How to Make a Portobello Mushroom Cheeseburger

Hi, I'm Louisa Shafia, and I'm one of Rachael Ray's Buddies on eHow.com. Today, I'm going to show you how to make portobello mushroom burgers. These are great, juicy, satisfying burgers, and they're wonderful if you're cooking for vegetarians, or if you are trying to cut down on the amount of meat in your diet. Mushrooms are a great way to get protein without eating animal products. Preparing portobello mushrooms is really, really simple. All you want to do is break off the stem. Sometimes you'll have more stem, sometimes you'll have less, but you can just break that off, throw them away. Or, you can actually save these, and put them in a stir-fry, or something else. If your portobellos are a little bit dirty, just take a damp cloth, and wipe them off gently. You don't need to run these under water. In fact, you don't want to do that, because they'll get really soggy. So, just wipe them off. And then, this is what's called the gill side of the mushroom, and what I'm going to do now is, I'm going to make a marinade, and I'm going to pour that into the gill side of the mushroom, so it really sinks into the flesh of the mushroom. The marinade starts out with some soy sauce. That's good for giving it some deep salty flavor. I'm going to put in a little bit of olive oil. I have some white wine here. You can use white wine, you could use cooking sherry, you could use rose, that would be fine, too. I'm going to put in a little bit of minced garlic, because you can never have enough garlic as far as I'm concerned. A little bit of salt and pepper. And, just going to whisk this around. As I said, I'm just going to pour this right in here, directly onto the mushrooms, gill side up. So, it's really, really going to sink. Last thing I'm going to do, is I'm also going to add some scallions to this mix. I want these guys to marinate along with the mushrooms, and they are going to get roasted with the mushrooms. Make these nice and wet. Great. These are going to marinate. Now, I'm going to get my buns ready for the burgers. So, I'm just going to toast these. I'm going to toast them for about five minutes in my oven that's at 350, but I'm going to top them with my secret weapon, which is blue cheese. So, I'm going to take a big, generous chunk of this, and spread it on the top of each bun. I'm just going to work it in a little bit with my fork. Now, this blue cheese is going to add a lot of tang, a lot of flavor, and a lot of fat to these burgers. And, it's really going to make the texture a lot better. Even if some carnivores are eating these burgers, they're going to be really satisfied because of this awesome cheese. If you don't have blue cheese, or you don't like blue cheese, you could use another cheese, like goat cheese would be just fine. You could use gruyere. But, I would use something with a real kick to it. Okay, so I'm just going to toast these until the bread is a little bit crisp, and the cheese is a little bit softened. Here are my portos. These have been marinating for two hours. Now, I'm going to put them in the oven that's preheated to 350, and I'm going to let these roast for about a half an hour. Here are my portos. They've been roasting for about a half an hour. And, you can see they're much flatter than when I put them in the oven. They're nice and soft and tender. They're going to be really rich and meaty when I bite into them, and really full of flavor. You can see they have released a lot of their liquid, so the texture's almost totally different from when I put them in the oven. Okay, here are my burger buns. And, you can see that this blue cheese has melted beautifully. That's going to be rich, and tangy, and fatty, and give so much flavor to these buns. Okay, I'm going to assemble these. First, I put my bun down. Now, this big burger is going to go on top. I'm going to top this with some of this nice fresh watercress, just to give it a little bit of crunch, a little bit of tanginess, something fresh. And, I also want to get some of these nice scallions that were roasting right along with the burger. Those are going to add some good flavor. Now, I'm going to put the top on my burger with all this rich blue cheese. And, that is a juicy looking burger. I'm Louisa Shafia, thanks for joining me. See you next time on eHow.com.