While on a ketogenic diet, we’re usually looking for simple meals that re-create old tastes that we love. A meal that I used to love to take to work was a cheeseburger salad. Practically all of the flavors of a cheeseburger, but crumbled up over lettuce.
However since the cooler weather is here, I wanted to create a heartier dish that can be easily re-heated or served straight to a hungry family as-is. Plus, you may know I love my cold keto food – and this one tastes just as good right out of the fridge for a fast and tasty breakfast!
If you’re one to take part in Meal Prep Sunday, this would be perfect to try. It only takes around 45 minutes to make the entire casserole, and could very easily become part of your weekly rotation. Plus, if you want to multiply the recipe to make a few at a time – it’s very easily done.
Yields 6 servings of Keto Bacon Cheeseburger Casserole
The Preparation
- 265 grams cauliflower, riced
- 1/2 cup almond flour
- 1 tablespoon psyllium husk powder
- 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
- 1/2 teaspoon onion powder
- 3 ounces bacon
- 16 ounces ground beef (80/20)
- salt and pepper, to taste
- 4 ounces cheddar cheese
- 3 large egg
- 2 tablespoons mayonnaise
- 2 tablespoons low-carb ketchup
- 1 tablespoon dijon mustard
The Execution
1. Pre-heat oven to 350F. Rice cauliflower in food processor. Add dry ingredients and mix together.
2. Process bacon and ground beef in food processor until crumbly and slightly pasty. Cook over medium-high, seasoning with salt and pepper to taste.
3. Shred the cheese while meat is cooking. Once the meat is done, combine all ingredients in a large bowl and add 2 oz. (half) of the cheddar cheese.
4. Add eggs, mayo, ketchup, and mustard to the mixture. Using a fork or your hands, mix everything together well.
5. Press mixture into a 9×9 baking pan lined with parchment paper. Then, top with 2 oz. (the other half) of the cheddar cheese.
6. Place on top rack and bake for 25-30 minutes. For additional crisp on top, broil 2-3 minutes or until browned.
7. Remove from oven and let cool for 5-10 minutes.
8. Slice, and serve with additional toppings. Ideas: mustard, extra reduced sugar ketchup, and pickes.
This makes a total of 6 servings of Bacon Cheeseburger Casserole. Each serving comes out to be 493 calories, 39.3g fats, 3.5g net carbs, and 28.1g protein.
| NUTRITION | CALORIES | FAT | CARBS | FIBER | NET CARBS | PROTEIN |
| 265 gram cauliflower | 61 | 1.3 | 10.9 | 6.1 | 4.8 | 4.8 |
| 1/2 cup almond flour | 324 | 28 | 12.3 | 7.3 | 5 | 11.8 |
| 1 tablespoon psyllium husk powder | 56 | 0 | 12.8 | 11.2 | 1.6 | 0 |
| 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder | 5 | 0 | 1.2 | 0.1 | 1 | 0.3 |
| 1/2 teaspoon onion powder | 4 | 0 | 0.9 | 0.2 | 0.8 | 0.1 |
| 3 ounce bacon | 453 | 39.7 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 22.7 |
| 16 ounce ground beef (80/20) | 1152 | 90.7 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 77.9 |
| — salt and pepper | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 4 ounce cheddar cheese | 458 | 37.8 | 3.5 | 0 | 3.5 | 25.9 |
| 3 large egg | 236 | 15.7 | 1.2 | 0 | 1.2 | 20.7 |
| 2 tablespoon mayonnaise | 187 | 20.6 | 0.2 | 0 | 0.2 | 0.3 |
| 2 tablespoon low-carb ketchup | 18 | 0 | 1.9 | 0 | 1.9 | 0 |
| 1 tablespoon dijon mustard | 9 | 0.5 | 0.9 | 0.6 | 0.3 | 0.6 |
| Totals | 2964 | 234.4 | 45.7 | 25.5 | 20.2 | 165 |
| Per Serving (/6) | 494 | 39.1 | 7.6 | 4.3 | 3.4 | 27.5 |
Bacon Cheeseburger Casserole
Ingredients
- 265 gram cauliflower riced
- ½ cup almond flour
- 1 tablespoon psyllium husk powder
- ½ teaspoon garlic powder
- ½ teaspoon onion powder
- 3 ounce bacon
- 16 ounce ground beef (80/20)
- salt and pepper to taste
- 4 ounce cheddar cheese
- 3 large egg
- 2 tablespoon mayonnaise
- 2 tablespoon low-carb ketchup
- 1 tablespoon dijon mustard
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350F. Rice the cauliflower in a food processor, then remove to a large bowl. To the bowl, add the almond flour, psyllium husk powder, garlic powder, and onion powder and mix together. Set aside.
- Process the bacon and ground beef in the food processor until crumbly and slightly pasty. Cook over medium-high heat, seasoning with salt and pepper to taste.
- Shred the cheese while the meat is cooking. Once the meat is cooked through, combine it with the dry ingredients/cauli rice in the large bowl and add half of the cheddar cheese.
- Add the eggs, mayonnaise, ketchup, and mustard to the mixture. Mix everything together well.
- Press the mixture into a baking pan lined with parchment paper. Top with the remaining cheddar.
- Place on the top rack and bake for 25–30 minutes. For additional crispness on top, broil for 2–3 minutes or until browned.
- Remove from the oven and let cool for 5–10 minutes.
- Slice, serve, and enjoy!
My husband is not a fan of mustard in any form… is it okay to leave it out?
Yes, that shouldn’t be a problem!
This looks great! Been meaning to ask, do y’all have a function on the website that allows each user to save recipes they want to make? Something like a recipe book, I suppose. I’ve been browsing around for one because it would come in handy. Thanks!
This recipe is fantastic. I have made many cheeseburger casseroles using mostly eggs for the body. This usually resulted in a need for drastically more sauce and seasoning and reduced the re-heatability of the dish. The usage of riced cauliflower and almond meal for the body provided an excellent texture with no discernible grittiness or cauliflower flavor.
I am so glad you decided to make this for the cold months. I followed the recipe exactly except I used about 1/4 cup very finely diced red onion as well. I think this added a very nice punch of flavor and only cost one more gram of carbs per serving. It was totally worth it and I highly recommend it to anyone reading this comment.
Like you, I plate with an extra tsp of ketchup smeared on top and some crunchy coarse-chopped iceberg, with a couple pickle slices.
I’m really looking forward to the next few meals of leftovers!
Can one use coconut flour? I am having a very hard time finding Almond flour. Even your link is sold out
Take a look at the link again – it’s back in stock. Anthony’s rarely goes out of stock but I know they recently changed their packaging so that could have been the reason. I wouldn’t really recommend coconut flour because of the taste, but if you do use it in about a 1/3 amount.
This was surprisingly good! I honestly wasn’t expecting to like it but it was really good. Even liked by the rest of the fam. It’s best served with iceberg lettuce and pickles. The combo of the three in each bite really makes it taste like a bona fide cheeseburger. Thanks for another great and easy recipe!
Haha, well I’m definitely glad you liked it then! I agree with you – the lettuce and pickles make it!
For the riced cauliflower, it doesn’t need to be pre-cooked does it?
No, it doesn’t. It will cook through as you cook the casserole.
I can’t wait to be invited to the next pot luck among friends! I have an ace (Craig) in my pocket with this dish! Tasty! I will try the red onion as Tyler suggests. I can’t believe this could taste better but the red onion make sense!
Haha, thank you so much! Tyler’s suggestion is spot on – definitely add the red onion 🙂
I have a question about the cauliflower – is it 265 grams of whole cauliflower that you then rice or is it 265 grams of riced cauliflower? Also, once the cauliflower is riced – how much is it in cups? I made this last night, which was fabulous, and I sort of just winged it on the amount of cauliflower. Also, do you really need the psyllium husk powder? I didn’t have any so I made without.
Lisa – it’ll be the same weight before and after ricing it. Not too sure in cups, that’s why I included the weight measurement as the fine-ness of the grind would change that.
Psyllium helps thicken it up and keep form, but it’s certainly not a necessity in most recipes. I just think it adds a lot to the texture personally.
I found riced cauliflower at Trader Joe’s in the fresh produce section. It comes in 16 oz bags/465 grams. I think that would be about 9 oz or just over half.
Have you ever used the pre riced cauliflower? If so any difference in texture or quantity from making it yourself?
Thanks!
I actually used the pre-riced stuff in this recipe (I’ve used it in many recipes on the site that call for riced cauliflower). It works great! Make sure you weigh by weight – there would be no difference if you do that.
Did you try to remove as much water as you can from the caluiflower or leave it alone after putting in it the food processor?
I made this last night and it came out quite good…a little bland but held together nicely just as in your photos. I will make it again but increase the garlic and onion powders and perhaps season the ground beef and bacon more. My question is do you bother draining off the fat from the beef and bacon mixture? there was no mention of it in the recipe and I didn’t drain it and was not overly greasy/fatty, so perhaps i just answered my own question. But would still like your take on your method. Also I wasn’t sure what you meant by “process” the bacon and ground beef mixture and what it offers in the final result. I just browned the beef and bacon together and it seemed to come out fine. I welcome your thoughts.
Thanks again for the great recipes and website!!
Hi Randy! The recipe calls for putting the bacon and ground beef into a food processor and then turning it on so that the bacon gets ground up and mixed with the beef. It would just make it a finer texture, I think it’s just fine to cook it up as is. 🙂 I don’t think you need to drain it unless you have some particularly extra fatty bacon.
Be careful with the garlic an onion powders because they can raise the carbs! Just be sure to measure it out so you know.
I’m glad you liked it!
Can you freeze this by serving?
This recipe wasn’t really for me, though my husband liked it more than I did. I have a small food processor and wanted to double the recipe so I created a lot more work for myself processing everything in batches (my own fault of course), but the final outcome just wasn’t remarkable enough for me to want to attempt this again. Processing the bacon with the ground beef completely lost all the bacon flavor for me – I think it’d have been better to crisp up slices of bacon separately and layer it on top, under the cheese (or maybe on top?), probably sliced into smaller bite sized strips. I did swap the psyllium husk for flax meal (what I had on hand) and it held together fine, and made sure to season the meat as it cooked. Slathering it in sugar free BBQ or reduced sugar ketchup helped the flavor for me. Doubling the recipe filled a large glass casserole dish perfectly, no parchment paper needed.
My husband found it does work great as a sort of nacho “dip” if you break it up a bit, of course he’s not keto so he’s rocking the corn chips, but I imagine bacon chips or some other keto chip substitute could work fine.
Anyway, not for me, but not bad.
Thank you for your honest review Amanda 🙂
Is the Psyllium Husk Powder necessary in this recipe? Just curious as I’ve never heard of it before and it only calls for 1 tbsp…Thank you!
It’s fiber that works as a thickener. You can probably omit it and replace with coconut flour, or even a little extra almond flour. I think the eggs and cheese will still hold everything together.
I messed this up badly because I forgot to put in the almond flour. It wasn’t totally runny, but it had a strong, bitter cauliflower taste that really turned me off. I know it would have been better with the almond flour, but I’m having a hard time believing it would be THAT much better. I do wish I had done it correctly because I probably won’t take another chance on it since I had to dump the whole pan in the garbage. 🙁
I suppose it depends on the cauliflower, too. I’ve found cauliflower that is starting to go bad will give a more bitter taste. You could optionally try cooking it for longer to see if that helps with the bitterness. You can taste the cauliflower some in this casserole, but it shouldn’t be an overly prevalent flavor.
I don’t have a food processor, so I couldn’t follow the recipe exactly, but it still came out great! I was not properly prepared in many ways actually…
I chopped the cauliflower, browned the beef normally, and cut the bacon into small pieces and browned it with the beef (this extended the meat cooking process a lot actually – the beef browns quickly but it took longer to brown the bacon). I salt & peppered the meat fairly generously, same for the dry mix.
I also mis-remembered my mustard stash, so I was stuck using something else and chose stoneground horseradish mustard.
I failed to find psyllium husk powder at the store, and didn’t understand what it was for. At first google, it seemed to mainly be a fiber source, so I subbed a scoop of benefiber that has sat in my pantry for forever. After a little more research, it’s possible this caused my loaf to be less fluffy than the recipe, but as I said in the beginning, it was still great!
I’m convinced anything you would normally enjoy on a burger would be excellent either cooked in (like the red onion comment below) or on the side. I had a salad of spinach, arugula, and avocado with it, and everything working together was really great.
This story of outrageous noncompliance to the recipe is really just to give hope to anyone who doesn’t have all the exact things and tools. It’s a solid base no matter what!
I should have read the reviews first and added red onion. My husband doesn’t like casseroles due to their texture so I cooked the bacon and browned the beef separately. This was probably my downfall as the dish lacked flavor. I ate it with iceberg lettuce and blue cheese dressing which helped.
I made this for dinner last night (omitted the psyllium husk powder and found 0 sugar ketchup). It was fantastic! It’s going to be added to our Keto meal rotation for sure! It was reminded me of a tater-tot casserole and it felt naughty even though it was perfectly Keto!
Glad I stumbled onto this site-will be puruesing more recipes to try!
I’m super happy to hear that Ashley – glad that you liked the recipe!
I’d love to make this for a dinner party. Would doubling everything 1:1 work out if I wanted to use a big casserole dish?
Yeah I don’t see why not, you just may need to cook it for a bit longer.