Yummy Chicken Burgers

I've been eating ground chicken for a very long time. I never got used to ground turkey....something about it always weirded me out. Always seemed to be a bit of gristle or bone in it...blech. I had the same fears about the chicken but found it to be, in my opinion of course, 100% better than ground turkey. Now, my husband does not feel the same way at all. He will eat it but does not love it. I know he'd much rather NOT be having it. So, when my son broke the news to him last nite we were having chicken burgers, he suggested I do something "good" with them. I think they are "good" on their own but I was in the mood to be creative so I set out to look for a recipe.


I ended up taking a few ideas and mixing them together. I saw a recipe for a garlic rosemary chicken burger and a recipe for a Cordon Bleu chicken burger that both sounded good. I decided to mix it up and do both on my own.


Here's what I used:

~1 pound Perdue ground chicken (not the ground chicken breast but I am sure that would have been great as well)
~dried rosemary
~crushed garlic (I used Trader Joe's jarred....love this stuff)
~sea salt
~pepper
~deli ham
~Swiss cheese (I used Finlandia light Swiss)

As you may have noticed, I have no measurements for anything. I don't measure too much when I cook. Rather, I tend to just put what looks good in. This is hard to retell as a recipe of course, and hard to remember what I did if it turns out great and I want to do it again but I just can't bring myself to do it when I cook. When I bake, I do it faithfully for fear that the recipe will not turn out properly...but cooking, nah...I wing it!

So...on to what I did.

I made 3 burgers out of the pound because there were 3 of us eating. I am guessing it would work for 4 burgers, you'd just have to be aware of the thickness and size as you shape the burgers. 

I put the chicken in a bowl and put in the salt (about 1 tsp), pepper (about 1/2 tsp), garlic (about 1.5-2 tsps) and the rosemary (about 1 tbsp). I mixed this all together and let it sit while I got the ham and cheese ready.

I was afraid of cheese seepage if I was going to stuff these burgers with the ham and cheese as I had wanted to. What I did to lessen the chance of seepage was this....I cut each cheese slice into quarters. I laid the each piece of ham out on the counter and in the middle of each piece I put the cheese...all 4 quarters stacked on top of each other. I then folded the top of the ham down over the cheese, folded the left side over, folded the right hand side over and then the bottom up. Now the cheese was all wrapped up in the ham like a little package.

The chicken had gotten quite sticky as I mixed it with the other ingredients. I was trying to figure out how on earth I was going to make 6 thin patties and assemble them without a disaster on my hands. This is what I ended up doing and it worked out wonderfully....I divided up the chicken in 3 equal portions. I tend to get a bit obsessive about things being even so I did this with a scale. I then took each third and divided it in half, again with the scale...now that I type this I realize I could have just used the scale the first time to divide it into 6 portions but it was a process and I wasn't quite sure where I was going with it all at the time!!! Okay...so, take 1/6 of the chicken and pat it out onto the frying pan into a thin, burger sized layer. Next, take your lovely ham/Swiss cheese package and put it in the middle of the patty. Take another 1/6 of the chicken and put it on top of the package and pat it out and around the package to meet up with the patty underneath and press a bit to seal then push in the flattened edges a bit so it's all one uniform thickness...make sense? I hope so. I hadn't intended on blogging about this so I didn't take any picture to demonstrate. It should not be taller in the middle than it is on the edges where you sealed it...I wanted it an even thickness for more even cooking. Repeat with the rest and cook over a fairly high heat, medium high maybe, until all is done.

Like I said, hadn't intended on blogging at all about these but I keep thinking of them today, the day after I made them, and really want to make them again so I figured it was worth sharing.