Modernist Hamburger – Semi-Homemade

It’s been a while since I made this, but just thinking about it is getting my mouth all watery. That good. Seriously. And I totally semi-homemade this, in a way that, minus alcohol, would make Andrew Cuomo’s wife nod in appreciation.

The original recipe calls for making a white sandwich bread with poppy seeds or some such in it. Not for me. Didn’t feel like making a big loaf of bread to put two burgers on, and then rot or something. We were going to Europe in less than a week, so those were the options. Or eat a ton of bread. I’m sure it’s fantastic, but it just wasn’t going to happen. So, I bought buns.

The original recipe calls for a custom blend of beef, ground with your meat grinder attachment for the stand mixer which I don’t own.

Fortunately, there is Butcher and the Burger. Wife, friend and I went there a few months ago and I was wowed by the product, which is saying a lot because Chicago is a great burger town with lots of great burger places around. They do a local house blend of ground beef for their burgers (among other options), and they operate as a butcher as well as burger joint. They were only too happy to sell me two patties and two pretzel rolls to go with. They were also interested in what I was up to, so had a nice chat. One of the few nice things about furlough was the ability to take my time and not worry about deadlines (beyond driving the wife to work and picking her up from work).

So, if I’m not grinding the burger, and I’m not making the bread, what am I actually doing? Something I’ve wanted to do for a while, which is run some hamburgers through the sous-vide. Edge to edge perfection, then a quick deep fry (or grill or griddle) to put a crust on. Burger seemed perfect for this. For burgers, like many meats, neutral oil with meat in bag, soak for time at temp, blah blah blah.

You don’t want to put two burgers in the same bag. I guess they will merge or something else bad will happen. So, I made a duplex with the rack, and soaked.

The plan was to deep fry them. Of course, when it comes time to finish them, I find that I have maybe 1 cup of neutral oil in the whole house. 1 cup of neutral oil could also be known as not enough to deep fry anything in any pot I own and know how to find.

So, on the big pan with some neutral oil (peanut IIRC, because canola gives this fishy smell), high high heat and we’re browning and building a crust. Not as sweet a crust as deep fry, but the Flying Spaghetti Monster will bless him that has his own.

Dunno what happened to his pic, but the focus just isn’t there. Ground beef has a lot of texture, which is why you’d want to deep fry, or even do a shallow fry to brown it. Would help with the browning.

Remember these bad guys. The original recipe calls for a slice of perfectly melting cheese, and either a MC version of McDonald’s Special Sauce or some Pressure Caramelized Ketchup. I made the cheese, but did not feel like having extra ketchup or special sauce around the house while going off to Europe, so I used what I had… the BLT Pork Belly, sliced and fried like bacon.

I liked the simplicity of it, not cloaked or covered with a sweet sauce. If I wanted to add some sweet to it, maybe some caramelized onions. If it needed some umami, some shiitake marmalade. But really, this was sooooo good as it was.

Now, I have some further avenues of investigation. First, actually deep frying the patty. Second, I used some very fancy ground beef on this. I’d like to validate the process by using the grocery store ground beef. And maybe someday, grind my own mix. But, for the day, this was a huge win for the book, even if I really did Sandra Lee the living hell out of it.