Introducing The Coppa Burger
She bedeviled me, but she was worth it
New here?? Hi! Scroll down for the video link and alllllll the way to the bottom for the recipe itself.
Hello to All My Toasted Buns!
I am writing to you from Book 3 HQ, with 71 days and counting until I submit my manuscript. If you want to follow my unhinged daily countdown check-ins, I’ve been posting them to TikTok. As the minute I have the all-clear to reveal the title (locked in!), cover art (not designed yet), and details about the structure and content of the next book (it’s different!), I will be doing so here.
But first: I need to tell you about this burger. As mentioned previously, I am taking a hiatus from long-form video production because of impending doom deadlines (see above). It was with full awareness that the video for The Coppa Burger would be the finale before I take a break, and it has everything I could ever hope to pack into a recipe and a video. There’s family lore, a multi-round recipe development process, a little food science, molten cheese, and even a Cosmo cameo. Could I ask for anything more? Yes: A good hair day. I got that too. (Side note: My YouTube tell-all is in process. I’m dedicating a separate post to explain the financial, creative, temporal, and emotional considerations that went into pausing the show.)
THE CHEESE
This recipe was inspired by cheese, more specifically cheddar, and not any cheddar, but Cabot New York Extra Sharp Cheddar. I partnered with Cabot on my pommes aligot recipe, and for the subsequent creation, a cheeseburger felt like an obvious choice. Indeed, it felt too obvious. Do people want, need, crave another burger recipe from me? I’ve done smashburgers (twice, in fact) and the world has done them 97 billion times.
As I snacked like a happy mouse on slices of Cabot cheddar in my kitchen, waiting for ideas to arrive, I kept coming back to the cheddar. It’s my mom, Carole’s, favorite cheeseburger cheese. An elite choice, I may add. Whenever we have Burger Night in America (the official name), cheddar is on offer alongside American singles and pepper jack. The boring unoriginal thing that everyone always says as they choose American is that they don’t like the way cheddar melts. Well, how rude. Honestly. Cheddar is one of the great melting cheeses of the world and also of our nation, and it’s also Carole’s favorite, so how dare you.
What Carole (aka Coppa, because that’s what everyone in the family calls her) says is that she likes the bit of sharpness and actual flavor that cheddar brings to the table, and if you are picking up a whiff of dismissiveness towards American “cheese” in that statement, you’re exactly right.
This was just the type of internal dialogue, aka manufactured outrage that I needed to spark my motivation. In my mind’s eye, The Coppa Burger emerged: tall, juicy, seared, a little bit messy, and absolutely cloaked in creamy, glossy, molten cheddar cheese. It would be adorned with griddled onions, dressed with a mix of Dijon and mayo—no ketchup Coppa—and lovingly cradled by a toasted English muffin. You heard me: English muffin! With that, I was off to defend both my mother’s (nick)name and cheddars everywhere.
SCENE ONE: PATTY PROBLEMS
Since cheese inspired this burger, I got straight to work on the patty. This would need to be a burger thick enough to hit an actual internal temperature. Coppa likes her burgers rare, I like mine medium-rare. That meant I’d be working with 6- or 8-ounce patties.You can’t call for a temp on a smashburger—the margin is too narrow.
I had no reason to think that the blend of ground short rib and chuck that I use for my smashburgers wouldn’t translate to a taller, heavier patty. My assumptions were extremely wrong. The first burger off the griddle was tough, dry, grey, and crumbly. The cheese, which I had cut in thin slices, never got warm enough to melt. But you know what? We love a first-round failure for the clarity it brings to the revision!
For the next round, I tried a fattier ground meat mix (75% instead of my usual 80/20) and worked diligently to handle the patty as little as possible while shaping it. I still believed that pre-ground meat could be cooked rare. Instead of slicing the cheese, I grated it this time, and gave it another go.
The cheese melt improved, but the patty was a fail. Again. This unexpected bump in the development process can spark doubt, and the thought “do I not know how to cook a burger?” fluttered through my subconscious. Are you insane, I barked back. It’s not me, it’s the meat. The solution presented another challenge: if I can’t call for pre-ground meat, that means I am creating some amount of trouble. How much trouble, I didn’t know.
I went back into research mode, watched a lot of pub burger videos, and read a lot of recipes online. And then I remembered a video about ground meat from America’s Test Kitchen that I’d seen a couple months earlier. In it, the host Lan Lam—who is amazing—talks about the role a protein called myosin plays in recipes with ground meat. Go watch the video, she breaks it down with excellent explanations and three recipes that demonstrate all the things myosin can do. For our purposes, the takeaway is that myosin is activated when raw meat is cut; the more it’s cut and the more it’s handled, the more opportunities the protein has to do it’s thing. And its thing leads to a tighter bind in the cooked product. Tighter bind is great for corsets, bad for burgers. This was at the root of the toughness I was experiencing. I knew it wasn’t me.
To subvert myosin’s powers, you need to strictly curtail how much the meat is messed with. In this recipe, that means we’re hand cutting the beef. I know. Sorry. It’s not a big deal. Prep time goes up, but the burger still cooks in 5 minutes. If you have a meat grinder at home, awesome. Use the large die. I don’t, so I first sliced the meat into small pieces, then par-froze it, and then minced it in my food processor. I know! But it literally fixed everything.
SCENE TWO: MAKING THE CUT
For the following few days, I was obsessed with the cut of meat I wanted to use. I tried beef country ribs, short rib, Denver steak, sirloin, alone and in combination. None of these burgers were bad, exactly, but they weren’t great, so I kept going. Along the way, I dialed in the timing on the freezing and the food processor pulsing. The onions morphed from being griddled in intact rounds, to being piled up in rings, and finished with a little vinegar.
Regardless of the final cut of meat, the cheese had to ascend. At this point the timing on the burgers was pretty consistent: 3 minutes on the first side, 2 on the flip. I was happy with the doneness, but this was not quite enough time for reliable, even melting. In the restaurant videos I was watching, the cooks always had a method for covering and steaming the burgers after the cheese went on. Sometimes it’s a domed cloche-looking thing. Other times, a long rectangular hotel pan. (In a skillet, you can just throw on a lid.) I had based all my timing on my range’s built-in griddle and wasn’t starting over. If I wanted a cheese waterfall flowing over the top of the burger, I’d need a way to cover them with clearance. I rummaged around until I found the answer. The answer was metal cake pans. Game. Changed.
Throughout it all, I had avoided chuck beef. So regular, so basic, I scoffed. Coppa deserves a signature blend, I thought. Round three, four, five. Nothing was quite it. Finally, I opened my heart to chuck. Oh, Chuck. It was you all along. The beefiness. The fat content. The crisping. The juices. Chuck! I’m so close. ;-)
SCENE THREE: EVERYONE ALL TOGETHER NOW
Full company, places please! How do you know when a recipe is right? Well, as I say in the video, “it’s like pornography—you know it when you see it.” (Does everyone get that reference, or am I officially that old?) Anyhoo, let’s take a look at how she stacks up: cheese duvet luxuriating on top of a big craggy bite of a burger, tangy and creamy Dijonnaise, crunchy-sweet-sour onions, proportionally perfect English muffin.
The only thing missing here is a slice of beefsteak tomato. But, as Coppa says, you only get the tomato in the summer. I think The Coppa Burger is perfect today, but it’s always nice to have something to look forward to.