (Note that we were still affected by Camping Appetite, so on a normal day wouldn’t have eaten, ahem, almost two servings each.) After a few minutes over a charcoal fire, those burgers became one of the best meals we’ve eaten this summer. In our minds we were somewhere in the mountains: a little dusty from a long hike, comfortably weary, and sated with fresh air and good food.

Lamb and Barley Patties

Adapted from How to Cook Everything iPhone App, by Mark Bittman

1 medium onion, quartered

2 cloves garlic

1 pound ground lamb

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Pinch cayenne

1 teaspoon ground cumin

1 egg

1½ cups barley, cooked until just tender, drained

½ cup chopped fresh parsley leaves

Prepare a charcoal fire, with coals in the middle under the cooking grate. (Ordinarily I’d be perfectly amenable to a pan-frying alternative, but the flames make such a difference that I order you to fire up a grill.)

Take the onion and garlic for a spin in the food processor to evenly chop. Add the lamb, salt and pepper to taste, cayenne, cumin, and egg, and pulse until combined. Turn it out into a large bowl and stir in the barley and parsley. Form loose patties with your hands. Lightly salt and pepper the patties for good measure.

Grill over the hottest part of the fire until lightly charred on the outsides and cooked throughout, turning carefully with tongs. Serve with grilled corn, tzatziki, and a green salad.

-Kristen