People who know me as a gamer, probably already know that I’m interested in the idea of using games as a topic for my dishes. And those people probably also know about my love for poker and gambling. So I guess it’s not too difficult to figure out how this will eventually turn out!
The first time I cooked with a casino theme was almost 3 years ago already – I still remember it quite well, since this was one of my first “big” projects. Back then we actually had a couple of Poker Tournaments going on – which made cooking something related to this theme quite easy-peasy.
Some months ago I also had the chance to cook something for a Fresh Casino Germany with friends of mine – it was a rather busy time right in between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, so unfortunately I didn’t have any time to take photos of this creation. But what remains is an un-edible photo that shows me cooking that night. It looked delicious!
Last week I got yet another chance to cook with the online casino theme – but this time it wasn’t just about poker, but also chips other related stuff. So today you will find out how my dish turned out!I should also add that I’m not a poker player myself – but I love to play other casino games like roulette, blackjack and so on. And back when we had live casinos here, I sometimes spent quite some time at the gaming tables.
So what did I come up with?
Well, since my original idea was to create a dish for Poker-Fans and players who might attend EuroPoker’s next Event, which will take place in Barcelona this year (and a smaller event in Vienna later this month), I decided to go for something “snackish” – Chips with dips! The main element of course were mini beef burgers served with different types of dipping sauces. There’s a cheese sauce, a barbecue sauce and what I call a version of the classic French Sauce Bearnaise, since this is another type of sauce you can often find served with fries etc.
I’ll first show you some photos from my cooking process – then you will find the actual recipe below!
Here’s how I started: after going through lots of websites related to poker and online casinos I came up with the idea for this creation. My original plan was to make one large serving dish representing an online casino theme, but after additional research it turned out that most casinos only use black and red as their color scheme. And since I already had three different dipping sauces in mind, I decided to go for a red and black color scheme.
I first started out with a large baking dish that I covered with black aluminium foil – then I put some small white stones into this tray that were going to represent the smaller casino chips. This wasn’t actually anything new that I came up with myself. You will find lots of similar creations on lots of gaming websites, so if you need something as a reference just click here. To get an idea what those online casinos actually look like these days!
Well, after adding those little stones it looked quite nice already! Of course at this point there was no food inside yet. So it might seem a bit empty. But if you want to cook with an online casino theme, chips are actually essential
And here comes the interesting part: I started out by preparing some dough for making beef burgers. This was done according to my usual recipe – which you can find here – with one little difference: in this case I added a bit of extra salt in order to give them an online casino flavor.
After having shaped the patties and covered them in breadcrumbs it was time to prepare some wooden skewers so that they could be placed onto the baking dish later on. These skewers had quite an interesting history behind them, because I actually bought them at Ikea during my last visit there! Yes – it’s true what they say: Ikea has everything!
Now it was time to get the beef patties into shape. So I pressed them onto the skewers using my hands, covered them with black pepper and then placed them all on top of that aluminium foil – which later proved to be essential! Otherwise these mini burgers wouldn’t have been able to stay upright.
After adding some salt around those burgers I decided it was time for an additional decoration, so I took a couple of small buns and used a larger round cookie cutter in order to create some discs for each one. And this is how they started looking after being placed onto the baking dish. Butter and breadcrumbs were used for making these buns nice and crispy.
After having placed some small red and black stones around the edges of the baking dish it was time for more items! I decided that the usual table setting would have been too “boring”, so I started looking around my kitchen for items that would fit this online casino theme better.
That’s how a coffee cup and a bowl was added on top of those round buns. Finally some red food coloring was used to make those discs look even more realistic, as well as placing a couple of extra stones onto the rim of those cups.
