Where's the (Ground) Beef?

No, seriously, where's the beef?  After dreaming all day about perfectly-cooked, juicy, medium-rare burger, Allie and I were horrified to discover that the fattiest ground beef that we could find at our local grocery was 93/7 (compared to our preferred burger mixture of 80% lean, 20% fat, which, in our minds, yields the juiciest, most tender patties).  After talking to the butcher and confirming that there was nothing close to what we were after, we did the only thing that would enable us to enjoy the burgers that we'd been lusting after all day: we bought a rib eye and decided we'd grind it ourselves.

HOUSE-GROUND RIB EYE BURGERS
Ingredients

• Rib eye Steak (~1/2 pound per person)
• 1 T Butter (Melted)
• Salt
• Pepper
• Buns

Directions

1. These directions actually start at the store itself.  When buying your steak, you should look for a few things: Great marbling (ensuring that there is a good amount of white fat flecks in the muscle itself), a rich pink color, and a non-mushy texture.  You can buy bone-in or boneless (but if you buy the former, you'll need to cut the bone out yourself).

2. After getting home with your steak, cut it into long slices, sprinkle liberally with salt and freshly-ground pepper, and put it into the freezer for about 10 minutes.  This will firm the meat up enough so that it can be easily ground.

3. After the meat is nice and firm, it's grinding time!  We used our meat grinder attachment for our trusty Kitchen-Aid stand mixer, and used the larger of the two dye plates.  After grinding the chunks of meat once, we put the once-ground beef through the grinder again, which further mixed the fattier bits with the leaner bits.

4. After grinding all of the meat, we formed it into patties by starting with balls and gently flattening them out.  We also made sure to leave an indention in the middle of each patty, so as the meat expands as it cooks, the burger doesn't get too round.  After the grill was preheated, we melted the butter in the microwave, brushed one side of the burgers, and put them, butter side down, onto the hot side of the grill.

5. After about three minutes, we quickly buttered the uncooked tops of the burgers, and flipped them.  Note: Thou shall NOT push the burgers down with the spatula (lest you lose the delicious juices.  Be prepared to combat any flare-ups with a squirt-bottle of water.

6. After another three minutes or so, we pulled the burgers (internal temperature around 115).  We then let them rest for between five to ten minutes so that the juices could re-introduce themselves into the meat (and not go running as soon as we bit in).

7. After the burgers had rested, we put them onto the toasted buns, and kept toppings to a minimum (balsamic-caramelized onions and mayo).  We cut in, and enjoyed.

All in all, we were frustrated by a cruddy meat selection at first, but necessity is the mother of amazing burgers.  The lack of decent ground chuck led us to improvise with rib eye, which we will absolutely be repeating in the future.