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To my knowledge, Connecticut style steamed burgers are only found commercially in Connecticut, but thanks to the Internet, they have become a kind of thing elsewhere.

If you don't know what they are, here's a video that shows one of the burger joints making the burgers:

Ted's Burgers

Basically they stuff the ground beef into miniature loaf pans which then go into the steamer. They do the cheese the same way, separately.

America's Test Kitchen (sorry, paywalled) has published a recipe that just puts the burgers straight on the steamer:

burgers

I plan to use washed out tuna cans for the cheese because the pouring of the cheese is pretty cool. But is there any good reason to open two more cans of tuna for the burgers themselves? I kind of don't see the point, but I don't want to miss any of this bizarre experience.

Jolenealaska
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    If you have ramekins you could spare the tuna cans. Presumably for cheese a pyrex measuring cup would work nicely and be easy to pour from - or the tiniest saucepan we normally use only for melting butter which is nearly a tuna can with a handle, but it's stainless (and copper plated outside-bottom, being Revereware) Never heard of these burgers, but I don't spend a lot of time in CT, though I have been there. Presumably "burger on the steamer" would drip grease and steamed in a pan the grease would be retained. – Ecnerwal Nov 28 '16 at 17:05
  • In the picture above, is that person going to steam the hamburger buns? Because that seems terrible. – Caleb Dec 09 '16 at 18:57
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    @Caleb Believe it or not, it's actually pretty good. The final result is reminiscent of a regional sandwich from my childhood in Iowa, the loose-meat burger, AKA the [Maid-Rite](http://maid-rite.com/). I played with it, and plan to write up an answer in the next day or two. – Jolenealaska Dec 09 '16 at 23:45

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The cheese needs a container such as the tuna can so it doesn't just ooze everywhere, but the burger does not. You could steam the burger by just placing it in your steam tray. Since it's solid, it won't go anywhere!

Caleb
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