Guest written by Chef Liam
Our Angel Bay battle royale resumes this month with a continued look at the best methods to cooking your favourite Angel Bay products. This month we’re rounding out the range with the Slider, Bites, Meatball and Veggie patty focusing on the traditional grill, combi oven and air fryer. But these are just my opinions – feel free to share your thoughts and inspiration via our Angel Bay website.
In part 1, we looked at each method and how they produce very different results for our 120g Gourmet Beef patty, Beef and Lamb Rissoles and the Breakfast sausage patty.
Results
In this round, the bites and meatballs were a small variation on the previous trials due to their thicker density and smaller surface area making them a little trickier to cook when using the traditional grill method when making contact and transferring the heat evenly. This is where the combi oven really comes into its own with a fast, easy, and most importantly even cooking process, this no fuss method allows you to concentrate on other jobs in the kitchen and ultimately was the best outcome for all factors including taste, texture and convenience.
Whilst the grill delivered a marginally better slider than the oven or air fryer methods, I must remind myself that once the patty is built into the final burger with its sauce, bun, cheese, and everything else would I even be able to identify any difference. Somewhat reassuring when planning your next function or snacks menu for its efficient ease and consistency.
The combi oven demonstrated its power again with the veggie patty it was a close finish between all methods but yet again the oven produced a marginally better result not just for its ease and efficient operation but texturally the patties delicate vegetables and legumes were held together really well allowing you to appreciate all the ingredients that go into this well-balanced offering.
Although the air fryer method did not take out any gongs this time round its results were on par with the oven, the only thing holding back its score is the lack of opportunity to scale up quickly when the demand comes, but for individual portion serves and plug n play setup it works wonders for many.
In the end, it's hard to beat the grill for that textural crunch and savoured beef juices generally when preparing Angel Bay burger patties but when it comes to the smaller bites and vegetable patty it’s the oven that delivered on all levels of culinary principles and therefore is my pick for serving the very best Angel Bay products.
What’s your favourite cooking method or tip for producing the best patty, bite or meatball? We’d love to hear what your experience is.