Want to make a burger without the mess? Use a sheet pan

In the past, burgers have been thought of as casual fare, something to eat at a barbecue or at a fast-food restaurant. Recently, though, the lowly burger has become the darling of chefs all over the country, finding its way onto high-end restaurant menus everywhere.

Many of those fancy restaurants are producing fancy burgers, some topped with brie cheese or filled with foie gras. While I love a good cheeseburger, made with American cheese and topped with nothing but chopped onions and a little mustard, some of these chef-driven creations have inspired me to boost my burger game.

And my game needed some help. First, let's be clear: Making a good burger is messy. Getting a beautifully seared patty requires high heat and creates a lot of splattering, which often dissuades me from making them at all.

So, I turned to the sheet pan to see if there was an easier, less greasy option.

Sheet-pan dinners are one of my favorite ways of making a complete meal with minimal mess. All of the elements of a meal go onto a pan, which is placed into a hot oven to roast until everything is perfectly cooked.

Well, not quite. For a sheet-pan dinner to produce a meal worth eating, every ingredient must be placed on the pan in order of its individual cooking times — with the ingredients that take the longest to cook going on first.

Take our sheet-pan burgers. I wanted to serve the burgers with crispy wedge fries, but if I put the potato wedges and burgers on at the same time, the burgers would be petrified hockey pucks before the potatoes even began to brown.

While the burgers are cooked to the correct doneness, they do lack the browned exterior they would have if they were cooked in a skillet or griddle. Since there are few problems in life that wine can't solve, I decided to reduce red wine to a glaze consistency and brush it on the burgers, giving them a beautiful mahogany finish. And since more wine is always better than less, I boosted the flavor by tossing the roasted onions in some of the glaze.

Taking my burger game to the next level, I topped the patties with blue cheese, which pairs wonderfully with red wine.

The result is a beautiful burger, with an addictively sophisticated flavor, all without having to spend the rest of my evening cleaning burger grease off my stove, cabinets and floors.