Venison sliders: take me home, country roads pt. 2

Hunting deer is very popular in West Virginia. Yes, venison is the culinary name for deer meat. The name comes from the Latin venor, which means to hunt (thanks, Wikipedia!). If you like beef, you'll love venison. It's lean and almost never gamey contrary to popular belief. If you're one of those people who only eats lean beef and white chicken meat, try something f#@king new. Because venison is lean and prone to drying out, these sliders include ground pork and bacon for added fat. This isn't a strictly traditional WV recipe, but rather a pastiche of recipes I found.

Venison Sliders (serves 8)
1 lb. ground venison
1 lb. ground pork
2 slices bacon, cut in half lengthwise and then finely diced
~1 tbs. Worcestershire (~5 splashes worth)
Swiss cheese, sliced thin and cut into small 2" x 2" squares
16 dinner rolls, or small brioche buns if you're feeling bourgeois
canola oil
salt and pepper

• Add enough oil to coat a thick bottomed pan or cast iron skillet and heat over medium.
• When oil is hot but not smoking, season about 4 patties with s+p and add to pan, leaving plenty of space between each patty.
  
• Cook for ~3 min on first side. While they cook, toast your buns if you'd like.
  
• When sliders have developed a nice crust, flip over and cook for another min. Then, add a bit more s+p and cheese slices. Cover pan to melt for another 1-2 min.
  
• Once cheese has melted and the sliders are about medium, take them off the heat.
• Cook the next batch of sliders.

These didn't turn out as planned and weren't amazing. That's okay, though. You learn a lot from your mistakes in the kitchen. Also, cooking is one of my hobbies rather than a necessity for feeding my family or my day job. So, romantic notions of constantly striving for better somehow aren't flippant. You want to try new recipes, experiment with new ingredients, and step outside your comfort zone. Otherwise, you'll be making baked chicken breasts with canned cream of mushroom sauce for the rest of your life.

I would change a lot of things if I were to make this again. Because I'm not Cook's Illustrated, I won't actually try five more iterations and present the best one. What I will do is discuss what I might do differently if I give this another try. First, I would use a ratio of 3:1 or 2:1 for the amount of ground venison to ground pork. The 1:1 ratio tasted way too much like pork rather than venison. This isn't a pork burger recipe, after all; it's for motherf#%king deer burgers! I would also cut the amount of bacon down to 1 piece, and cut it into even smaller pieces using either a food processor or by finely mincing even after doing a dice. I might also skip the bacon altogether because its smokiness can overpower the venison flavor.

I also made the sliders a little too thick and forgot a cardinal rule of burger making, that (homemade) burgers will shrink towards the middle when cooking and be thicker cooked than raw. No one wants a baseball-shaped burger. So, try making them 1/2 in-3/4 in thick rather than drifting towards 1 in as I did. The picture of the raw patties were from the second batch and a better thickness than the thick slider in the finished picture. As for choice of cheese, choose a mild Swiss or Cheddar rather than an aggressive cheese more suitable for a beef hamburger. Don't try to get fancy and buy Emmental, which I did in a classic case of "when getting fancy goes wrong," or Gruyere, which was recommended to me at the Pasta Shop and an equally overpowering, poor choice.

Lastly, don't be a jackass like me and eschew humble dinner rolls for small French rolls. The correct ratio of meat to each bun should be ~1:1, for a total meat to bread ratio of 1:2. With these rolls, the ratio was more like 1:4. The bread overwhelmed the meat. Small brioche buns that aren't too thick would a good choice if you have to get bourgeois.