 Today, I'm going to show you how to make the best burger that you and I have ever eaten. It's called a Smash Burger. Have you ever heard of that? Well, I made it for the first time about three weeks ago, and I was blown away, literally. It was the best burger I've ever eaten, and my family agrees. Nowadays, that's all they want. Make me a Smash Burger when I mention burgers. That's what they want, and there's a good reason for that. So what I'm going to show you today is I'm going to show you the tools that you need, the pans to use, the smasher that you need to have in order to make these the best that you possibly can. I'm also going to show you the best cheese to use, although you can change it up if you want, and we're going to add some caramelized onions to this, and I'm going to show you a nice secret sauce to add to it to really just round it out, and you're going to love it. I'm Rockin' Robin, and I'm going to show you all the details right after this. Before we get into our recipe, I want to start off with our chef joke. I have two today, one now and one a little bit later. All right, here we go. Where do the two hamburgers go to dance? A meatball. So it's time to talk about our ingredients. So we're going to start off with our ground beef. Now you want to use 80-20 ground beef, absolutely, because that means 80% lean to 20% fat. You want that 20% fat because that means flavor, and that's what we've got to use here. It's subtle for, you know, 90-10 or any of those, it just won't be as good and juicy. So when I went to the grocery store looking for grass fed, I like to use grass fed because it's just a quality piece of meat, and I couldn't find 80-20. They just don't have it. So I went online, and what I found was this company called Desert Mountain Beef, and I went ahead and ordered like 10 pounds of this, and it's, like it says here, you know, it's 80-20, which is hard to find, and I tell you, the price was reasonable. I made some burgers with it, and I love it. It's very good quality meat. The company seems really good. They're very concerned about the quality of their product and their customer service. So I'm going to leave a link for you to their website down below in the description of this in case you want to order from them online. They deliver, I believe it's all over the United States, all 50 states. So if you're in the States, then you can certainly get that if you want. It comes frozen. It worked out great for me. And I also secured a special discount code for all of my viewers, and I'll leave that coupon code down in the description. If you're interested in that, you can save 10% off of anything on their website. Next up, we have some onion. Like I said, I'm making some caramelized onion. So I have just a regular onion here. Now the cheese. I am using American cheese. Now some of you may not like that, but it works the best in these kind of burgers because it melts so quickly. Now if you insist on using like a cheddar or Monterey Jack or something else, you can always put a lid over your burger to help encourage that melting of the cheese because these don't cook very long and that cheese doesn't have much time to melt. Next up is some butter. We'll need some avocado oil. I like to use avocado oil and we're going to just flavor up our burgers with some garlic powder, salt, and pepper. It's time to talk about our equipment and what you need to make these and just make it the best. Okay, so first up, you're going to need, I cook mine in a cast iron pan or a grill like I bought and it's sitting over there on the stove. I highly recommend that cast iron works the best. You could buy a bigger one and put it on your barbecue and do it that way. But cast iron works the best in terms of flavor and just the way it browns up. And then you'll need some sort of press. Now I bought this off of Amazon and they call it a bacon press. You could use it for bacon. And it has some ridges in it and what happens is you want to use wax paper or parchment paper, which is another requirement. So that when you put your hamburger ball down on the grill, you put your wax paper on top and you smash it, okay? And that keeps it, the wax paper keeps it from sticking to your press. Then you'll also need a nice metal spatula. Don't use this kind. It just won't work as well. You want something nice and thin. You're going to be scraping up that, you know, hamburger off of the grill and you want to make sure that all that caramelized crispiness just comes right with it and doesn't stay in the pan. And then you'll also want to have a scale of some sort. This is my little scale. I bought it and it fits nice. It's compact. Fits in the drawer. So I like that. And you can weigh out your meat and that way each ball is consistently the same size so it'll cook up at the same rate. All right, we're going to start off by slicing up our onion because that's going to take the longest amount of time to cook on the stove, right? So we'll slice out the ends and peel the onion and then we'll slice it into one quarter inch slices like this. And then we'll go take these over and put them in our cast iron pan. I have my cast iron pan over medium high heat here and I'm adding some olive oil to the pan. I like to use olive oil when I'm sauteing onions. So we'll toss those in and cook them for, you know, 20, 30 minutes or until they're nice and caramelized in a nice golden brown. And you're going to want to lower the temperature as you cook to low. For our super simple secret sauce, we're going to use avocado mayo because it, well, is healthier. We're going to need some ketchup, some plain yellow mustard, and I'm using Tabasco sauce with a chipotle flavor, which gives it a nice smoky heat. While the onions are caramelizing over there, we are going to work on our secret sauce. So I'm going to take my mayo and we're going to put equal amounts of mayo and ketchup. Now with the mustard I probably put about, I don't know, a couple teaspoons to a tablespoon in there. And the Tabasco sauce, well, that's to your liking as well, depending on how much heat you like and how much smoky flavor you like. Probably a couple teaspoons in there. Then we'll give this a stir and it's good to go. And then just take a whisk, that'll really blend everything smooth. Okay, so I'm going to cover this and put it in the fridge until we're ready to use it. So now I'm going to pull out my little scale and we're going to measure out our hamburger in about three ounce portion sizes. And we're going to be making a double burger. So we'll be using two patties per burger plus cheese. Before we get to cooking our burgers, we have time for just one more chef joke. This is our last one. Here it goes. How do you tell if a hamburger is cooked in space? It's a little meatier. Now just before cooking our burgers, we're going to toast up our buns. I have one hamburger bun here and I'm going to spread a little bit of butter on it. Place it in the cast iron pan here over medium or low heat and let that brown up for a minute so it's nice and toasty. Now I want to show you my setup here because it's really important. We want to make sure that we have everything laid out, ready to go because these burgers cook up so quick. We want to just cook them, plate them up, add our toppings and send it off so it's nice and hot when the person eating it gets it. So here's our setup. I've got my wax paper here, a couple pieces. I've got my meat already measured out. I've got my cast iron pan over medium high heat. My masher's right here, accessible along with my spatula. I've got my salt, garlic powder and pepper ready to go. We've got our caramelized onions and we have our buns toasted and ready to go. Along with our secret sauce and back there I also have my own gluten free bread for this. You'll have your cheese laid out and ready to go as well. Okay we're ready to make a burger. Alright I've got this pan over, it's about medium high heat and I'm going to place just a little bit, just a drop. I want to give a little bit of oil on my pan here. And then I'll just take my spatula and you can see that's pretty darn hot. I'm going to place a little bit of butter on this side of the pan here, take one of my meatballs, place it on there, wax paper and a smasher. This is where you get your smash on. Then remove your wax or parchment paper. Since we're making a double decker here I'm going to throw in another piece of butter, a bit of butter, put our wax paper on there and smash be careful, you don't get burnt. While I'm smashing burgers over here would you do me a favor and smash that like button. Season it up with a little salt, the higher you hold your hand up, the more spread out it'll be, garlic powder and some pepper. Now you're going to notice that we're going to get a crispy edge on this burger as it cooks, which is what you want. And you can see it's starting to get done, you can see the fat kind of rising up. And when you start to see that, this only takes like a minute, minute and a half. Now we're going to start scraping the edges so that we release that crispiness. Once it releases, flip it over. Once you flip it, you place your cheese on top and the American cheese does melt quickly. You can place a lid over the top if you want to. If you're using other cheeses you might want to do that as they take longer to melt. As soon as that cheese is melted, these will be done. All in all these burgers cook up in about two and a half minutes total. All right, we're going to take this one off and place it onto our bun over here. We're going to make it a double decker. I'm going to add some of these beautiful caramelized onions. Look at that. These are amazing on this sandwich or this burger I should say. Look at that. And then we take our secret sauce and I like to just drizzle it right over the top and I like extra. So it's just nice and oozing all over the place. Now you could put some on the bottom bun but I didn't do that. But here we go guys, look at that. It's beautiful. I think I've got it upside down. Hey, who cares? This is going to be so delicious. Now when you want to go for another round and make some more, you're going to have this build-up stuff right here. See this crusty stuff, the cheese and whatnot? You're going to want to scrape off your pan otherwise your burger is going to stick to it. So I'm going to make a single burger for me now. Add your butter, put your burger on, top it with parchment paper or wax, smash it for 10 seconds and then peel it off, season it, wait until you get the crispy edge, and then flip it over and add cheese. Put sauce on your bread, add some onions on top and drizzle more secret sauce overall. I'm ready to dig into this sandwich. Let me tell you, let me see how it tastes. This thing is full of flavor, guys. You are going to love this. This is the best burger ever. It's the only kind of burger I ever want to eat again. Please try it once. Let me know what you think. Man, this is good. You got the onions, the caramelized onions with a slight sweetness. We've got that special secret sauce that gives you that little bit of heat and just a little bit of a tang. The, of course, the American cheese melts like a beauty. I mean, it's just so good. Now, if you'd like to try another recipe of mine, I hope you will, I have a hamburger steak with mushroom gravy. You might want to try that. I'm going to leave a link for you. Click that right over there and you will find it and give that a go as well. I think you're going to love it. Don't forget to subscribe, hit that like button, and leave me a comment. See you next time.