Patty Melts
When I'm looking to order a burger, first I check if my favorite is on the menu—that's one topped with cheddar, bacon, onion rings, and barbecue sauce—failing that, I see if there's a patty melt before moving on to lesser options. With its combo of Swiss cheese and caramelized onions on rye bread, a patty melt may be one of the more minimalist burgers out there, but I contend it's one of the tops too. I realized its presence on this site before today was limited to a vegetarian variation, so I'm finally bringing my love of patty melts full circle with my preferred beef patty version.
On this particular day, I was making patty melts for nearly 40 people, along with using caramelized onions for another recipe too, so I loaded up my Dutch oven to the top with sliced yellow onions and tossed in about five tablespoons of butter before starting to cook them. A mass of onions this size takes quite some time to cook down and start to brown, but fear not, the smaller quantity required for the actual recipe takes significantly less time and I can often go from start to finish in around 30 minutes.
There isn't much active work while the onions lose enough moisture to begin to brown, so that's prime time to make the other required components. In a traditional patty melt, that's really only the beef patties, for which I used ground chuck that had at least 20% fat—the high fat concentration is required for the juiciest and most flavorful burgers. I formed third-pound portions of the meat into patties by hand, trying to stretch them a little larger than normal to account for the larger size of the rye bread compared to a standard bun. I then pressed a little dimple in the center to help them from shrinking up too much, and then gave the patties a seasoning of salt and pepper.
The next thing I made veers into non-traditional, but I'll also admit that my favorite patty melts always have some sort of sauce on them. I decided to use a fairly standard burger sauce, which tends to combine ketchup, mustard, and mayonnaise plus extra seasonings. For those seasoners I used chopped dill pickles, paprika, garlic powder, and cayenne pepper. On the first taste, I felt the sauce was a tad too sour, so I tossed in a little sugar and that helped balance the sauce out nicely.
Now back to onions...once they start to leave some fond at bottom of the pan, you really need to be attentive to keep things browned and not burnt. This is the stage where they become caramelized by adding water and then scrapping up the browned bits at the bottom of the pan, then waiting for more fond to form and repeating the process until your desired doneness. I like mine a dark brown and very sweet, so I might do a couple more deglazes than the average person.
With all the components of the patty melt prepared, I moved things outdoors to a grill I had running at high temperature with the charcoal arranged in a two-zone manner where all the coals were situated on one side of the grate. I then grilled off the patties until they were well seared and cooked to medium-ish. I was cooking in a large quantity and actually overdid some of the patties, but since I had that high fat content, I felt pretty confident they'd still be plenty juicy despite my mishap.
As the patties were done, I moved them to the cool side of the grill and covered them each with a slice of Swiss. Then I toasted up the rye bread, which I had buttered beforehand.
When those were lightly browned, I moved them to the cool side of the grill too, placed the patties on top, then spooned on onions, sauce, and topped with another slice of rye before covering the grill and letting the patty melts cook until the cheese was completely melted the bread was crusty.
A slice into the patty melt reveled a cross section of perfection—a juicy burger, creamy cheese, and a sauce and onions that had melded together a bit. The flavor totally matched the looks with a burger that delivered on a big beefiness and a topping pairing that could keep up by having a strong sweetness, tang, tartness. The unique earthy flavor of the rye then tied the entire thing together. At this particular cookout I had also purchased standard buns and burger fixin's, but ended up not using any of them because all anyone rightfully wanted were these incredible patty melts.
