The Viking Burger: a construction of Danish awesomeness. Wherein, we craftily combine the power of the Danish meatball (frikadeller) with slithery, ‘pickly’ red cabbage (Dansk rodkal) and a Danish Dill Sauce to form a magnificent ‘Viking Burger’. Described by our (completely unbiased) tester as “subtle but evident”.
Ingredients:
Frikadeller (the burger portion)
one pound of pork
one pound of beef
1 tsp salt
½ tsp pepper
two eggs
one small onion
¼ cup breadcrumbs or some flour as a binding agent
1 tbsp allspice
1 tbsp nutmeg
1 tsp cardamom
some Danish blue cheese to finish…
Dansk Rodkal (the cabbage portion)
Cabbage is great to roast outside on the grill – that way your house doesn’t smell like Gdansk.
one head-sized red cabbage
½ cup butter
1 tbsp jelly (we used crabapple because of the 100 mile diet and all that)
½ tsp allspice
1 tsp coarse salt
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar (any kind of vinegar really)
Dill Sauce (the sauce portion)
4 Tbsp chopped fresh dill
1/4 cup mayonnaise 1/3 cup sour cream
1/3 cup mustard
pinch of salt and pepper
Directions:
Step 1: Assemble your ingredients
Step 2: Carve out a compartment in your cabbage. Make it roughly 3”x3”. (I’ll be honest with you, you will almost certainly cut off a finger or jab a carving knife into your abdomen while you’re doing this. Our apologies in advance.)
Step 3: Fill the cabbage cavity with the butter, jelly, vinegar, ¼ teaspoon of allspice and a teaspoon or so of salt.
Step 4: Roast the cabbage on your barbecue (we did it over Maple Leaf Charcoal) until the cabbage is as soft as you’d like. Probably about an hour or so on medium heat for a crunchy cabbage. If you prefer softer cabbage – l
Step 5: Combine frikadeller ingredients and mush them all together.
Step 6: Form into burger-shaped patties and grill on the barbecue as you would any other burger. Don’t forget to finish with melted blue cheese (important!)
Step 7: Combine dill sauce ingredients and mix them all together. Don’t be shy with the dill.
Step 8: Remove cabbage from the barbecue and slice it up. Try to maintain the butter/jelly juice so the remaining ‘dry’ bits of cabbage get exposed to the yumminess.
Step 9: You know how, when you cook spinach, you can start with what looks like enough to feed a herd of llamas and then it cooks down to just barely enough to cover a cracker? Yeah well, that doesn’t happen with cabbage. In fact, the opposite happens. It expands. It enlarges. It explodes. We could have had Lithuania (all of it) over for dinner after we cut our cabbage. Anyways… it makes a lot of crunchy garnish for the burgers.
Step 10: Fill the bottom of your burger bun with yummy, crunchy cabbage, next, the frikadeller burger, then top with a healthy dollop of the dill sauce and some fresh dill. (You remembered the blue cheese right?) Serve with some grill-roasted potatoes, a dark ale and, if you want to get legit, some aquavit. Skål! And seriously, we’ve thrown a lot of recipes your way over the past 7-8 years. Some of them … sort of…, “suck”. This one doesn’t. Try it.