Spanish Style Pork Burgers.

Or, getting a bit of balance into the diet.

I came in for a lot of stick the other day. A chap, whom I don’t know, gave me a really hard time for promoting beef consumption. He had all his arguments at hand. We eat too much beef. Cows fart and they are responsible for a huge chunk of global warming. Cheap beef is facilitating the general populace in eating too much and getting fat. This leads to the medical system being overrun and innocents dying as a result. With his beef arguments in mind, I had better get a bit of balance in the diet. So, here’s a recipe for pork burgers.

The burgers are truly delicious and not difficult to make, if you allow a little preparation time. The ingredient’s list is shorter than the queue I have caused outside the emergency department in the hospital.

Lots of healthy garlic goes into the burgers.

Ingredients for Spanish Style Pork Burgers

• 1.2 kilos of pork shoulder.*
• 1 bulb of quality garlic
• 2 teaspoons of smoked, sweet paprika
• 1 teaspoon of smoked sea salt
• 1 teaspoon of ground black pepper

* Be sure to get free range pork with a decent bit of fat. Otherwise I take no responsibility for the quality of the end result.

The first thing to do is to get the oven up to 180ºC. Wrap a bulb of garlic in foil and place in the oven for 30 minutes.

Great garlic makes for great burgers. Use great garlic.

Let it cool before removing the skin.

The garlic takes on a really sweet flavour. Perfect in the burgers.

Beat the garlic into a pulp with a fork. This is easy to do and you can sneak a taste of the sweet garlic before adding it to the mixture.

The garlic mashes very easily. It needs to be soft to mix well.

Grind the pork in a mincer. If you like, get your butcher to do this step.

Notice the decent amount of fat in the mixture. This is important for flavour.

Add all the ingredients to the pork and mix thoroughly.

Mix well so there are no lumps of paprika. They can discommode diners!

Make the mixture into patties. Bear the comments in the top paragraph when sizing them. I made ten burgers.

In fact I made ten and a baby one. A sort of cook’s bonus at the barbecue…

Let the patties rest for a bit before cooking them on a barbecue or skillet.

The burgers do release a deal of fat as they cook. That is probably a good thing.

I served mine with griddle cooked sourdough bread and a big healthy salad.

I assembled the burger on the bread, using a good amount of salad and mayo to bind.

The salad is to provide a bit of additional balance in the diet. I hope that loon who attacked me doesn’t read this. He’ll have a go at me over the poor pigs next!

Footnote on the poor pigs: I have given up buying factory produced pork. The process is totally unfair on the animals as well as on the unfortunate people eating the poor quality excuse for real pork. I don’t want to be part of either. End of rant and end of post.