Latest news with #cheeseburger


CNET
a day ago
- General
- CNET
I Was a Grilled Burger Purist Until I Tried This Easy, Indoor Method
I'm no air fryer rookie -- I've crisped, roasted and reheated just about everything in my beloved countertop convection oven, but I held off on burgers for one reason: I wasn't convinced it could deliver that perfect medium-rare magic like a grill or cast-iron pan. Turns out, I was wrong. If your backyard's missing a Weber -- and the smoky sizzle of burgers -- you're not out of luck. You can whip up juicy cheeseburgers, turkey patties and veggie stacks without ever stepping outside. One of my favorite tricks? Letting the air fryer do the heavy lifting. After air-frying a burger -- bacon, bun and all -- I am happy to report that making a bacon cheeseburger in an apartment-friendly air fryer is fast, clean and, as I found out recently, nets an equally juicy burger. Plus, you can easily get your air fryer burger medium rare via the super-convection heat that crisps the outside of food quickly without overcooking the inside. Here's how to make a bacon cheeseburger in your air fryer at home. How to make a cheeseburger in your air fryer Even a small air fryer can handle a full-sized burger patty and a few slices of bacon at once. Pamela Vachon/CNET I consulted a variety of different sources for timings and temperatures, but the process is about what you'd expect and similar to that which you'd experience cooking a burger in any manner: flipping the patty about halfway through for even results, with different timings depending on the size of your desired doneness. Read more: How to Tell When Steak Is Perfectly Cooked Without a Thermometer The air fryer works by circulating hot air in its contained chamber, so as a matter of interest, your air fryer burger will cook opposite to what you'd see on a sauté pan, with the exposed side of the burger cooking more quickly and becoming browner than the underside of the patty. Best Air Fryers: Cheap vs. Expensive Best Air Fryers: Cheap vs. Expensive Click to unmute Video Player is loading. Play Video Pause Skip Backward Skip Forward Next playlist item Unmute Current Time 0:01 / Duration 0:30 Loaded : 100.00% 0:01 Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:29 Share Fullscreen This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. 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Best Air Fryers: Cheap vs. Expensive I tried two approaches, both with a quarter pound of lean ground beef, seasoned simply with salt and pepper. Air fryer cheeseburger recipe Shape a single patty of beef about three-quarters of an inch in thickness. Place in a greased air fryer basket and cooked at 370 degrees Fahrenheit for 10 minutes, flipping at the halfway mark. With about 2 minutes to go, add cheese to top of burger patty and place bun into air fryer basket to toast. Remove all ingredients and build burger on bun with toppings of your choice. Serve. I also tried the same amount of meat shaped into two, thin, smash-style patties for a total cooking time of about six minutes. (Double your cheeseburger, double your fun.) Making a great burger in an air fryer takes almost no skill and requires very little cleanup afterward. Pamela Vachon/CNET Air fryers require very little cleanup You can cook a burger to that perfect medium or medium rare with an air fryer. Pamela Vachon/CNET Well, that was easy. In both cases the patties cooked evenly, with an outcome that was medium in doneness. (You can easily experiment with your model and ideal burger patty size to find the precise timings for your preferred degree of doneness.) The hot air circulation even managed to produce a bit of caramelized crust on one side. Because I could, even with a small, single-household air fryer, I put in a couple of strips of bacon with the single burger patty, since crispy, spatter-free bacon is another excellent use for an air fryer -- not to mention an exceptional burger topping. Speaking of spatter-free, this is the single most compelling reason to employ the air fryer for burger prep. Your clothing, skin and stovetop all avoid the sizzling oil droplets that -- safely contained within the air fryer drawer -- like to escape the pan during regular skillet cooking. The smoky, greasy, meaty aroma, which is otherwise appealing at a burger dive, but not so much in a studio apartment, is also minimized. Cleanup was limited only to the nonstick, air fryer drawer. Read more: I've Been Making Bacon Wrong. Here's the Best (and Cleanest) Way to Cook it There are drawbacks to air fryer burgers With an air fryer, you can't smash the patties down as easily as you can on a grill or griddle. Pamela Vachon/CNET The air fryer isn't perfect when it comes to burgers, and the drawbacks as I experienced are twofold. First, since you can't really access the patty while it cooks, you're unable to smash it down in such a way that it doesn't shrink up significantly while cooking. Since an English muffin is the best burger containment method -- I will not be considering opposing viewpoints at this time -- this didn't bother me so much, since the resulting patty fits the intended vessel perfectly. Expect shrinkage when considering the size of your patty before cooking. Second, if you're like me and believe that a burger without cheese isn't worth eating, things get a little more complicated. Because of the air circulation action of the air fryer, it's hard to anchor cheese on top for a quick melt at the end of the process. My first attempt with a sliced single, an ideal burger cheese -- and I am a cheese pro, so don't come at me -- flew off and unhelpfully adhered to the surface of the air fryer drawer. Am I seeing double? Pamela Vachon/CNET My second attempt where a slice was halved and layered for extra heft was more successful, even more so when I moved the patties to the back edge of the fryer basket, which gets less aggressive air circulation. This may just be a quirk of my model, but I'd be prepared to experiment. I wouldn't even consider shredded cheese on top of a patty, but I absolutely would consider a cheese-stuffed burger, which should work nicely.


Daily Mail
01-07-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
Aussie woman shares her 'sneaky' hack for saving money on a popular McDonald's staple
An Aussie woman has revealed her 'sneakiest' McDonald's hack for snapping up a cheeseburger at a discounted price. Queensland podcast host Dani Said, 36, has shared a series of hacks for scoring cheaper deals at the popular fast food restaurant to TikTok. In her latest trick, Ms Said filmed herself in a McDonald's drive-thru asking the price of a cheeseburger which was $4.80. 'And, how much is a hamburger on its own?' the podcaster asked. '$2,' the cashier responded. Ms Said then ordered a hamburger and added a slice of cheese, which is what a cheeseburger is. Her total ended up being $3.15 - $2 for the hamburger and $1.15 for the cheese. Her video was flooded with comments from Aussies impressed with her 'hustle'. But many said the fast food chain was still too pricey. '$4.80 for a burger the size of a baby's fist?' one wrote. '$4.80 for 1 cheeseburger is wild! I remember when a small Big Mac meal was $4.95!' another said. '$1.15 for a slice of cheese? Tell 'em they're dreaming,' a third added. Others said they had tried the hack but to no avail. 'I've tried to do this and they told me they have to put a cheeseburger through, so stopped trying this hack,' one wrote. 'Sneaky, because you can't add cheese onto a hamburger on the MyMaccas app,' another advised. Current and former McDonald's staff said they had been warned about savvy Aussies trying to use the trick in the past. 'We were told we weren't allowed to do this, and we'd tell customers we would give them a slice of cheese separate from the burger, usually ended up being melted into the box,' one said. 'I would actually get in trouble from my manager for doing this for customers,' another said. But one worker said the hack would only work for a limited time. 'Hi, so I work at Maccas and the reason it's way cheaper is because the hamburger is on a temporary deal,' she wrote. 'So it seems weird but it won't be like this forever. 'The hamburger will go up soon.' The video received more than 680,000 views after Ms Said posted other 'Maccas hacks' to her TikTok account. In another video she clarified with a cashier that a small cheeseburger meal and a Happy Meal at the franchise were more or less 'exactly the same thing' plus a toy. She wrote the prices were $3 apart from $8.95 for a small cheeseburger meal to $5.95 for a Happy Meal. 'Do you get people asking that all the time?' she asked the cashier in the clip.


Bloomberg
03-06-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Arizona's Water Drought Reality
A cheeseburger uses a lot more water than a ChatGPT request. Arizona's water is vanishing before AI gets a crack at it, explains Bloomberg Opinion columnist Mark Gongloff. (Source: Bloomberg)


Fox News
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Fox News
Celebrity chefs shred Diddy's 'travesty' of putting applesauce on burgers
Applesauce is a food commonly fed to babies and a popular snack for children. It's also apparently a favorite of rapper Sean "Diddy" Combs. During testimony last Thursday at Combs' ongoing sex-trafficking trial, a former employee of Combs said that the rapper "loves applesauce and eats it on the side or top of a lot of things," according to People magazine. "Cheeseburgers?" defense attorney Marc Agnifilo asked. "Cheeseburgers being one of them," replied George Kaplan, the former assistant. The burger topping is prompting reaction from some celebrity chefs, including Andrew Zimmern, who recently shared his opinions with TMZ about Diddy's unusual preference. "I don't like to yuck on anyone's yum, but applesauce on a hamburger is a complete travesty," Zimmern told TMZ. Fox News Digital reached out to the Minnesota-based Zimmern for additional comment. One chef wondered how this would even work. California chef and American Gravy owner Andrew Gruel shared his own thoughts from a culinary perspective. "Anyone who feels inclined to put applesauce on their burgers should seek professional help immediately," Gruel told Fox News Digital this week. Florida chef Jason Smith, who won the Food Network's "Holiday Baking Championship" in 2016, told Fox News Digital he wonders how that would even work. "Cold, wet, gritty, sweet applesauce just doesn't seem appealing," he said. Combs also apparently enjoys ketchup on many foods. "Ketchup was a big item that he always needed for his food," former Combs assistant David James testified earlier last week, according to People. James claimed that when they flew to the United Kingdom, he always brought Heinz ketchup along with them because "the tomato sauce [there] didn't meet Combs' standards." "Were you aware he put applesauce on his cheeseburgers?" Agnifilo asked James during the trial, the magazine reported. "I was not aware, but I knew he liked applesauce," James replied. Smith said he wonders if applesauce on burgers could become the newest food trend. "I mean, after all, we eat applewood smoked bacon on a burger and that works great," Smith said. "Food trends come and go sometimes when we don't even realize it."

ABC News
24-05-2025
- General
- ABC News
This cheesy rice bake is an effortless way to make a burger bowl
OK, hear me out — cheeseburger rice bake. It might sound a little unconventional, but the combo of rice, mince and cheese is anything but unusual across the world and the flavours are comforting and nostalgic. Think: fluffy rice as your bun base, topped with juicy, seasoned "burger patty" mince and a generous layer of melted cheese, all baked until golden and bubbly. Then, just like your favourite burger, it's finished with tangy burger sauce (with pickles, they are non-negotiable), crisp shredded lettuce, and juicy cherry tomatoes. It's an easy, satisfying weeknight meal — and a great option for anyone gluten-free who's been missing that classic cheeseburger hit (just be sure to check your pre-bought sauces for any sneaky gluten). I really enjoyed this one — I hope you do too!