Making Hamburgers McDonald's Style

I was recently reading Top Secret Recipes and the section on McDonald's really peaked my interest.  Because health concerns aside McDonald's has always been my comfort food of choice.  It's just so yummi but the prices ensure I curb my cravings.  I finally figured out why I love it so much, the meat in their burger's all have MSG!!!! No wonder I'm addicted.  The most shocking thing, was discovering that for every ONE pound of ground meat they make 10 beef patties out it!!! Which as a frugal girl really, really intrigued me, talk about penny pinching!  In terms of the patty the recipe is simple, its salt, pepper, MSG, and dried onions.

I honestly couldn't stretch the meat that much so I decided to use real onions instead and was able to make 5 patties out of 1/2 LB of ground meat. I changed up the recipe a little since I'm not using MSG.

Ingredients:

1/2 LB Ground Beef

1/2 Medium Size Onion

2 TSP Soy Sauce

2 TSP Cooking Wine

Salt and Pepper to taste

You will need Wax Paper or cheaper alternative Plastic Wrap

Directions:

Using fork lightly mix your Soy Sauce, Salt, Pepper and Cooking wine into the ground beef.  Let sit and marinate for at least an hour in lower fridge.  Finely chop your onion or use food processor.  Then Mix in you onions to the beef.  Divide your meat so that you get 5 even amounts.  On flat surface lay out your Plastic Wrap.  The proceed to scoop your sections onto the plastic wrap like below.

Then cover the beef mixture with the other half of Plastic Wrap and gently press to form your patty.  

After you have formed your patties, pay attention to the ends.  Use your fingers to gentle make sure the ends aren't too thin as that would make it vunerable to falling apart when cooking.

As the book said, its easier to cook these then patties when they've been slightly frozen.  For me, I'm just putting these into my freezer for when I need an emergency Burger.What I discovered is that this method is great for getting the max out of your meat.  It would also work great for mixing black beans as well so you have a combo of meat and black bean burger patty !!  What I love about this is that my hands never get dirty and the clean up was just the bowl I used to marinate and the chopping board for the onions.  Next time, I get a great deal on Ground Beef, I'm going to make a ton of these and they take up almost no room in your freezer!

Cost Analysis: Even if you get your ground beef for $2 per LB which is way to high, it would cost you only $.20 of meat for each patty.  And it's a lot more filling than what you pay for ham or turkey sandwich meat.  And this version is NO MSG and real Onions!