Blended Mushroom and Beef Burgers
For some of the juiciest, most flavorful burgers you’ve ever had try making blended mushroom and beef burgers. Blended burgers combine beef and mushrooms to create tastier, healthier burgers with a lower environmental footprint.
There are a few reasons why mushroom blended burgers are becoming so popular. The combination of beef and mushrooms mean the burgers cost less to make, they’re more environmentally friendly, healthier, and most importantly they taste better.
Yep, we said it, blended burgers taste better.
How to Make a Blended Burger
There are lots of environmental and health reasons why we should be moving towards blended burgers as the standard for burgers. Let’s start with the fact it takes more resources to grow a pound of beef than it does a pound of mushrooms and that’s not meant as a dig on cows.
The idea behind blended dishes is that they help us balance the health and environmental realities of the world we live in with our desire to eat delicious food. Finding ways to incorporate more plant-based food in our diet, especially though blended dishes, helps us have our proverbial cake and eat it too.
Making mushroom blended burgers is just as easy as making regular burgers. Our blended burger recipe has two additional steps and takes around five minutes longer to make than our simple grilled burger recipe.
At home, these burgers have almost entirely replaced all-beef burgers as our go-to burgers. They’re a couple of reasons why we’ve made the change. The first is we get to eat bigger burgers. The mushrooms add volume to the burgers and help them hold on to their moisture and keep their shape.
Because the burgers hang on to their juices better, they also have a bigger window when it comes to cooking time, something that is helpful when you’re making a couple of different dishes for dinner. We regularly cook our blended burgers for 6 to 8 minutes a side, which would turn our all-beef burgers into hockey pucks.
The mushrooms also add vitamins and minerals to the burgers while cutting down on the amount of fat and calories per burger.
What Makes These Burgers so Good
The best thing about these burgers is how good they taste. When the mushrooms are run through a food processor before being combined with the ground beef, it’s almost impossible to tell the difference in texture between blended and all-beef burgers.
The mushrooms excel at absorbing the flavors from the spices and the juices from the beef which adds layers of deep, rich umami flavors. The burgers’ bold flavors lend themselves to a wide variety of toppings. One of our favorite combinations is Swiss cheese and homemade onion dip.
While we were developing this recipe, we tried all sorts of ratios of mushrooms to beef. Too low and there was no difference between blended and all beef, too high and there was too much liquid from the mushrooms to form and hold good patties. The ratio we found that works the best is a 2 to 1 beef to mushroom ratio.
When it comes to grilling, the only difference between the two is that the blended ones can be grilled longer without drying out. Otherwise, all of our tips for grilling better burgers still apply.
In the end, the reason we like blended burgers so much is they’re just as easy to make, have a lighter footprint, and most importantly, they taste better than all-beef burgers.
A few dishes we like to serve with this blended burger recipe are Sweet Corn and Anaheim Peppers, a delicous Smokehouse Potato Salad, or Grilled Corn on the Cob slathered with seasoned butter.
Read Our Best Ideas for the Grill – Tips, Tricks, Recipes, & Secret Sauces for more innovative grilling ideas..
Ingredients
- 1 lb ground beef
- 8 oz mushrooms, rough chopped
- 1/3 medium white onion
- 2 cloves garlic
- 1/2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
- 1 tsp smoked paprika
- 1-1/2 tsp salt
- 1 tsp ground pepper
Instructions
- Wash and clean the mushrooms before giving them a rough chop to break them into chunks.8 oz mushrooms
- In a food processor mince the onions and garlic. Once they’re done, add the mushrooms and use the pulse mode to mince them. Using the pulse mode and giving the mushrooms a rough chop helps them hold on to their liquid, making the burgers easier to form.1/3 medium white onion, 2 cloves garlic
- Combine the mushrooms with the smoked paprika, salt, pepper, and Worcestershire sauce.1/2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce, 1 tsp smoked paprika, 1-1/2 tsp salt, 1 tsp ground pepper
- In a large bowl mix the mushrooms and ground beef together.1 lb ground beef
- Using your hands, form the mixture into five patties, using your thumbs to create a small indentation in the top.
- Grill the burgers on a medium-high grill for 6 minutes per side.
- Serve on toasted buns with your favorite condiments.
Notes
Mark is an experienced food writer, recipe developer, and photographer who is also Umami’s publisher and CEO. A passionate cook who loves to cook for friends, he can often be found in the kitchen or by the grill testing new recipes.
More Info About Mark Hinds
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