the butcher, the baker

    I've thought a lot about burgers since we opened up the restaurant for lunch some time last year. There are several factors that come into play to make the burger good enough for us to be proud of, and I'll go through them all here. 

lunch: peanut butter foie burger

    The single most significant resource apart from our own tastes in figuring out how we wanted to do our burgers was Heston Blumenthal's In Search of Perfection. The two things from that book that we needed to do in our burger were to char some of the meat before grinding and the maintain the "threads" of meat that come out of the grinder in a line from the top to the bottom of the burger. That's probably not clear in such short form, but I'll illustrate all the details as we go.


    So what did we think was important in a burger? Feel free to skim the emboldened text for a quick overview.

• Flavorful meat with enough fat. We mostly use short rib, which I then dilute with lean trimmings from, say, rib eye. The short rib meat is rich with plenty of fat and flavor, plus it's not too firm at colder temperatures. Bone marrow, for instance, would make it feel like you were eating soft wax in the middle of a rare burger, but the short rib fat is plenty soft as well as flavorful, and that's part of what makes it so suitable for both burgers and emulsified sausages.

smoking short rib

• Charred and smoked meat. The flavor from a wood-fired grill is so good that it's a shame that we don't have one inside the restaurant. One way around this is to impregnate the meat with that flavor ahead of time. Just get a handful of coals blazing hot, add a sprinkling of wood chips, and place a portion of the short rib meat just inches above the heat. A portion of fat will melt onto the coals and will produce the charred flavor to go along with the smoke that we identify with a grilled burger.

the log in stages, all running(more or less) in one direction

• Unworked meat. Some might feel inclined to mix the meat together some before making a patty, but I think that is misguided and is just the beginning of meatloaf(which is fine in its own right). In order to avoid making the patty too firm, we avoid mixing the meat where possible and keep the meat in the threads in which it comes out of the grinder. First I salt the unground meat hours ahead if possible with just 1%-2% salt by mass(also useful in sausage making) to get the meat to bind a bit better.
• Once the smoking task is finished I mix that meat right in with the rest and grind it all up. Now the thing here, and the best thing we took away from Blumenthal's bit on burgers, is to lay the chords of ground meat onto plastic wrap lengthwise and keep the lines running all in the same long direction. The plastic wrap is then closed over the proto-log and rolled tightly until the meat is a firm cylinder(at the restaurant I also put it through the vacuum sealer without a bag to evenly but gently shape the log). Once we roll this up and let it set, this log will allow us to just slice patties off one at a time to order.
      The unidirectional grind in the burger will let a bite break off easily in the mouth and as a bonus will provide lots of nooks and crannies in the burger's surface to be exploited for tasty browning when it is seared.

burger log, rolled and on display with Erik

• 7-8oz portions. This is not a child's burger. 7-8oz allows enough room for the variation in texture and doneness that makes the burger interesting.
  
• Seasoning and cooking is actually the easy part after all this. We all know how to use salt and cook meat. Salt and pepper are applied in appropriate amounts and the burger is cooked to temperature mostly on the plancha(something like this one). Since we serve a fairly large burger it also often takes a trip into the oven to finish, depending on temperature.
• Accoutrements. Bacon, which we make in house and deserves a discussion all its own, is an important addition. Whatever good melting cheese we're receiving from our purveyors goes on top with a sweet-tart pile of caramelized onions. The buns are made in house as well early in the morning: a potato bun that is rather like a lightweight brioche.
      To the side of the burger are a simple seasonal salad and house-made tater tots. Nothing more. Not only do we not want to distract from the burger, but it's plenty filling and even as a big eater I wouldn't want much more in the same course if I had the choice.

    After writing this post I start to realize how much detail we actually put into things on a daily basis without even noticing. Since it may all be a bit much to do at home, just come to the restaurant for lunch!