keto burgers

A day late, perhaps, but I did go through with my threat to make keto burgers. I've enjoyed using Joe Duff's fathead-dough "bagel" recipe in the past, so it's what I used today. The bagels came out a bit underbaked, but they still served their purpose.

Fathead dough gets its name from the large amount of fat in it, usually in the form of cheese, which takes over the role normally played by gluten in regular bread. As a result, this bread also needs to be kneaded as a way to allow the mozzarella cheese to be stretched and pulled into a complex lattice that is webbed in and through the almond flour and egg. I didn't buy enough mozzarella cheese, so I threw in the last slices of some other cheeses I had lying around—one very Gouda-like (Normantal), one very Emmentaler-like (Maasdam). This may be why the cheese didn't integrate with the dough as well as it normally does. Not that it mattered much: the resulting bagels' taste and texture were about the same as always—possibly lighter than usual.

Joe Duff's recipe recommends dividing the dough to make six small bagels, but I prefer to make four slightly larger bagels. As you see, I sprinkled on the Everything Bagel seasoning.

The foreground bagel makes it obvious that some cheese in the dough remained unmixed. This wasn't tragic at all.

If this wimpy serving of keto "fries," below, looks too stingy, it's because I kept picking at the batch I'd made, eating all the darker ones first. The fries are made from almond flour, which does a lot of heavy lifting in the keto world, serving as the raw material for breads, fries, cakes, pie crusts, and even dodgy pastas. As with potatoes, the fries also go soft if you allow them to cool before you eat them. They're still tasty (and yes: they taste noting like potatoes), but once cooled, they can be a bit chewy.

I pressed my home-ground beef into a burger mold, then used a flat-bottomed cooking vessel to smash the patty out a little wider and flatter. The patty held its shape beautifully, and the Gouda analogue (Normantal cheese turns out to be more Gouda-like than Emmental-like) melted nicely on top without my having to use a pan lid to accelerate melting:

cheese: good melt, but a bit sweaty

Second patty:

Second patty, flipped, and before the placement of cheese:

Second patty, becheesed:

First burger, mostly assembled:

sauce, then tomatoes underneath, then a bed of lettuce

Looks pretty good:

I need to take some courses in food styling.

With keto "fries":

I was so impatient to eat the first burger that I forgot about the bacon I'd prepped. Here's a pic of the second burger, crowned with its bacon:

I cooked the bacon a little less crisply than I usually do.

A couple not-quite-keto elements: (1) the sauce was a combo of teriyaki, sriracha, and mayo. Teriyaki was the odd man out because it has carbs, just like ketchup and barbecue sauce. I probably should've left the teriyaki out. (2) The pickles were sweet. Finding honest-to-goodness unsweetened dill pickles in the local supermarkets is hard work. I have to rely on Coupang if I want them.

In all, a good meal. With the fathead dough being a bit heavy (but not overly), I could have stopped with just one burger. But I was able to eat two burgers plus a mess of keto fries while staying under a 50-gram carb budget. (Technically, I should be doing 20 grams, but I've already talked about the sauce and the pickles.) I still need to make my keto fried rice, but I might save that for this coming Friday. Tomorrow, I'll have another burger and a Paris Baguette salad or two.