Experimental Cookery 2025: Peanut Butter Burger with Bacon & Tomato Chilli Jam

I have officially upped my burger game.

When cooking burgers, the target is pretty clear: you want them cooked through, but not overdone - they want to remain suitably juicy for a good mouthfeel. But once you've cracked that, there's not all that much to be done with the burger itself - fundamentally, it's a bit of meat in a roll, and there's only so much to be done there.

This post's recipe comes from "The Handcrafted Burger", a book I've had for a couple of years and have wanted to use for a couple of years... but I've just never quite found the time to do anything with for a couple of years. This is, as it happens, both the first recipe I've taken from the book, and also the first recipe in the book.

Anyway, this one called for the preparation of two components: a peanut butter sauce (dead easy) and a tomato chilli jam (slightly more involved, but also easy). Then it was a case of cooking the appropriate meats on the BBQ, toasting the buns, and assembling: spread the peanut butter sauce on the buns, then layer the bun with the burger, the bacon, gherkins, the jam, and the top.

And the result was a great burger. Surprisingly, the peanut butter sauce didn't make any great difference - it was there, but it was a fairly minor component of the whole. The chilli jam was much more noticeable, and was very nice.

But, oddly, it was the brioche-style bun that made the most difference - suddenly this was something that I could almost see them serving up in a restaurant (except that restaurants tend to avoid nuts except where there's a specific need for them), and indeed could almost see paying £18 for such a burger.

So, yeah, all in all this was a crazy-good burger. A triumph, and we'll definitely be revisiting that book again in the near future.

As for having this burger again... we'll certainly be making use of the chilli jam again, both to use up the leftovers from yesterday, but also simply to use it again. And the other components will appear at various times and places. But the key component, the peanut butter sauce, may be something we use again only rarely, if at all - it's probably not going to become one of our go-to items, and while it's something interesting to lay out for others to try, the presence of nuts means that it's something we'll want to avoid in almost all cases where we might do that. Which is a shame.

#12: "Hera", by Jennifer Saint (probably the current "book of the year")