Hawaiian Patty Melt

After the success of the pineapple and chicken teriyaki quesadillas, I wanted to put pineapple on more savory dishes like this Hawaiian patty melt. You'll notice that there aren't grill marks on the pineapple because we put them in an aluminum foil pouch as to not get meat juices all over them!

These originally didn't start out as patty melts, but rather as burgers, but we forgot to buy buns. Despite our great success making hamburger buns from scratch, it it a lengthy process we don't always want to go through for every burger we make. So yes occasionally we do buy hamburgers buns :). To improvise for this dish we used slices of brioche bread that we normally reserve for lunch sandwiches.

We grilled up some ground turkey patties, melted some Swiss cheese on top, sliced some red onion, added a slice of Applewood smoked bacon, then threw on the grilled pineapple chunks and a splash of premade terayki sauce onto the brioche. This burger was too tall to eat the traditional way, so I ended up going at it with a knife and fork. I have to say in the end I'm glad we forgot to buy hamburger buns because the slightly sweet bread flavor was very complementary to the pineapple, reminding me of that packaged Hawaiian sweet bread. Lesson of the day— sometimes mistakes can make a good thing even better!