Spanish Burger with Manchego and Padron Peppers

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• The birth of the Spanish burger
• Flavours of Spain
• What bread to use
• The secret Spanish burger sauce
• Homemade saffron mayonnaise
• No Spanish burger without peppers
• More Spanish-inspired recipes
• Latest recipes
• Spanish burger recipe

What makes a Spanish burger? A burger after all is simply a meat patty sandwiched inside a burger bun. Burgers are generally considered American but perhaps with German origins, there are however numerous worldly ingredients that are interchangeable for any burger. If every burger bar in the world served only one type of burger, how boring would that be? Thankfully that is not the case and people try to mix things up all the time so a Spanish burger can actually be many things.

The birth of the Spanish burger

The amazing thing here is that there is no “one definitive” recipe, as variety is the spice of life. With a Spanish burger, it is exactly the same, there is no one way of making one. A cheeseburger has cheese! But you can use any cheese you like. A chicken burger has chicken whether it is plain grilled or encased in a crispy crumb, it is entirely up to you. All a Spanish burger must have is the unequivocal flavours of Spain. And there are a lot of them, so with this idea of a Spanish burger, we are exploring what are the flavours of Spain, what are the key ingredients and what flavour combinations work best. The list isn’t definitive but certainly long enough to give you an idea of how you can experiment yourself and also how to make one amazing Flavourise burger full of fiery Spanish panache.

Luckily, there is a formula to follow when building a burger. No matter how many ingredients you want to use to embellish it, there is a key structure. That is a patty of some kind. This can be meat, poultry, vegetable or a vegan substitute such as Seitan and there is a bread bun which could be a brioche bun or sourdough roll or classic sesame seed bap. The general extras include salad of some description and a sauce, typically mayonnaise or ketchup. That is as simple as that. Everything else is an embellishment. Pickles, chutneys, cheese, bacon or secret herbs and spices are commonplace, but if you think about these key ingredients, Spain has their own in abundance. 

Flavours of Spain

Classic Spanish dishes are full of excellent homegrown produce. Their meats are especially held in high esteem all around the world and the pork is exceptional. Iberico pork loins for example, are such good quality they can be treated like a steak and cooked medium rare, it’s all about the taste and texture and we think it is unmatched. Iberico ham, or jamon iberico de Ballota, a luxury food item that can be sold at eye-watering prices, is juicy and earthy and full of umami richness. Then there is Serrano ham, probably the most globally recognised food item of Spain which is another highly flavoured cured ham. It has such a good distinct flavour, it is traditionally enjoyed just by itself. Of course, there is also chorizo, a sausage flavoured with pimentón which is a sweet and hot smoked paprika that is as Spanish as it gets. These meat products would not be mistaken as anything other than Spanish so this is a good start for the patty.

Using Iberico pork for the base of the patty does work a treat, however there is also an image that is created when thinking of Spain and that is of toreadors and matadors, so it is also very befitting to use beef. In this case a nice slab of steak that we put through a grinder. So to make this beef burger with the unmistakable flavour of Spain, we are going to pair it with chorizo. There are different chorizos to choose from, but when making a patty, it needs to stick together and the higher the fat content, the better it does stick, so rather than using a cured chorizo, we pull apart the uncooked variety in order for the chorizo’s paste-like texture to bind the burger together. The flavours of rich beef with the smokey, paprika pork is perfect for our Spanish burger.

We’re also going to use the jamon, as it is just too good to leave out. Many burgers are topped with crispy bacon, so frying a thin slice of Serrano ham creates a perfect salty meat crisp to put on top as the ideal bacon substitute.

What bread to use

For the bread aspect of this Spanish burger, there is quite a list to choose from. Mediterranean countries make a lot of bread and Spain is no different. No self-respecting tapas board would be complete without some for sopping up sauces and of course, there are tostadas, small toasted bread tapa topped with all kinds of delicacies that are served up and down the country. So, bread and meat is just a perfect match in Spain too. If you can find a nice Spanish loaf, go ahead, however this is a burger after all, and, feel free to argue with me, but the best burger bread is a buttery sweet brioche bun. It just looks the best, all golden and glistening and it also tastes the best, especially when cooked for a few minutes in a hot oven to crisp up a little.

The secret Spanish burger sauce

Burgers always need a sauce and of course, there is tomato sauce. The Mediterranean climate in Spain produces some of the best tomatoes in the world, and they are used a lot, but tomatoes are often used in conjunction with other Spanish ingredients too. We’ve mentioned pimentón already flavouring chorizo, and it is this wonderfully smoky, sweet and spicy ingredient more often than not that gets the nod. Just think patatas bravas, small bite-sized morsels of perfectly crispy potatoes topped with a spicy tomato and pepper/pimentón sauce. Bravas sauce would be an admirable sauce to choose on a burger, but we already have this flavour in our patty. 

There is one other key flavour that is perhaps the most Spanish of them all, saffron. Originally brought to the areas by the Moors, it is the golden jewel of spices that exudes a unique and captivating flavour with delicate notes of floral honey and earthy bitterness. This luxurious spice is a thread throughout Spanish cuisine so with its alluring flavour, it is saffron that we want to flavour our Spanish burger sauce with. Here we make a simple saffron mayonnaise/ burger sauce from scratch which is very easy to do and it also gives us the opportunity to use another very Spanish ingredient in sherry vinegar. 

Homemade saffron mayonnaise

Many burger sauces have small diced shallots in them to add texture which is a nice addition. To release the saffron flavour, just start by frying a tablespoon of finely chopped shallot and add a couple tablespoons of sherry vinegar with a few strands of saffron. What happens in the pan is that the hot vinegar gets infused with the saffron strands and the shallots suck up all this flavour. Reducing the liquid away then removes the majority of the sharp vinegar taste but just leaves a mixture that is potent enough to flavour the mayonnaise. You can just stir this into a store-bought mayonnaise, but making your own is much better, it is really very quick and very easy. Just add this mixture to two egg yolks with a spoonful of mustard and whisk the lot until it gets thicker in texture and paler in colour, then just pour in a steady stream of neutral flavoured oil such as ground nut oil or grapeseed whilst whisking until you have a smooth shiny emulsion.

So, we have our patty of beef and chorizo, a nice bun to put it into and a sauce to smother over. We have a crispy serrano ham slice too but there are still more embellishments we can use.

If you want a cheeseburger, you don’t have to look too far for a wonderful Spanish cheese as Manchego is very common. It also melts really well too. 

If you want pickles in your burger, then Spain produces wonderful guindilla peppers. These are the pickles similar to the feferoni pickles often found on the side of a kebab and can be quite hot.

No Spanish burger without peppers

Peppers are very Spanish and you could use the wonderfully sweet red peppers that have been grilled already to maximise on their flavour. We’ve decided, for this Spanish burger recipe to use another very uniquely Spanish ingredient with Padron peppers as they have a wonderful hot pepper flavour but without the actual spiciness. However every now and again you can get one which is hot and will catch you off guard, so be careful. Just fry them in a hot pan so that the skins begin to blister then season liberally with salt, just like you would get in a tapas bar.

You can mix and match these ingredients but serve with a simple salad of sliced of tomato, onion and a crisp lettuce leaf and you are good to go. Viva la burger.

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