Home Head Chef's Tony Ganoe is back with another backyard BBQ banger! Level up the summer with his award-winning French Onion Burger recipe.  

French Onion Burger Recipe

French Onion Toppings

• 2 medium size yellow onions (sliced)
  
• 1 cup beef broth
• 3-4 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 1 teaspoon fresh thyme (chopped)
• 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
• 1/4 cup bourbon
• 1 teaspoon corn starch
• Salt & pepper to taste

Burger

• 1 pound ground beef (80/20 works best)
• 4 brioche hamburger buns
• 4 slices provolone cheese
• Salt-N-Pepa (Ahh. Push it. Push it real good)

Heat up your grill for a 2 zone cook. One side around 400°F the other around 200°F.

Place your skillet on the hotter side and add the butter and oil until the butter is melted.

Once the butter mixture begins to sizzle, add your onions. 

Cook the onions till they start to become soft and translucent. 

Slide the skillet over to the cooler side of your grill and let them cook for about 10 to 15 more minutes. Stir occasionally. 

While the onions are caramelizing, it's time to work on the burger!

Form your burger patties a little bigger than your buns. 

Make a small indent in the patty to will help it cook evenly and shrink less.

Let your burger patties sit at room temp for about 10 to 15 mins before putting them on the grill.

Add bourbon to the onions and let the alcohol cook out for about 3 minutes. 

Add thyme and half the beef broth to the onions, and let it simmer while you cook the burgers.

Season both side of the burgers with salt & pepper and put them on the grill.

Let the burgers cook for 4 to 5 minutes per side to develop a crust. Don't mess with the burgers while they are cooking. You want to get a nice sear so they stay juicy. 

Right before it's time to flip the burgers, add in the rest of the beef broth and mix in the corn starch. This will thicken up the French onion topping while your burgers are cooking. 

Once your burgers are done (for the most part), add the cheese and let it melt. While the cheese is melting its time to toast the buns.

Spread a small amount of mayonnaise on the buns and place them on the grill. 

Plate it up and let the compliments fly! Time to plate.

Video transcript:

Chef Tony:
Hi everyone, I'm Chef Tony, and welcome back. MONSTERBASS has brought me back to bring you guys another episode. Today, I got the grill fired up. I'm going to show you how to make my award-winning French Onion Burger.

Chef Tony:
I don't want to waste too much of your time, just a little backstory on this burger. In 2017, I was an executive chef at a restaurant. We entered a burger competition for the whole county that I'm in. We ended up taking second place for it, and today I'm going to share that recipe with you. So let's head on inside and see what we need.

Chef Tony:
First thing we're going to start working on for this burger is the French onion topping. Now I'm going to do it out on the grill, in a nice cast iron pan, but you can definitely do it on the stove.

Chef Tony:
But for the ingredients that we're going to need for that, we're going to need two yellow onions, thinly sliced. We want them to be uniform, so they cook evenly. We need a cup of beef broth, salt and pepper, three to four tablespoons of unsalted butter. We're also going to need one teaspoon of fresh thyme, chopped up, about a tablespoon of oil, a quarter cup of bourbon, and about a teaspoon of corn starch.

Chef Tony:
First things first, I have the grill set up in a two zone. I got over here, that's extremely hot. It's about 400. Over here is about 200. We're going to start to cook these onions on the high side at first. Cast iron is on. We're going to go in with our butter. Get that melted. We'll go in with our oil as well. The reason I use both is because butter has a very low burning temperature, and it'll start to brown and burn the onions up, and then you got to start all over. So by adding in the oil, it's going to bring the smoking point up higher. So that way we can cook these for longer without anything burning.

Chef Tony:
Once we start to see the butter sizzle like this, we're going to go in with our onions. We're going to start to cook these for about five to 10 minutes or until they become translucent. After about two to three minutes, our onions are starting to get soft and they're starting to become translucent. We're going to slide our pan over here to the colder side, and we're going to start working on our burgers. So I'm going to do that. And I'll meet you guys back inside the house and I'll show you what we need for the burgers.

Chef Tony:
Now to make the rest of this, all we're going to need is our hamburger buns. You can use whatever buns that you want. I like to use these brioche buns. I'll show you what we're going to do with them when it comes to it. About four to five slices of provolone cheese, about a pound to a pound and a half of burgers, depending on how big you like to make them, and some salt and pepper.

Chef Tony:
Now, when it comes to burgers, you can make them many size that you want. I like mine to be a little bit bigger than the bun when I make them, and nice and thick. So since I'm using about a pound and a half here, I want my burgers to be about seven to eight ounces. So I'm going to take, I'm guessing, about seven to eight ounces. I'm going to form this to a nice burger patty. We don't really want to squish or push this too much, or we're going to start to develop a protein in it. And it's going to end up becoming tough. Say probably about that size. Little trick I like to do. So I like to build a little edge around my burger, push down the center because as they cook, they do have a tendency to shrink, but this will help prevent that as well.

Chef Tony:
Now, before we throw these on the grill, we're going to let them rest at room temperature for about 10 to 15 minutes. Because when you have a tendency to throw a cold piece of meat on a hot grill it shrinks, the meat contracts. So we're going to let these sit on the counter for about 10 to 15 minutes and we're going to finish up those onions.

Chef Tony:
Our onions are looking fantastic. They're starting to slightly break down. They're taking on a beautiful mahogany color. Now we're going to go in with our bourbon. Be very careful with this because if it's hot, it could flare up, and you could have some flames. There we go. We're going to cook this for about three minutes. Let that alcohol cook out. Now we're going to go in with our thyme and half of our beef base. We're going to let this continue to cook as we're cooking the burgers, but we want to occasionally stir this.

Chef Tony:
Grill is still nice and hot. Our burgers are at room temp. We're going to season these on both sides with some salt and pepper, and we're going to get them on the grill. We're going to take our burgers place them down on our nice hot grill. You want to hear that sizzle. We're going to give these about three to four, possibly even five, minutes per side. We want to leave them untouched. It's going to develop that nice crust that we all know and love on a good burger. All right, let's give these burgers a flip. Perfect. We're going to let these go for about another four to five minutes to fully cook through. We're going to finish up these onions.

Chef Tony:
To finish up these onions, we took the other half of our beef stock, mixed it in with our corn starch. We're going to go in there, just like that. Give this a stir, kind of push it over on the heat a little bit more. And this is going to start to thicken up. It's going to get real thick. We're going to have those onions in there. We're going to finish this all up and we'll put it together. Our onions are looking fantastic. Let's get a taste to adjust seasoning Looks perfect, almost like a glaze. Man, those are good. They don't need any salt whatsoever because we reduced down that beef stock. Crack of black pepper. These onions are good to go.

Chef Tony:
And let me show you how to do these buns. And now my secret with the buns, mayonnaise. It really allows the buns to crisp up. It's going to give us that element of the French onion soup, of the crispy croutons inside of it. We're going to toast these for a few seconds. Grab the cheese, throw our cheese on here and get this melted. And we're going to plate this up, and we're going to get a taste.

Chef Tony:
All right. Now to plate these, we have our beautiful toasted bun. Go on with our burger. Now, if you want lettuce, tomato, pickles, all that, by all means, throw that on. I am not going to, I'm going to let this burger talk for itself with a nice toasted bun, the melted provolone cheese. Going to spoon on some of our French onions. Take it right to the edge. That looks fantastic. Save some for the rest. Crown it just like that. Going to finish these up, and we'll get inside, and we'll get a taste.

Chef Tony:
Now before we dig in, if you're interested in recipes like this, or other cooking videos, make sure you head on over and check out my channel. It's called HomeHeadChef. There will be a link for that down in the description.

Chef Tony:
Let's not waste any more time. Let's get a bite of one of these burgers. Mmm, perfect. Now I remember why this won second place. I don't remember the burger that beat it. The bun is perfectly toasted. Get a nice sweetness from the caramelized on onions. That beef base in there that thickened up, it adds a nice beefy flavor. You get the creamy cheese on with the burger. It's an amazing burger. This goes great with fries, potato salad, macaroni salad.

Chef Tony:
I hope you enjoyed this video. If so, please hit that thumbs up button. Don't forget to check out MONSTERBASS's other videos. Thanks for watching, guys. We'll see you in the next one.