Steak au Poivre Burgers

A burger that's pure decadence.

Mar 14, 2024

∙ Paid

Steak au Poivre has always been on the short list for my last meal on earth. It’s elegant and old school, but its never gone out of style. This burger version comes from the You Asked For It section of Gourmet’s February 1975 issue. Readers write the magazine with a prompt, and Gourmet responds with a recipe.

This might sound a bit silly, but I would very much appreciate it if you could supply me with a "gourmet" recipe for hamburger.

When I came across this recipe, I thought it would be a fun project, but I realized that I don’t think I’ve ever actually cooked steak au poivre. But, I figured, it’s a essentially a pan sauce with only a few ingredients. How hard could it be?

First, I crusted the burger with a lot peppercorns per the instructions, but they toasted far too much. The burger was dry and had a spicy-burnt crust.

When I went to make the sauce, I added the brandy, and then the cream. And then the sauce got extremely goopy and thick. Then it broke, which means it started to separate again and it got weird.

I wiped the pan out a bit and attempted the sauce again. I added the brandy with the heat off. I then turned the heat back on to continue and FLASH! A flame rose up and caught me by surprise, somehow missing my hair. I continued with the sauce and it was still too thick.

Needless to say, our burgers were so sad on recipe testing night.

Many weeks later on my final attempt, I finally nailed it. I skipped the pepper crust, and instead put all the peppercorns into the sauce to toast them with more control. I cooked off the brandy without lighting my face on fire. The sauce was creamy and thick, and it blanketed the burgers with pure decadence.

This recipe is a close adaptation of the original, but my version yields more sauce, because I am a saucy girl. Spoon it liberally over the burger then spoon more on for each bite. The burger sauce gets a traditional au poivre treatment with shallots and butter, and I am convinced that’s what makes it all come together with relative ease.

For the brandy, use something you’d actually drink. I don’t like brandy so I picked the cheapest one and it definitely was a tad sweet. I feel like higher quality ones would yield in a less sweet-forward au poivre sauce.