Ground Beef Recipes for Dinner: 20-Minute Cheeseburger Skillet with Pickles

Oct 24

2 min read

Updated: 15 hours ago

Ground beef cheeseburger skillet with melted cheddar, diced pickles, tomato and chopped onion

20 minutes, one pan, six pantry staples

Everything that makes a cheeseburger good, in a pan, in twenty minutes. The pickles are not a garnish here — the brine goes into the pan too, and that splash of acid is what stops a skillet of beef and cheddar from tasting heavy. Six staples, one pound of beef, and it feeds four.

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Why this one works

A tablespoon of pickle brine in the pan does what a whole burger's worth of condiments usually does.
Browning the beef without stirring for the first few minutes gives you the crusty bits that taste like a grill.
The cheese melts under a lid off the heat so it stays creamy instead of turning oily.

At a glance

Prep time: 6 min
Cook time: 14 min
Total time: 20 min
Yield: 4 servings
Protein: 33g per serving
Calories: 512 per serving

Ingredients

Skillet

1 lb (450g) ground beef, 85/15
1 tbsp olive oil
1 yellow onion, finely diced
3 garlic cloves, minced
1 1/2 tsp kosher salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
1 tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp yellow mustard
2 tbsp ketchup
1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
2 tbsp dill pickle brine, from the jar

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To finish

1 1/2 cups shredded sharp cheddar
2/3 cup diced dill pickles
1 large tomato, diced
2 green onions, sliced
Toasted buns or a green salad, to serve

Instructions

Brown the beef. Heat the oil in a large skillet over medium-high. Add the beef in big chunks and leave it alone for 4 minutes so one side crusts properly, then break it up and cook 4 minutes more.
Drain, but not all of it. Pour off most of the fat, leaving about a tablespoon. Season with the salt, pepper and smoked paprika.
Soften the onion. Add the diced onion and cook 4 minutes until translucent and starting to colour at the edges, then the garlic for one more minute.
Build the burger flavour. Stir in the mustard, ketchup, Worcestershire and pickle brine. Let it bubble for 90 seconds until the liquid has mostly cooked into the beef and the pan looks glossy rather than wet.
Melt the cheese. Scatter the cheddar evenly over the top, cover with a lid and turn off the heat. Leave it 2 minutes — the trapped steam melts it smoothly.
Top and serve. Scatter the diced pickles, tomato and green onions over the melted cheese. Serve straight from the pan with toasted buns alongside, or over a salad to keep it light.

Notes and swaps

Spoon it into brioche buns for sloppy-joe style cheeseburgers, or over fries for a loaded version.
The pickle brine is not optional. Without it the whole thing tastes flat.
Add a cup of cooked macaroni at the end to stretch it to six servings.