Buying groceries for a whole month requires lots of planning. Usually, I roughly plan all our meals, especially Sunday lunches. But sometimes, I just decide to change the plans at the last minute and make something different. Past Sunday was one of those days. I decided to make burgers, but had no meat or buns for this meal. So I made my buns and experimented with chicken minced meat and my chicken burgers tasted amazing.

Making the buns

Usually, when I make my burgers, I either buy the buns or make burger buns myself. This time I couldn’t make my buns because I lost the recipe. I can’t find it anywhere. So I went online and got the first recipe for “peciva”, Croatian simple milk buns.

Recipe:

• 350 ml (11.8fl oz) of milk
• 1 egg
• 60 gr (2.11oz) of butter
• 2 tablespoons of sugar
• 1 teaspoon of salt
• 7gr (0.24oz) of dry yeast
• 500-700gr (17.6-24.6oz) of all-purpose flour

This is a very easy recipe to make. All you need to do is mix the wet ingredients with sugar, salt, and yeast and gradually add flour. At first, the dough will be very runny, and it should be kneaded until it can form a soft ball. Once the dough is done, cover it with a cloth and leave it to rise. I leave my dough overnight. This way I’m certain it will rise well, especially now that the house is much cooler than during the summer.

In the morning, I divided my dough into 8 small balls and made buns. My buns are all different sizes on purpose. My hubby likes it when he can choose different sizes. He usually has two for lunch, and then if he’s still hungry he chooses a small one. I always make a couple of bigger and a couple of smaller ones.

The dough is left to rise again for an hour and then baked in the preheated oven at 190°C(274°F) for 15-20 minutes. Once the buns are baked they can be used as soon as they cool down a bit.

Sauce

While I was waiting for the buns to cool down, I decided to make burger sauce. Usually, I make a mixture of mayonnaise, ketchup, and sour cream, but this time I had some “sir i vrhnje” leftover from last evening. “Sir i vrhnje” is a mixture of fresh cottage cheese and sour cream with spices which we eat cold with bread and deli food. This time I made “sir i vrhnje” with sweet red pepper, garlic, and salt, so I decided to use it and add some mayonnaise, ketchup, and a teaspoon of mustard to get a nice refreshing sauce.

This is not far from our vendor kiosk sauces that are very popular here in Croatia. We do have McDonald’s around the country, but small vendor kiosk burgers are still very popular here, and in my opinion, taste much better. In these places, which are usually located on major bus and train stops we can buy burgers, pizza, hot dogs, and sandwiches. Meat is made on the grill, and burgers are made from fresh ingredients, which are then heated in the microwave. Also, these burgers are much bigger and cheaper.

Once the sauce was done, I had to make some kind of meat, and I decided to try minced chicken meat.

Chicken minced meat

Chicken mince is sold frozen in our stores. It is fairly cheap. Cheaper than separate pieces of meat, whose prices are huge. I usually buy and mix it with pork minced meat to make the meals lighter. Since I didn’t have any whole chicken or chicken breasts at home, I decided to make burgers out of minced meat.

The problem with chicken mince is that it is very runny, which is not good for making burgers. Also, the meat itself doesn’t have a strong meaty taste, so it can easily get lost in the whole burger. But I decided to fix that with breadcrumbs and lots of spices.

I used 1kg(2.2lbs) of chicken mince in which I’ve added 2 tablespoons of dry breadcrumbs, salt, black pepper, powdered sweet red pepper, garlic, Curcuma, and a mixture of dried carrot, parsley, and chives. After mixing everything, I left the whole mix in the refrigerator for 30 minutes and proceeded to fry.

Frying the meat

Making the chicken mince into small burgers is actually much harder than it looks. The meat is not as hard as the beef or pork would be, so the burgers must be much bigger to stay in one piece. Still, I managed to make them by rubbing vegetable oil on my hands and making bigger burgers.

Since this is chicken and it should not stay raw, I decided to fry the bigger burgers on both sides, take them out and cut down the middle, and then fry the inside. I could have left them in one piece, but then the meat would be very round and the burger would fall apart. This way the meat was flat and well fried. You can’t be too careful with salmonella.

Making the chicken burgers

The rest of the work was just playing with ingredients. A bit of sauce on both halves of the bun, a piece of meat on both buns, some pickles, a slice of tomato, a slice of cheese, and a lettuce leaf, and the burger was done. I made 8 burgers, 2 of them I immediately wrapped and stored for hubbies Monday work lunch, and the rest we ate on Sunday.

We usually eat the meals which I make for lunch and dinner. I never make two meals, all leftovers are eaten first, and then I cook something new. So on Sunday, we had burgers for lunch, and then we had them for dinner when we got hungry. We always do it this way, no matter what’s for lunch. If there are some leftovers from Sunday then I make a light Monday lunch and we eat leftovers from Sunday with the Monday lunch. Nothing is wasted.

The burgers with chicken mince ended up tasting excellent. My hubby even prefers them over beef or pork burgers. The burgers are much lighter, and the meat tastes great. I’ll definitely continue making them out of chicken mince from now on. It might be a bit trickier, but the taste is much better and worth it.