Diner-Style Smashburger and Spicy Tomato Soup Recipe

Diner-Style Pies

Welcome to Poor Girl’s trip back home to New York, Day 3. Today I’m making soup and sandwich diner style. New York is great for diners, as I’m sure you know. What I love most about diners is the extensive menu, abundance of pies, the long griddle, and always ordering the same thing despite it all and knowing that it’s going to be just what you wanted.

I started the day again with pizza dough, but this time I sweetened it up. I used it to make an overabundance of pies, of course. I started with 2 cups of flour, added 1 cup of warm water, 1/2 cup of sugar, a teaspoon of salt, and about a tablespoon of yeast. If you have packets, just use one packet. I get the large bags of yeast. It’s great value for money, uses less packaging in the long run, and allows me to add as much yeast as I want without feeling guilty.

I used to work with S. cerevisiae in the labs, and I learned to love the smell of it growing. By adding more, I get more of the yeast smell. I also get a better texture, in my opinion, because I get the same lift to the dough in less time and with smaller, more consistent holes. I also like to think I get some added nutritional benefit from the yeast, vitamin B and protein for starters. Mostly, though, I like the smell and the speed of the proofing.

Air Fryer Apple Pie

While that was proofing, I peeled, quartered, cored, and evenly sliced 3 apples. The key to a good apple pie is consistent slicing, and that starts with the right knife. It shouldn’t be too big or too small for the apples you are peeling and slicing, and it should have a good grip on the handle. You should feel comfortable fully slicing the apple towards your thumb without touching your thumb with the knife. It takes some practice, but when you get it right, you can hear it in the slicing. I usually get about 6 slices from each quarter of an apple.

Add about 1/2 cup of sugar to the apples, a half teaspoon of salt, and an overflowing capful of lemon juice. You can double the recipe if you want to make a full pie or make apple pies for both pizza dough pies. When I have everything mixed, I put it in the slow cooker and let it cook on high for an hour or two.

Once the pizza dough has risen, take half of it and stretch it out to the size of your air fryer basket, or a cake pan if you are using your oven, making sure it climbs up the sides. I always use an air fryer baking paper for this. It keeps it from sticking to the sides and is easier to remove. It looks nice, too. You can either put the apple pie filling on top of the dough now or bake the dough for 5 or 10 minutes first. The filling is cooked, so it doesn’t need the extra time in the air fryer, and blind baking the dough keeps the bottom from undercooking or getting soggy.

Before I put the apple pie mix in the dough and while it’s still piping hot in the slow cooker, I add flour a tablespoon at a time to sop up the excess liquid. It should get a gel-like consistency. Do this slowly so you don’t add too much flour. If you do it right, it comes out like a McDonald’s apple pie center.

Add the apples to the dough in the air fryer basket and cook at 450 for a total of 20 minutes (this includes the blind bake if you did that part). When there’s about 5 minutes left to cook, you can add toppings if you want, granola, walnuts, dried cranberries, etc.

Mixed Berry Pie

Because this is NYC diner day, I made a second pie. I followed the same process for the dough. For the filling, I put 4 oz of cream cheese and 2 oz of butter in a mini ramen cooker (or small saucepan) and melted them together while stirring constantly. I added about half a cup of sugar and a capful of lemon juice. Then I added about a cup of mixed berries and let it cook down while my apple pie was baking.

After I stretched out the rest of the pizza dough and added it to the air fryer with a new sheet of parchment paper, I added the berries and cooked for about 15 minutes (you can do the same thing with the blind bake here, but I’d suggest 5 minutes to give the berries extra time to cook). When there was about 5 minutes left, I added additional berries to the top, mostly strawberries that I had held back from the filling, to give it some pop.

Spicy Tomato Basil Soup

The next step was to make the soup. I made spicy tomato basil soup using fresh tomatoes from the garden. I used about 4 to 6 medium-sized tomatoes and just squashed them with my hands. It’s a fun way to do it, but you can use a blender if you prefer and if you don’t like any chunky pieces of tomato in your soup. Since I was using fresh tomatoes, I added one can of creamy chicken soup concentrate. If you’re using canned tomatoes, just use about 16 oz of chicken broth.

I added the tomatoes and soup to a small slow cooker. I then added about 4 to 6 cloves of fresh garlic, whole. You can chop them up and cook them first, but I wanted a fresh soup, and the garlic loses its bite after it’s been in the slow cooker for a few hours. I added about a medium onion’s worth of chopped onion and one jalapeño sliced with seeds (can be removed for less spice).

Finally, I added basil from a tube. You can use fresh, but the squeeze stuff isn’t as leafy when you eat the soup and still tastes fresh. I gave it a good squeeze and then tasted it as it cooked and added more as needed. I did the same with the salt. And, of course, I added a capful of lemon juice. I didn’t add cracked pepper, but you can, especially if you pass on the jalapeño. I let it cook for several hours and then added about half a cup of heavy cream (I probably added a cup, but I like it light and creamy). I cooked the soup on high in the slow cooker for about 3-4 hours total. You can make this soup ahead and reheat it as well.

The Griddle Burger and Pickles

Finally, I made the sandwich. I went with a cheeseburger. But because this is diner day, I cooked it in the myMini griddle and used sandwich bread instead of rolls. I kept it simple: a quarter of a pound of 75% fat ground beef from a 1 lb roll was put in the center of the myMini griddle and smashed. The beef roll is well packed and doesn’t need to be messed with. I cooked it until it was perfectly pink in the middle, flipping it once to make sure it was evenly cooked.

For the bread, I used my other myMini griddle, buttering the top and bottom well. Then I put both pieces of bread (cut to fit) on the griddle. When the outsides were toasted, I flipped them over so the toasted sides touched and griddled the other side. Why didn’t I toast it? Because that is the best part about a diner: bread cooked on the griddle. A toaster oven can’t replicate it. It’s buttery, warm, and toasty on the outside while still being soft in the middle. It’s what a bun tries to replicate, but can’t.

I plated up the burger and soup with some half-sour pickles that I had started several days earlier. If you live someplace other than the middle of Nebraska, you can probably get something like a deli/diner pickle in the refrigerated section of the grocery store with the prepackaged cold cuts. If you can’t, a dill pickle will work.

If you’d like to try to make half sour pickles, I’d recommend getting a one-gallon glass mason jar with an airlock top, using Kirby pickles (ones without any wax on the skin since it’s the natural yeast on the skin that does the fermenting), and then following the directions for a half sour pickle off the internet. The reason I would use a Mason jar with an airlock top is that this is a fermented vegetable, not a pickled one.

You need to let the CO2 from the yeast escape, and that’s the best way to do it without risking breaking the jar. I’d get a second lid to put on the jar for storage in the fridge. It will continue to ferment, so don’t make too much. Just be sure to cover the tops of the pickles with liquid.