Firstly I can't stand a burger made from only lean ground beef, so I mix Regular ground pork 60% and reg ground beef 40%, added to that are eggs, bread crumbs, a little sea salt, both cayenne and black pepper and dried onion soup mix, The amounts are to taste so you can work them out for yerself. So far thats pretty basic, what I used to do to make my burgers different was to take smoked farmer sausage equal to about twenty percent of the weight of the ground pork that I was going to use, split the sausage and scrape out the sausage meat and mix it with the pork and it was always a PITA to first make the sausage, smoke the sausage and then open it up and throw away the casings and you can never get all of the meat out of the casings, like I said it was a PITA.
One day I had what here is colloquially referred to as a brain fart and I said why make the sausage in the first place as it's just more work and the casings add no more flavor to the meat than the milk carton adds to the milk. So what I do now is place an old oven rack covered with a piece of cheese cloth in the smokehouse. I place a layer of sausage meat about 2" thick onto the cheese cloth and smoke it that way.
After the smoking is done I package and freeze the smoked meat for later use.
It's easy, works really well and yuh don't even have to be brave, cuz like yuh don't need any Guts to try this method.
Swallow
