Lemon and Herbs Russian-style Chicken Burger
One of my favorite ways to make a hamburger is a Russian-style recipe, which I got out of probably my all-time favorite cookbooks: Please to the Table by Anna von Bremzen. This is a delightful Soviet-era cookbook, which includes the cultural legacy of the various Soviet Republics, as well as of course Russian cuisine. It’s given me a host of different recipes… a great chicken in walnut sauce recipe, borscht, a host of different dessert cakes, dumplings, the list goes on and on. But the hamburger recipe is the flagship of it all. Check out my version of it!
Probably the reason why it is so different is due to the poverty of the Soviet food supply. In a country where meat supplies were much rarer than in Western countries, I imagine that the American hamburger, made of a single solid chunk of ground beef, would have been a profligate investment. This is purely my speculation however, but in any case the Soviet hamburger recipe that is advanced in Please to the Table relies on the incorporation of dill, garlic, and most importantly egg, grated onion, and breadcrumbs. It’s a very different hamburger, but I find its flavor to be remarkably seductive, with the strong rich notes of the onion and the wonderful green and haunting flavors of the dill, and I think I actually prefer it over the regular American hamburger.
At this point my recipes always come with the phrase “And then I was thinking….” What if you replaced the hamburger with chicken? I wanted to try to preserve the same concept of the Russian hamburger, with its onion and herbs, but with a different network of flavoring: in particular I thought that it might be interesting to try to play around with a more lemon flavor. This seemed like it would go particularly well with chicken, and it’s a very convenable platform to put lots of different delicate herb flavors with.
I’m a menace when it comes to a recipe that I’ve designated as being a “green, herbal flavor,” concert! There are just so many wonderful different herbs and flavors that you can use… so many of them painfully underappreciated. People are used to garlic, to paprika, to cumin, but rosemary, thyme, and tarragon have such wonderful delicate flavors. They’re easy to overpower, but they give a true sylvian essence to a recipe, and they work excellently with lemon. And with chicken too, so it’s no surprise that they all turned out magnificently. There is a tantalizing, intoxicating note of lemon in this, paired with the elegant and pleasant herbs, and it all is matched by the rich notes from being sauteed. Sauteed mind you – the inclusion of the grated onion and other ingredients means that this chicken burger is much too soft to go on the barbecue. In any case, I don’t think that a barbecue’s smoky flavors would make the more tranquil and peaceful notes of this more herbal and lemon burger. It gives such a soft and tantalizing burger, luscious and tempting to bite into, the opposite of any hard, frozen patty that you might get at a fast food restaurant: instead it is soft, juicy, and with a luscious and zesty flavor of herbs and lemon.
While not as easy as a regular hamburger, since after all there is the combining process in making them, it isn’t too difficult either: I think that they could be made in probably a bit over half an hour after some practice, and 45 minutes for the first time making them.
This makes a lot of hamburgers, with 6 patties, and I think that a single burger, combined with a bun, cheese (I recommend a softer, milder, sweeter cheese, choosing brie myself), tomato, lettuce, and onion is sufficient for one person, especially with a side. You could reduce it if one wanted, but they also keep and can be made over the course of a few days.
This recipe is entirely my own.
Ingredients
- 1 1/2 pounds ground chicken
- 1 teaspoon herbes de provence
- 1/2 teaspoon tarragon
- 2 teaspoons thyme
- 4 sprigs rosemary, stems removed, washed, chopped
- 1/2 teaspoon basil
- 1 teaspoon garlic salt
- pepper, to taste
- 1 egg, white and yolk separated
- 1 onion, peeled and grated or blended
- 4 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
- 1/2 cup bread crumb
- 1 lemon, juice of
- 1 side of hamburger bun, or two slices of white bread
- 1/3 cup milk
- 5 tablespoons butter
Instructions
- In a small bowl, combine together the milk and the 1 side of hamburger bun or 2 slices bread, and allow the milk to soften the bread.
- In a large bowl, combine together the ground chicken, grated onion, and minced garlic.
- Add in the herbes de provence, thyme, rosemary, basil, season with some pepper, the lemon juice, the ½ cup bread crumbs, and the milk and bread. Then add in an egg yolk.
- Beat the egg white until frothy in a small bowl, and then fold it in. If the resultant mixture is excessively wet, you can dry it out with some bread crumbs, but it will in any case be substantially more moist than a regular hamburger.
- On a flat plate, spread out some more bread crumbs. Form the meat into six patties, and coat them in the bread crumbs on all sides. Add additional bread crumbs as needed.
- Heat some of the butter in a large skillet, and when the butter is hot add in the patties. Put as many as can comfortably fit, and fry them over high heat for a few minutes, until their bottoms are browned. If the butter has evaporated away then add in more. Then turn them over, place cheese on top if you are using, and put a lid on it. Once the burgers are browned on the bottom, turn the heat to low and cook for a few more minutes, to make sure they are fully cooked through.
- Remove from the pan, drain fat, and serve on hamburger buns with accouterments such as tomato, lettuce, fried eggs, onion, etc.
