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Adult Summer Camp
It's a real thing.
Well hey there! You survived July 4th. We hope your holiday was full of delicious food (preferably from the grill over Meat Head Charcoal), time spent with your family and friends, and most importantly, celebrating the freedoms we have living in the US of A.
Welcome back to The Meat Platter. Let’s get into it.
If your summer travel plans are still mostly “maybe a beach, maybe a lake,” we’d argue for a different route: build a weekend around one of the South’s produce or food festivals and let somebody else do the cooking.
Garden & Gun’s “What’s Happening in the South” roundup includes summer food festivals built around things like Florida mangoes, Creole Tomatoes, and Fried Chicken. A ‘lil somethin’ for everyone you might say.
We brought our beloved smash burger recipe to life over on the gram. Have you seen it? I dare you not to fire up the Blackstone immediately. Just look at that thing!
Click that LINK, Fam!
And in case you need a refresher…
Everyone worth knowing loves a good smash burger – super thin patties with crispy edges stacked on top of each other with the meat and cheese melding together on a toasted bun. Whether you’re cooking them on a cast iron over Meat Head Charcoal or using your favorite electric or propane griddle, smash burgers are always a crowd-pleaser. After a whole lot of experimenting – patties too thick, buns burnt to a crisp and cheese melted all over the griddle – I’ve finally figured it out and have put it into our bi-monthly dinner rotation.
First and foremost, the foundation of a good burger is the heat and the meat! If you’re using a charcoal grill with a flat griddle on top, make sure to remember that Meat Head Charcoal burns way hotter than your run-of-the-mill big box store briquet, so let it burn down for a good 30 to 45 minutes or so! For the meat, I personally use TeXGa ground beef since it’s the perfect grind and fat content for burgers. Plus, I love supporting local businesses and knowing where my food comes from. One other thing I love about TeXGa meat is that it’s vacuum-sealed in super flat packages so when I get home from work at 5pm and realize that I forgot to take it out of the freezer, it only takes 20 minutes to thaw out!
The Perfect Smash Burger
Get your griddle preheating. Low to medium-low heat is perfect for smash burgers – any higher and you’re going to end up with an unappetizing black meat frisbee.
PRO TIP: Throw some thick-cut bacon on the griddle. Two slices per burger is perfect. Not only does it add a delicious crunch to your juicy smash burger, it greases up the griddle perfectly and helps your burgers get a nice crisp.
I like to prep my patties by measuring them out into 1/3 pound portions (1/3 of a cup is roughly a 1/3 pound patty)! Roll ‘em up and put them on a plate in the fridge.
Once the griddle is preheated and your bacon is almost crisp, move your bacon off to the side of the flat top and throw your meat balls down in that bacon grease. Immediately put a piece of parchment paper on top of the meat and use a burger press (or a small frying pan, large spatula, etc.) to smash them as thin as possible. They’ll shrink up a little bit so you want to smash them just slightly larger than the diameter of your bun.
Sprinkle some of The Founder on them! You don’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to seasoning burgers – Meat Head already did it for us! The Founder is perfect for almost everything, burgers included!
As the burgers cook, all of that fat will start rendering down. I like to have my griddle slightly off-level so all of the juices run to one side or to the back. Take your buns and sop up some of that juice and put them off to the side of the griddle to toast. They usually go pretty quick so keep an eye on them!
At this point, you should have buns on the left, burgers in the middle and bacon on the right!
After a few minutes, take your largest spatula and scrape the patties off the griddle and give them a flip. Immediately throw a slice of pepper jack on them (or whatever cheese you prefer, but pepper jack is KING). I like to cover the patties with a melting dome but if you don’t have one, no worries! If you put the cheese on immediately after flipping them, it should be perfectly melted by the time the second side is done.
After a few more minutes on the grill, stack two patties on top of one another, grab that nice, crispy bottom bun and slap that patty stack right on top.
Break a couple of slices of bacon in half and put them on your burger, along with your toppings of choice, and plate it up! Enjoy!!
We are keeping it courteous of the red, white, and blue this month in honor of our 250th Birthday this year. The July Playlist is as predictable as it gets in the best way possible. But if loving your country isn’t your thing, click over to our Spotify page.
There’s something for everyone and if there isn’t, do you even like music?
If you’ve written off okra because you only know it fried or gummy, July is the perfect time to revisit it. This is when it’s most tender, least fibrous, and easiest to throw on a grill, into a skillet, or into a quick stir-fry.
Okra truly thrives in the South's hot, humid summers, which is why it's so bountiful this time of year. In fact, if planting okra yourself, you'll really want to pick an area with a lot of sunlight for best growing results.
Fresh Okra Tips
Look for smaller pods. Try to choose small, tender pods about two to four inches long. Once okra gets longer than four inches, it tends to get woody, fibrous, and chewy. Additionally, try to avoid buying pods that are limp or have brown streaks, indicators that the okra is less than fresh.
Use it up quickly. Fresh okra doesn't tend to last that long. Try not to store it in the fridge for more than three days.
Keep it dry. When okra is exposed to moisture, it can quickly become slimy (on the outside, not the mucilage its known for). Store pods in a paper bag or wrapped in a paper towel, so it can breathe. If you want to wash your okra before storing, be sure to throughly pat it dry before putting it away.
Avoid copper cookware. Cooking okra in copper (as well as iron or brass) can turn the vegetable black or gray. This is the result of a chemical reaction between the metals and compounds in the okra. This doesn't make the vegetable inedible, it just makes the normally vibrant green pods look less appealing.
Did you know okra flowers are in the hibiscus family? The plant is just as pretty as it is productive — which feels unfair, frankly. Something else you may not know…okra is techinically a fruit. Yeah, we were shocked too.
Lean, Mean, Meat Meter Machine
Somewhere between bourbon tourism, summer camp nostalgia, and grown adults wanting a sanctioned reason to play games and drink whiskey in Kentucky, Buffalo Trace seems to have found the sweet spot.
Buffalo Trace is hosting an adults-only bourbon summer camp, and honestly, it’s the most Southern thing we’ve heard all week.
Held on August 29 and September 5, 2026, Camp Buffalo Trace is billed as an immersive, one-of-a-kind experience that reimagines the classic camp activities around the beloved American spirit. There’s cocktail making, blind tasting challenges, even relay races.
Learn more about camp and how to enter the online sweepstakes over on Southern Living. Opens July 14th through the 21st so make sure to set your reminder!
We can’t let peach season pass us by without mentioning our friends over at Jaemor Farms. If you haven’t been by to grab peaches, this is your sign!
We sat down with Drew last summer to talk all things agri-tourism, too. If you haven’t checked it out, head over to our YouTube to learn more about their family first business!
We love those of you that read our newsletter each week, support our products, buy in store and online- it truly means the world to us. So, if you’ve bought from us for years or are new to Meat Head, we’d really appreciate it if you’d leave us a Google Review. We hope those reviews are glowing, and we are only as good as those of you who keep coming back and support us because you love the product. Thanks, from all of us at Meat Head. Treat Your Meat!
I told my wife I was going to make a car out of spaghetti.
—You should’ve seen her face when I drove pasta.
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