I've been looking at Beer Can Burger recipes where you make a big burger and push a beer can in it to make a hole and then fill the whole with veggies, cheese etc and wrap bacon around the burger. The instructions say to grill on indirect heat for 1 hour. How long and at what temp would I make these at in the oven? Thanks for responses.
2 Answers
Putting the oven at a lower to warm setting like 200 to 250 Fahrenheit (93 to 121 Celsius) is a good approximation for long, slow indirect cooking on a grill.
It depends on how you like your burgers. If you want any sort of browning or crispyness on the outside (which I would recommend), you will need to cook them at at least about 300 °F (150 °C) for the Maillard Reactions to occur. But that poses a problem if you also want the burger to be cooked rarer than well-done (which I also recommend, especially if you are grinding the meat yourself). The trouble is that, assuming you put the veggies in raw, they will need a long time to cook.
Here is what I would do if I were you:
- Pre-cook the bacon in a frying pan
- Remove the backon and form into a ring in the desired size of the burger
- Cook the veggies by themselves in a frying pan in the bacon drippings until the desired texture is reached
- Remove the veggies and mix in the cheese
- Form the burgers inside the bacon rings with the cooked veggies in the middle
- Salt the burgers at the last minute
- Fry the burgers on high heat back in the skillet for a couple minutes per side, or until the desired doneness is achieved
If you don't care about delicious browning and crispyness, and are content with more of a meatloaf-like texture, mix the ground meat with salt, form the "burgers" entirely raw, and bake at a very low temperature (~200 °F) for an hour or more.
If you don't want to dirty your skillet but still want browning, you could try roasting the burgers at ~350 °F or even higher, but then you seriously risk completely overcooking the beef by the time the veggies have cooked.
