10:13
Hello, this is Chef John from foodwishes.com with lazy cheeseburger kebabs. That's right, I absolutely love this easy technique where meat is wrapped in a flatbread before it's rolled and skewed. And while most of the versions feature a Middle Eastern style meat filling, I wanted to try a cheeseburger approach. And I was thrilled with how these came out, especially served with my famous secret sauce. But first things first and to get started, we will season up half a pound of ground beef with some kosher salt, some freshly ground black pepper, plus a few shakes of cayenne to stay on brand. And then we'll finish up with a couple ounces of shredded cheddar cheese, which is my
preference. But whatever your favorite cheese is to top burgers, it'll work the same here. And what we'll do is scatter that nice and evenly over the top, which makes it easier and faster to mix in uniformly. And then we'll take a fork and do just that. Gently folding and stirring until it's just mixed in. And then we'll stop because you don't want to overwork burger meat, which can make it a little bit tough. Although, truth be told, using this method, that probably wouldn't make much of a difference. But anyway, once that's mixed, we'll head to the cutting board and we'll lay down one piece of lavage bread, which could also be a flour tortilla, but I find this a little thicker and softer and more flexible. So, that would be my first choice. And
it's pretty easy to find in stores these days. But anyway, we'll turn it this way and we'll moisten our hands with a little bit of water before we transfer over our meat mixture. And of course, the water is going to prevent the meat from sticking to your fingers, which is going to make this next step a lot easier. And what that step is spreading this meat out as evenly as we can all the way to the very edge. Except, as you'll notice, I like to leave about an inch uncovered at the top. Since for that area, I like to smear the meat a little bit thinner since that's the direction we're going to roll to. So once the other areas are covered, we'll
take a little bit of the meat and sort of push it and smear it towards the edge. And that's going to help give our seam a nice seal. And once we have that spread out and pat it down nice and flat, we can sprinkle over any additional ingredients we want, which for me are going to be some minced green onions. And of course, you could add pieces of bacon or mushroom or sauteed onions or pretty much anything else you wanted. I mean, you are after all the moms and dads of your lazy cheeseburger kebabs. But in any event, we'll go ahead and start rolling this up. All right, nice and tightly making sure we're getting as uniform a log as possible.
Oh, by the way, if you are going to use the round large burrito size flour tortillas, I probably would trim a little bit off the sides to square it up since something close to a rectangular shape is going to produce something more uniform and neater looking. But it will still work even if you don't. And there's a lot of viral videos using this lazy kebab method that do just that. But anyway, once we have that rolled up, finishing with the seam at the bottom, of course, and we've given it a little bit of a squeeze to fine-tune the shape, what we'll do is grab a knife and cut this exactly in half since we're making two kebabs, which of course is two portions. And I almost made a big
mistake here since after the first cut, I noticed some meat on the blade, which I started to wipe off and then I realized, what are you doing? Any and all meat should go back in the roll. So I course corrected and felt a lot better. And once those are halved, we'll go ahead and score the center and then carefully slice each piece into two and then cut them in half again to get four pieces total. And I did a test where I cut these in three. But cutting something evenly in thirds is way harder than cutting something evenly in quarters. Plus, if we cut them in four, they do cook a little bit faster. So to me, this is the way to go. But in any event, once those are cut, we will grab
some skewers. And I'm using metal, but bamboo will work out just the same. And I'm going to impale these with two each, which is always more secure and makes them easier to turn. And we'll start the first one about a third of the way in from the edge. And as long as we start the gear nicely centered up and down, and we keep the gear nice and flat, if everything goes according to plan, it should come out in the right spot in the last roll. But as they say in golf, there's no pictures on the scorecard. So, as long as these stay together, you did good. And once that's been accomplished, we'll go ahead and transfer those onto a foil line baking sheet. And then to keep things moist and
help them brown later, we'll give them a nice brushing with some melted butter. Starting with the best looking side facing up. And once that's brushed, we'll flip them over and do the same thing to the other side. At which point, I'm going to cook these in a hot oven for about 7 minutes. And then we'll brown them up under the broiler for another two or three, which I think is probably the fastest and simplest way to do this. Or you can cook them in a pan or on a grill pan on the stove or outdoor on the grill, but that's a lot trickier. So, as promised, once I had those buttered and spaced out a little bit, I transferred those into the upper center of a 450°ree oven for just seven
minutes, at which point they look like this, which no, is not super attractive yet. But that's okay because what we'll do is flip these over. We'll switch our oven to broil and we'll pop these underneath for about 2 to 3 minutes or however long it takes for these to get cooked through and beautifully browned. and hopefully looking like this, which is way more appetizing than a couple minutes ago. And then if we want, we can take some of that butter and melted cheese and beef fat from the pan and we can slather that all over before we serve these up nice and hot, which I'm going to do on a plate covered with my favorite cheeseburger accompaniment.
Oh yeah, you got your lettuce, tomato, onion, and pickle. But what about the secret sauce? Well, that would be fine. But let me show you how to make secret sauce, which starts with regular secret sauce, which as everybody knows is mayo, mustard, and ketchup. But if you then stir in some buttermilk, you turn secret sauce into secret sauce. And that buttermilk sort of gives things a little bit of a ranch vibe. And at this point, you go ahead and add whatever else you wanted in the way of herbs and spices. But I actually like mine as is. And I went ahead and spooned some over my lazy cheeseburger kebabs with, by the way, apologies to food stylists everywhere. Okay, I usually use
a squeeze bottle. And as I finish spooning this over, you're going to see why, right? The pros would call that a little bit horsey, which basically means sort of clunky and unrefined. But anyway, at this point, I couldn't pretend to care because once you pull these off the skewers and you go in for a bite, you're going to be experiencing some incredible cheeseburger goodness. Oh, and if you're going to serve it on the platter of veggies like this, you probably wouldn't eat it with your hands, right? You probably want to build yourself a nice lazy cheeseburger kebab bowl and eat this with a fork. But no matter how this goes down, the results really are very impressive. Okay, it really does somehow taste like a proper
cheeseburger. Although, I'd say more of the smash burger variety since the meat is going to be pretty much cooked through and the rendered fat from the beef and the butter fat from the cheese is going to be soaked into that lavage. And I think everything's working in perfect concert. And believe it or not, there's only 4 ounces of beef in one of these kebabs. But because we added the cheese and rolled it in the bread, it looks to be a very impressive portion. Okay, if you hand someone a 4- oz cheeseburger, they'll smile and say thank you. But we all know what they're really thinking. Oh man, that is a small burger. So, with basically the same ingredients, I do think this looks more
impressive. And of course, before I sign off, let me state the obvious that this will work with literally any kind of ground meat. But whether you adapt this method or not, lazy kebabs are one of my new favorite things to make. And I really do hope you give them a try soon. So, please follow the links below for the ingredient amounts, a printable written recipe, and much more info as usual. And as always, enjoy
