Burgers In Sauce

[mongoose]

i figure i'll start at the start with the dart food. for whatever reason, and i don't care what it is, burgers in sauce is the favorite of all the foods we put out. so, we have it twice a season, every opening day, and again towards the end of the season.

basically, i get a couple of boxes of burgers and fry them off, and put them in a roaster in sauce.

Sauce:
the sauce is tomato-based, so it can be spaghetti sauce, or doctored tomato sauce. or a combination of both. generally you can get tomato sauce pretty cheap if you get it by the large can at a food wholesaler. we have one in town, so that's a blessing.

if you end up having to go to Wal-Mart and buy jars of Prego/Ragu, it's not too cost-effective.

i take the sauce and pour it into a roaster (an oversized crockpot with better temperatue control. it has a removabele insert for easy cleaning. standard WalMart stuff), and warm it.

i add strips of peppers and onions. you can get them in a can at the wholesaler too, pretty cheap. but i really prefer the stuf that hasn't been soaking in a can on a shelf, so i cut my own up.

i think onions are cheap all the time. peppers are 4 for a dollar when the're in season, so i get a couple of bags in August/Septmeber and clean them and cut them into strips. i vacuum seal them and then i'm good for the year.

and that's it, the sauce is done.

Burgers:
i fry off the burgers. i used to fry them on my gas grill at home, but the fat that comes out of a batch of 40+ hamburgers meant i was hitting the grill with oven cleaner after every session. i don't like that.

so, now i do them on a george foreman grill where the grease just runs off into a trough and i can pour it into a coffee can that sits in the freezer until garbage day.

the grill holds five burgers at a time, and it takes me 6 minutes per batch of 5 burgers. i guess that's not so bad, but it's probably not as good as a place that has a real commercial kitchen to work with.

as the burgers are done i just put them into the sauce, and i can keep that on 200 degrees for hours without anything drying out.

i'm sure that other places might use a different kind of sauce, like maybe a can of Au Jus or some beef broth with onion soup mix in it to hold the burgers. i've seen that at picnics plenty of times, and it worked fine for me.

i just like the tomato sauce with bell peppers better.