Tried a Fantastic New Recipe: Asian Turkey Burgers

Background
We are not usually a turkey burger eating family. We do like to cook from scratch for taste reasons and for health reasons.

My husband found this recipe and decided to try it. The recipe was published in AARP magazine. No we are not members and no, we don’t usually read this. My husband was at my mother-in-law’s house and her computer was not working right so he had to call a help center to get some help when he was stymied by the situation. While on hold ‘forever’ he picked up the AARP magazine which was laying on the counter and was skimming through it. The recipe caught his eye.

I suspected I’d like these because they use fresh cilantro and I am a cilantro fanatic. If I had known they had cabbage in them I probably would not have wanted to try them.

My husband made a batch of these and he froze the extra raw burgers. They were great the first time we had them (fresh). They were also great when we ate a batch that had been previously frozen.

Although as I said we normally don’t eat turkey burgers, this is a recipe that we will keep using. The burgers have a ton of interesting flavors and since we didn’t overcook the burgers they came out very moist. Because these are turkey, we wanted to make sure they were cooked enough to kill salmonella just in case it was in there (you never know). Not being able to tell when they were done enough to be safe to eat and not wanting to end up with dried out overcooked turkey burgers we relied on our food thermometer to tell us when they were done.

We rely heavily on our cooking thermometer whenever roasting meats and it never fails us. We ignore our mother’s recipes to cook meat for a certain number of minutes and instead set the thermometer to go off when the meat reaches the certain temperature that indicates it is done enough to be healthy to eat. We use a reference chart to know these temperatures and ignore whatever the recipe says as sometimes the recipes are wrong about cooking times because each oven is different.

Since it was winter when we made these, we used our toaster oven to bake these in, instead of grilling them on our outdoor Weber Grill.



This was adapted for the magazine from Sara’s Secrets for Weeknight Meals by Sara Moulton (2005). I used to enjoy watching Sara Moulton on her shows on the FoodTV channel. I’d like to see what other recipes are in that cookbook now that I know this one is so great.



Note on the wasabi sauce: We do love wasabi but we didn’t like this sauce on the burgers. I ended up preferring my moist burger without condiments, and my husband preferred using a little plain mayonnaise.

To not break copyright law I am not reproducing the recipe here. The recipe can be viewed free online by clicking on the link below.

Asian Turkey Burgers With Wasabi Sauce recipe
Published in: AARP magazine, March & April 2008 issue

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