At the Holly Bush Inn this is how we like to serve our beef burger.

Now it would be crazy to think that you can serve the perfect burger because everyone has their own personal tweaks and refinements, but we believe our recipe, described here, tastes not only fantastic but also suits most palates.

The way we like to achieve this, is by keeping it simple and letting the quality of our mince speak for itself.

When we opened we spent a lot of time sourcing the best quality and most consistent beef that we could find to use on our menu.

Having tasted and tinkered with many burgers, we settled on what we believe to be the best recipe for us.

The beef we found stands head and shoulders above the rest and comes from Aubrey Allen, a fantastic supplier we have now built a great working relationship with .

Anyway enough about us, let’s get to the recipe. Like I said earlier, using great quality beef allowed us to keep it simple.

So for our beef burger, the mince we use is 28 day dry aged beef mince with a 80% meat content and a 20% fat content to give our burger a real depth of flavour that most mince just doesn’t have.

This is because mince is usually very fresh and has a higher water content which obviously leads to less flavour in your burger. The second important factor is the ratio of the lean meat to fat ratio. A pure 100% beef meat burger would be naturally very dry, so the addition of the 20% beef fat brings moisture and more flavour to the mince without it becoming unhealthy or greasy - for us, the perfect balance.

When it comes to the cooking, we prefer to serve ours medium, but also understand that should be the choice of our customer. The seasonings we use are unashamedly simple, a good quality sea salt (we use Maldon Sea Salt) and freshly ground black pepper, added at the last minute, just as you would cook a steak.

Making sure to use a high heat to give it that lovely deep delicious charred flavour.

The next thing to think about is what flavours you want in your burger and which style of bun you prefer.

For us the perfect bun will always be a lovely soft toasted brioche burger bun because it has the strength to maintain its integrity against the juices it absorbs from the burger patty and also brings a great buttery finish to the burger as a whole. I nside the bun, we choose to add English mustard mayo, iceberg lettuce, beef heart tomato, mature cheddar cheese, streaky bacon, ketchup and gherkins.

Simple but delicious and served with skin-on fries.

8oz Dry Aged Beef Burger

Ingredients

8oz 80:20 Dry aged beef mince patty
Sea Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
Toasted brioche bun (toast bottom on both sides to give strength against the meat juices)
English mustard mayo
Iceberg lettuce
Beefheart tomato slice (seasoned with salt and black pepper)
Sliced matured cheddar Streaky bacon Gherkins (sliced)
Rosemary salt (made by blitzing rosemary needles with sea salt in equal quantity)