Cattlemen’s Ranch Swiss Cheese and Mushroom Beef Patties

My first job in high school was at Hardee’s, back before the chain was purchased by Carl’s Jr. parent company CKE. In those days, Hardee’s sold both burgers and chicken, and while the chicken was pretty good, I tended to favor the burgers. The Frisco burger, set atop Texas toast, was a safe pick. My favorite, though? The restaurant’s mushroom and swiss burger, which it continues to sell to this day.

I’ve since become, you might say, a connoisseur of mushroom and swiss burgers. I often get them if we visit a burger place and such a burger is on the menu. While they’re a surprisingly common fixture on menus, it goes without saying that some mushroom and swiss burgers are better than others.

Aldi has all the fixings for me to make such a burger myself if I want to, and I sometimes do. But when I saw Aldi was actually selling a self-contained burger that already had all of it? Well, I had to try that.

Cattlemen’s Ranch Swiss Cheese and Mushroom Beef Patties are an Aldi Find. Each store gets a single stock of the burgers, and once they’re sold out, you won’t be able to get them again until they come back, whenever that might be. You can’t order them online if they’re sold out at your local store.

At the time, these come in a box of 6 burger patties, with the patties in a plastic bag inside the box. Each patty is 1/3 of a pound. The box currently costs $8.49, which comes out to about $1.41 a burger, $4.24 a pound, and 26 cents an ounce. These burgers were part of a mixed case that also included a Texas barbecue variety that we also picked up and tried out.

Nutritionally, these patties are very high in fat (34g / 44% DV), saturated fat (15g / 75% DV), cholesterol (95mg / 32% DV), and sodium (910mg / 40% DV). By those numbers alone, this is one of the less healthy products I’ve ever purchased from Aldi, and all of them are higher than the Texas barbecue burgers. On the positive side, the burgers are low in sugar, high in protein, and have modest amounts of calcium and iron.

It also has one allergen warning, for milk.

Nutrition information, ingredients, and instructions. (Click to enlarge.) 

The burgers come with preparation instructions that will look familiar to anyone who has cooked frozen burgers before. You can cook them in a broiler, on a skillet, or on a grill, with the end goal of getting the burgers to an internal temperature of 165 degrees. As usual, I went with a grill.

Mushroom and Swiss on left, Texas Barbecue on right

As with other frozen burgers, the instructions call to grill them on one side until the juices come through, then flip them and cook them to done. I found that these didn’t juice up quite as clearly as a traditional burger does, so I ended up cooking them for around the same time I normally cook a frozen burger, then using an instant thermometer to verify that they were done.

Mushroom and Swiss on left, Texas Barbecue on right

I have to admit I was a little apprehensive going into this: I’ve cooked burgers with built-in cheese before, and it hasn’t always worked out, with things falling apart during grilling. That was not the case here — the burgers stayed together and cooked well, and they came out pretty clean.

Best of all, they tasted good. The mushroom and swiss notes were clear and consistent in just about each bite, and the flavor was of a good quality. I like to dress my mushroom and swiss burgers up with mayonnaise, and doing so with this burger, I thought, added some nice flavor.

The Verdict:

I wasn’t sure what to expect with a frozen mushroom and swiss burger, but Cattlemen’s Ranch Swiss Cheese and Mushroom Beef Patties are solid, good-tasting burgers. They combine both a quality beef taste with clear mushroom and swiss notes mixed in, and I thought they were especially good topped with mayo. They’ve got tons of fat, sodium, and cholesterol, though, so these definitely fit more into the category of the eat-in-moderation foods.