A new learning every day

They say an apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. But that was not the case with our Marketing Analyst, Cleiton Maranhão. At least not until 2012, when he moved from São Paulo to Belo Horizonte.

His mom being a cook and his sister a confectioner, Cleiton was never really interested in cooking, despite his mother’s attempts. The interest came out of need. “When I moved to BH, I would only eat junk food, and I put on eight kilos in six months. My friends cooked and always told me about what they had made on the weekends, so I decided it was time to learn”, he recollects.

The first dish was the good old spaghetti. After a while, he started to improve, studying, reading, watching cooking shows — “MasterChef Australia is the best one there is!” — getting some tips from friends, and even asking at restaurants how they prepared some dishes. Today, being more experienced, he does not follow recipes, and uses the techniques he has learned to cook with the ingredients he loves, without any waste.

“It’s hard to make something great the first time. Cooking is a very empirical thing. You have to test things out, learn about them, finding out what the best way to make something is. The first egg I cooked, for instance, exploded. In the kitchen, you learn something new every day”, he says, echoing one of Hotmart’s mantras.

Being a skillful cook as well as a skillful conversationalist, Cleiton always gathers his friends to eat what he makes. His relationship with his mother has also changed since he picked up the hobby. “Now we exchange a lot of ideas about the recipes. My mom is really good at roasts, cakes and rice, which she makes for any kind of events. I learn a lot from her”, he explains.

To Cleiton, cooking means turning off the world, focusing only on what he is preparing. More than that, cooking teaches two major lessons our Trooper brings to his professional and personal life: learning how to deal with frustration and righting the wrongs, without any fear of trying once more.

Let’s have a burger?

And since Cleiton loves cooking for his friends, and May 28th is International Burger Day, we asked him to teach us how to make the famous “Cleiton Burger”. Our chef has taught us how to make the traditional one and also the vegetarian versions for those who don’t eat meat. Check out the videos below and enjoy!

Traditional Burger

Ingredients:

• 1 kg of brisket (the thick end), or any other cut with 80% meat and 20% fat
• 1 tablespoon of mustard
• 1 tablespoon of worcestershire sauce
• Bacon
• Arugula
• Cheese
• Burger buns

Method:

Mix the meat with the mustard and the worcestershire sauce. The meat, with a nice lean-fat ratio, gives a perfect consistency to the burger. In this recipe, the mustard and the worcestershire sauce bring out the taste of the meat.

After you have mixed the sauces, shape the meat into tennis-ball-sized balls, and squeeze them until you get a nice patty. Then, add salt and pepper to taste. Let it rest for a few minutes.

Fry the bacon the way you like it the most, then toast the buns with some butter. Reserve them. To fry the patties, use a frying pan or a grill pan on high heat. Put some olive oil, wait for three minutes and then flip. Put the cheese on the patty right after you have flipped it.

Take it out of the pan and put the burger together.

Vegetarian Burger

Ingredients:

• 400 gr of mushrooms
• 1/2 an onion, chopped
• Chives, chopped
• Garlic clove, chopped
• 40 gr of gram flour
• 40 gr of bread flour
• 2 tablespoons of worcestershire
• Cheese
• Burger buns

Method:

On frying pan on medium or low heat, sauté the garlic, and then add the chopped onion. After they get that golden colour, add the mushrooms and sauté them as well.

Put this mixture in a food processor. Run it for a few seconds, until it gets a texture similar to that of a kibbeh. Mold the “patties” and fry them on high heat: 2 minutes on each side.

When you flip the patty, place the cheese on them so it will melt. Then you just have to put the burger together and serve!