Tuesday Dinner: Spanish Burgers

One of my favorite items on the menu at Laci’s Tapas Bar in Syracuse are the Spanish sliders. The geniuses in the kitchen make mini burgers with beef, piquillo peppers, caramelized onions, manchego cheese and garlic aioli. There’s a lot of stuff going on in these little guys, but no one flavor overwhelms. Everything plays well together. Harmoniously even.

I wanted to recreate something similar here, but in a full quarter-pound burger portion. My nearby Wegmans stopped carrying manchego, but the fine people from Buttercup Cheese (found on Saturdays at the CNY Regional Market) import manchego and package it for sale. Piquillo peppers are another story. I could not come up with a source for these locally, instead using piquante peppers (jarred and sold under the Peppadew label). Piquante and piquillo peppers are related, and share many of the same properties, so I adapted.