Our Bacon Swiss Slider

We have been asked to come up with some “Signature Sliders” for a Weekly Tasting Event at Craft Brewing Company in Lake Elsinore, Ca. Sounding like some fun with plenty of good beer involved we jumped right on it.

I’ll tell you, we and a few of our “Crash Test Dummies” have been eating sliders now for over a week. Here are a few of what we have come up with:

Traditional Slider, mustard and a pickle slice on a slider bun

A Blue Cheese Slider, mustard and a pickle slice on a French roll

A Sticky Slide, peanut butter and two strips of bacon on a sour dough bun

A Bacon Swiss, a slice of Swiss cheese and two strips of bacon on a sour dough bun

A Cajun Slider, a slice of Cheddar cheese, pickle and Grandville’s Cajun BBQ Jam, Hawaiian Roll

Stuffed Sliders or as we are calling them “Double Stacks”

A Stufz slider, Bacon & Chipotle Cheese, on a sour dough bun

Brie Cheese and thinly sliced sun dried tomatoes, on a sour dough bun

Mushroom Swiss Slider, stuffed thinly sliced mushrooms and Swiss cheese on a sour dough bun

Directions: Double Stack Patty

To make a Stufz patty take patty and hold it flat in your hand. Use a spoon and press it down in the middle of the patty making a little bowl. Do this to both patties. You are now ready to add the filling of your choice to the pocket on one patty. Keep in mind these are small patties so your filling should be around bite size. Place the other patty over this and seal by pressing together. Use your thumbs to seal the seams.

A Double Stack Stufz with Chipotle Cheese and Bacon

Cajun Sliders

We have found that the key to a good slider in the BEEF. We are using MM Livestock’s Grass Fed Beef. It’s the best quality we’ve found. So, we are one step up from the get go. We have tried 8 or 9 different seasonings for our meat and have settled on one that works for everything and delivers that great beef flavor.

Prep Time: 15 minutes for 12 sliders

Cook Time: 8 minutes

Grill: Royall 3000 Wood Pellet Grill

Pellets: Royall’s Hickory

We have found by eating many, many sliders that the perfect slider patty to be 1 ½ oz. with 1oz. too small and 2 oz. too big, especially if you stack it. For home you don’t need to bother with a scale, just make what you like.

After all the seasonings, 2 pounds of beef will make 25 1½oz. patties.

Ingredients: Meat

1 lbs. lean ground beef

¼ lb. partially cooked bacon, chopped

2 Tbsp. dried minced onion

2 Tbsp. dried minced garlic

2 Tbsp. onion soup mix

2 Tbsp. Country Bob’s All Purpose Sauce

1 teaspoon coarse ground black pepper

Directions: Meat

Add all the ingredients to the meat and mix well with your hands. It needs time for the seasonings to blend and get happy. So, you can make your patties now or later. If you do it later put the covered bowl in the fridge until you are ready.

Ok, when you’re ready to make your patties try to make 12 1½ oz. patties from a pound of meat. Just shape them into uniform size balls. We bought a burger press for our patties. You do not need to do this if you don’t want to. I just thought it would look nicer if the patties were all the same.

Make your patties now and put them back into the fridge until you are ready. Cold patties hold up better on the grill than room temperature ones.

Make 1 ½ oz. meat balls

Press meat balls into your mold

Use a fork to lift your patties out of the mold.

3 kinds of patties here

Traditional (in back) Blue cheese (center) Cajun (front)

For Blue Cheese Sliders: add 4 oz. of crumbled blue cheese to 1 lb. of the seasoned meat.

The Cajun Sliders: add 1 tsp. Jac’s Tailgaters Smoken Dust Chipotle Seasoning to 1 lb. of the seasoned meat

A Double Stack with Brie Cheese and thinly sliced Sun Dried Tomatoes

Cooking Directions: Royall Wood Pellet Grill

Open the lid and set the dial to “High”, turn it on. After about five minutes you can shut the lid. Give it about 15 minutes to heat up. Patti has lined the drip pan with foil for me, it makes for easier clean up.

When the Royall reaches around 400 degrees place your patties directly onto the grill, single patties will take about 2 ½ minutes per side. Add a minute per side for the double stacks. These guys are small and won’t take much grilling to be perfect.

Blue Cheese patty using a Grill Grate on the Royall 3000

Note: I get a lot of questions about the kind of pellets you can use with a recipe. Keep in mind that a recipe is just an outline. Some you need follow closely like when you are making bread, but most you can do anything you can dream, our favorite way to cook. Feel free to mix and match the pellets until you find a combination you really like. Also you are only smoking at temps less than 250 degrees, anything higher is cooking and there will not be much if any smoke so it does not matter what kind of pellet you are using.

Cajun Slides

About our Recipes

We do our recipes on our patio where we have a lineup of grills, including Royall Wood Pellet Grill/Smoker, Traeger, Char Griller side box smoker, Charmglow, Char-Broil, The Big Easy, Brinkman and Weber. I call it our “Wall of Grill”. Our grilling styles are healthy and low fat and will fit pellet heads, gas, natural wood and even charcoal purists. Almost any of our recipes can be done on any kind of good BBQ.

The important thing to keep in mind is TIME & TEMPERATURE. You can even do some of them in the oven or crock pot, but, then you lose all the flavors you get from cooking outdoors. But sometimes it does rain.

Remember that a recipe is simply an outline; it is not written in stone. Don’t be afraid to make changes to suit your taste.

Take it and run with it….

Live your Passion,

Ken & Patti

http://datenightdoins.com

For REAL GOOD BBQ Sauce check out Grandville’s Gourmet BBQ Sauces 

Steve 360 943 2861 @ www.grandvillesbbqsauces.com

Jac’s Tailgaters Seasoning www.jacstailgaters.com

MM Livestock Co. Grass Fed Beef

Megan McDowell 951 259 2072

builttoslide@msn.com    

http://www.california.beef.com