Bacon & Cheddar Make Grilling Better

By Philip Van der Vossen on June 6th, 2017

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Summer is here, which means it’s time to fire up the grill and serve some outdoor meals. While we grill year-round, we do admit it’s much easier to grill when it’s not covered in snow. Over the weekend we enjoyed some Bacon Cheddar Cheeseburgers that we picked up at our local Giant Eagle. Believe us, they’re as good as they look and this Bacon & Cheddar infused meal was much easier to prepare than you might expect. Below we’re going to tell you how we pulled it all together, thanks to some product recommendations from Giant Eagle to get our summer grilling started right.

Shopping at Giant Eagle

Giant Eagle is the perfect one-stop shop for all your grilling recipe needs, and we hit up our local store for everything we needed to prepare that awesome meal you saw above. On our shopping list were four specific items :

Certified Angus Gourmet Burgers – Bacon Cheddar Patties
Lemon Lemon Sparkling Lemonade
Pepperidge Farm Farmhouse Dark Chocolate Chip Cookies
Breyers Natural Vanilla Ice Cream

Reference the photos above for where to find these products in your local Giant Eagle, and read on to see how we combined them into one great meal. The stars of the show are obviously the bacon cheddar burgers, and while we’re sure they are awesome just as packaged, we’re guys and couldn’t resist the urge to add even more bacon and cheddar to the meal. So below you’ll see the results of our shopping trip, where we’ve added some supplemental ingredients to pull together one awesome summer grilling meal.

Sparkling Strawberry Freckled Lemonade

It’s June, and it’s hot. So the first thing we did before we started cooking was to pop open a can of the Lemon Lemon Sparkling Lemonade. It’s delicious and refreshing straight from the can, so we kept one near the grill to stay hydrated. However for the table we wanted to kick it up a notch by adding some frozen strawberries. This recipe couldn’t be any easier, and you may recognize it as a sparkling twist on a drink from a popular hamburger chain.

Ingredients :

1 Can of Lemon Lemon Sparkling Lemonade
2 Tablespoons frozen strawberries with sugar syrup (let melt)
Ice

Directions :

Add strawberries to a tall glass
Add Lemon Lemon Sparkling Lemonade
Stir
Add Ice

Tip: Serve with a straw so you can suck up those yummy strawberry bits from the bottom of the glass when you finish drinking the lemonade.

Bacon Cheddar Cheeseburger

As we mentioned, these Angus Beef Burgers come with bacon and cheddar already ground into the patties, which is absolutely brilliant and should make their Meat Counter eligible for a Nobel Prize. However this wouldn’t be Gunaxin if we weren’t prepared to take these burgers to the extreme by adding even more bacon & cheddar.

While these aren’t just any burgers, they grill just like normal hamburgers. So we cooked them over a high heat, for about five minutes per side. This should go without saying, but you shouldn’t mess with the burgers once they’re on the grill, and you only need to flip them once. If we see you squeezing the juices out of your burgers with your spatula, we’re going to send over the proper authorities to confiscate your grill. We finished then off by topping them with shredded cheddar. Why shredded instead of sliced? Because we like to reuse ingredients, and we needed shredded cheddar for the next part of our menu.

Below you can see the additional ingredients to our burgers : kaiser buns, lettuce, tomato, and bacon. Especially for a meal like this when you have some gourmet burgers, we recommend checking the bakery for some higher quality fresh-baked buns, rather than just buying cheap hamburger buns that you might use with frozen patties. If you haven’t already figured this out in your lifetime, you should ALWAYS toast your buns, and we prefer to do that lightly buttered. Just be sure to keep the heat down and keep an eye on them so they don’t burn.

As you can see, you can also cook the bacon right on the grill, so there is no need to do that part inside. We recommend extra thick bacon to stand up to the grilling, and suggest you cook it low and slow for the best results. We cut one strip of bacon in half per burger. All that is left to do is assemble your burger.

Tip : Cook the bacon on the warming rack above the potatoes (see next section) so that the bacon greases drips on them. Yum!

Bacon Cheddar Grilled Potatoes

Why stop with just a Bacon Cheddar Cheeseburger, if you can put bacon and cheddar on your side dish too? A burger and fries are a typical meal in the United States, and while we could have done this recipe with frozen french fries (try steak fries, they grill up great) we prefer to use fresh potatoes. Our potato of choice for this are red potatoes, but you could really use whatever potatoes you have available or prefer. Just make sure you dice them up into small enough pieces so they’ll cook quickly, in the case of red potatoes we cut them into eighths.

Potatoes take longer to cook than the burgers, so make sure you start them first, and we suggest doing them low and slow, in a grill pan that has been coated with cooking spray. Once the potatoes are done, we like to turn off the burner below them and just keep them warm in the grill while we finish the other parts of the meal. We finished them off by adding sea salt, shredded cheddar cheese, small pieces of bacon, and garnished with green onion. Sure you have to eat them with a fork, but trust us, it’s worth it!

Tip : Heat the chopped red potatoes in the microwave for 1 minutes before grilling, to speed up cooking time and make sure they’re soft.

Chocolate Chip Cookie Ice Cream Sandwich

How do we finish off an awesome summer grilled meal featuring bacon and cheddar? By combining two of our other favorite things in life, chocolate chip cookies and ice cream. Utilizing the Breyers Natural Vanilla Ice Cream and Pepperidge Farm Farmhouse Dark Chocolate Chip Cookies, we made simple ice cream sandwiches. Sure you could get fancy by using different flavors of ice cream or cookies, but we prefer to keep it simple and stick with the classic. If you can’t figure this recipe out for yourself, just put a scoop of ice cream between two cookies and serve. We told you this meal would be easy.

Tip : Use wax paper on hard counter-top to flatten the ice cream scoop before placing it between two cookies. You’ll break fewer cookies this way.

Bacon & Cheddar Make Grilling Better

Check out Giant Eagle on Pinterest for more ideas.

About
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Philip Van der Vossen

Editor at Gunaxin

Philip Van der Vossen is the Editor of Gunaxin, a Men's Lifestyle Magazine that was established in 2008. Philip also created and hosts the Trail Trek Tour, a traveling series of off-road events for automotive media.

Additionally, Philip has served as Rally Director for the Washington Automotive Press Association, Speaker at IMPAcon and Blogs with Balls, Chairman of the Relay For Life of North Anne Arundel County, Examiner Team Leader for the Maryland Performance Excellence Awards, and Credentialed Founder of Capitals Outsider.