As most people know, we love fat in just about all its forms here at Serious Eats. We love bacon, barbecue, butter, lardo, guanciale, prime dry-aged beef, Wagyu beef, burgers, lard, prosciutto, cheese, and pastrami. But we try to advocate consuming these ultradelicious fatty foods in moderation.
According to a provocative, eye-opening, and artery-clogging story in the new, hip business culture magazine Portfolio, the folks at Carl's Jr. and Hardee's don't feel a similar need. If they had their way, we'd consume half-pound hamburgers topped with, among other things, a hot dog, early and often.
The secrets of hamburger production are revealed with this new T-shirt from Threadless. All it takes is a cow, a winged gnome-fairy creature wielding a magic wand, and in a poof of red smoke—TA-DA—instant burger! (A few steps may have been left out and/or altered in the design of the shirt.)
Posted by Ed Levine, September 24, 2007 at 6:00 PM
Uber-chef Thomas Keller,French Laundry and Per Se overlord, is getting into the butcher, burger, and frozen entrée business, according to Bloomberg News. Can this notorious control freak pull all these new businesses off? I think the answer is yes, though there will certainly be some bumps along the way.
For Keller, like the Mario Batalis and Tom Colicchios of the world, restaurants are much harder to clone and open because they require a lot of talented, experienced, and skilled people. So it becomes much harder to open another Per Se or even another Bouchon, because each of them has so many moving parts. But a burger place (even one called Burgers and Bottles) is a much simpler proposition. Keller knows both high and low delicious, and if you know delicious you can open a burger joint. I've had the sliders at Bouchon in New York (above), and they are indeed seriously delicious.
I'll admit it. We didn't go out this past Saturday night, so I found myself watching the Bon Appétit Best American Restaurants special hosted by Alton Brown on the Food Network. The show itself was reasonably entertaining, though no one would call it suspenseful. Brown is perhaps my favorite Food Network personality, but he looked totally bored and disengaged on this particular show. Andrew Knowlton and Barbara Fairchild of Bon Appétit were knowledgeable and credible as the magazine's on-camera experts, but they kept talking about passion without exhibiting very much themselves.
When you love fried chicken as much as I do you get really bugged when Bon Appétit announces its three finalists in its search for the best fried chicken in the U.S. and Gus's World Famous Fried Chicken is not on the list.
Not that the other three contenders, Blackberry Farm (Walland, Tennessee), Price's Chicken Coop (Charlotte, North Carolina), and Willa Mae's Scotch House (New Orleans) are not worthy of serious consideration.
I have written lovingly of Willa Mae Seaton's wondrous fried chicken in GQ and Business Week. (Those stories don't appear to be online or else I'd link to them.) My friend John T. Edge, whom I trust implicitly in these matters (he did write the book on fried chicken), speaks very highly of the other two chickens, though I'm sure he would agree that including an extremely fancy-pants place like Blackberry Farm on a list of fried chicken joints is a questionable decision. But pondering a cosmically important question like who makes and sells the best fried chicken in America and not including Gus's is like arguing about who the best heavyweight champion of all time is and not including Muhammed Ali in the discussions.
Last year, Serious Eats burger site A Hamburger Today teamed up with Gothamist for the Gothamist-AHT QBQ (that's Quality Before Quantity), we've decided to team up with them again this year for another burger bash at Water Taxi Beach in Long Island City, Queens. At last year's event, chef Harry Hawk served four regional burgers from around the nation.
We're doing something similar this year, but this time you get to choose which burgers will be served, with the top three vote-getters across Gothamist and A Hamburger Today/Serious Eats making the menu. Some are regional specialties, and some are original Water Taxi Beach creations. I'll get to the candidate burgers in a bit, but first the nitty-gritty details.
But before the details, can I tell you that later in the evening, Grandmaster Flash will be spinning at WTB? OK, the deets:
Yesterday I headed out to Aspen, Colorado, for the Food & Wine Classic. I'll be filing periodic reports from here, but since I knew I was going to be getting a lot of fancy-pants cooking in the next three days, I decided that my travel day would be hot dogs–hamburgers-and–pizza day. It actually turned into a fun food adventure day.
Craig LaBan, food critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, was so inspired by the blue cheese–stuffed burgers at Philly's Good Dog Bar & Restaurant that he wrote a song about it. No truer words have been sung about burgers:
All my life, I’ve been a burger chaser That perfect simple sandwich shouldn’t be so hard to find But how many times have I been sorry, after just one bite To find a fraud between the buns
If you'll humor me, I've got two more burger-related items for all my Meatheads out there today, and then I'll give the beef stuff a rest.
The first is a set of photos from Joshua "Meatwave" Bousel that shows that it really isn't that difficult to grind your own before grilling your own. Those are Bousel's pix above; click on them to view the rest of the series.
Before I founded A Hamburger Today and really started delving into Burgerworld, I was like most home cooks when it comes to this most delicious and iconic American dish.
Yes, I bought the ground chuck in the grocery store, thinking it was perfectly adequate for grilling or throwing into the cast-iron skillet.
As editor of Serious Eats's burger site A Hamburger Today, I'm positively burger-obsessed. For any Serious Eaters struck with a similar affliction, here's a roundup of items from around Burgerworld. Enjoy!
New York magazine's insatiable Gael Greene finds her new personal best burger: "Updating Old Homestead’s sidewalk seating with a nip and a tuck to pass it off as the new Prime Burger Café is clearly a bid to make the 1868 landmark seem cool. I’d say watching the glitz of their meatpacking-district neighbors had gone to the owners’ heads—except that the peppered bacon burger I’m barely able to wedge into my mouth may be the best burger I’ve ever eaten."
When we launched Serious Eats I didn't want to kill off Ed Levine Eats, so I just sort of put it in hibernation mode. It killed me not to be posting about my New York eating adventures, but I just didn't have the time. Then a couple of weeks ago a guy driving past me in a car rolled down his window and said, "You're Ed Levine, right?" I nodded affirmatively not really knowing where this interaction was headed. "What happened to Ed Levine Eats?" he asked. "I launched Serious Eats a couple of months ago and I post on that almost every day," I replied. This did not satisfy him. "Serious Eats is good, but it's not the same." And with that he rolled down his window and drove off.
Well, he was right, and though I still don't know if I'm going to be able to post every day on ELE, I'm still going to give it a shot. Today I posted about a meal I had at the new Landmarc at the Time-Warner Center. I've got a ton of things I want to write about; New York after all is a veritable food playground, so we'll just see what happens. So until further notice, Ed Levine Eats is back.
It's a flight of fancy, to be sure: In Florida, a group of pilots gets together a couple times a week for meals at fly-in restaurants. "Pilots joke with the term '$100 hamburger,' considering the cost of aviation gas, flight insurance and hangar space."
Oh, sometimes they fly to Georgia for barbecue for a change. Let's see—how many years till my retirement?
What inspired you to create Value Pack?
It was made for a typography class I was taking at Pratt Institute. The project was to make an alphabet out of any found object. I wanted to do raw meat, and hamburger was the easiest to mold and shape into letter-forms.
What, if anything, does Value Pack say to the observer?
It was intended to be just a type study, but I suppose there are other levels of meaning, if you choose to read into it. I made it before I read Fast Food Nation, but I'm sure you can draw some parallels. To be honest, I was mostly interested in trashy supermarket aesthetics and the repetition of the letters resembling an assembly line or something.
Who are your artistic influences or inspirations?
I am graduating in about a month, so right now a couple of my professors have had big impacts on me.
How long did it take to make Value Pack?
A frustrating day to shoot it. I went home to Pennsylvania to do it so I'd have more space. I repackaged each one individually, and I figured out that regular plastic wrap doesn't look the same as industrial plastic wrap, so at midnight I drove to the 24-hour grocery store and asked them if they would go back behind the meat counter to get me a sample of the industrial kind. They actually did it! It was awesome, but it made me feel weird when they watched me leave. They had this look on their faces like they had just given a murderer his weapon.
I was wandering around the Time Warner Center in New York City recently and found myself at the Bouchon Bakery thinking I was going to order its terrific grilled cheese sandwich (that's the one served with a surprisingly mediocre tomato soup). That's what I was planning to order until my server said they had a Wagyu beef slider special that day.
In the name of research I had to order them. Ten minutes later, she deposited a long thin plate in front of me: three sliders on house-made brioche buns with a pinch of sea salt on top. The burgers' condiments included ricotta cheese, a schmear of garlic aïoli, and tomato marmalade. So, basically, these were fancy-pants cheeseburger sliders with ketchup.
I flew to Minneapolis last week, and, in what could only be characterized as a total surprise, Sun Country Airlines served up an edible cheeseburger on my flight. The flight is only two and a half hours, so I was shocked we got anything beyond pretzels. The cheeseburger (right) was perfectly edible. It was basically a stripped-down McDonald's cheeseburger.
In Minneapolis proper, a friend took me to 112 Eatery as part of a progressive, three-location dinner. The food at 112 Eatery was mostly very good, simple, full-flavored food skillfully cooked. Although the lamb chops in pesto sauce were very good, the best thing we put in our mouths there was a killer cheeseburger served on an English muffin. It was beefy with enough fat to overcome the fact that we ordered it medium-rare and it came medium-well; the cheese was an aged cheddar. It was the best "big" burger I've had this year.
The burger was so good that I finished my half, which—along with the gnocchi, the aforementioned lamb chops, cauliflower fritters, and a single pork rib—made for one filling and satisfying meal. My friend Rick Nelson, the restaurant critic for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, said it's his favorite burger in the Twin Cities.
Negatives: The cauliflower fritters didn't really work—the coating kept coming off the cauliflower. The only total loser at the restaurant was the pot du creme, which was too thin and too sweet and tasted like mediocre homemade chocolate pudding.
Last year the stadium served "The Grizzly Burger," a bacon cheeseburger served on a toasted Krispy Kreme doughnut.
This year, they're raising the bar with deep-fried White Castle sliders. Called "Baseball’s Best Sliders," they'll come two for $4. A side of cheese sauce is $1 extra.
Says Darren Rovell, the man who broke the Grizzly Burger story last year, "It’s pretty awesome when it has been sitting in the studio for an hour. I can only imagine how great it is hot out of the fryer sitting at the ballpark. I couldn’t eat too much being that I’m down a gallbladder, but it basically tastes like an onion ring burger."
Further Reading
I've written about several Megaburgers on A Hamburger Today as well as sackful upon sackful of Tiny Hamburgers. This story defies mutual exclusion, managing to qualify for both categories.
Every year since the summer of 2004, a certain segment of burger-loving New Yorkers has engaged in ritualistic madness—waiting in an hour-plus line on opening day of the Shake Shack. Today was the unofficial opening, which might have explained the short line at 1:05 p.m., when the Serious Eats crew went to check things out. (Officially, the Shack opens on the first day of spring—March 21 this year).
Also each year, a certain segment of grousing New Yorkers, weary of the hype, has engaged in "Shacklash." The burgers are good there, folks like us say, but are they worth the long, long wait? I tend to avoid the joint at peak hours, but Serious Eats overlord Ed Levine checked the live Shack Cam and convinced Alaina and me to go. And, as editor of A Hamburger Today, I felt duty-bound to make the run.
One of the creations McDonald's is debuting next week is the Angus Deluxe, a "backyard style" burger with crinkle-cut pickles and red ring-shaped onions, as opposed to chopped onions and flat pickles served on other burgers, Frisbie said.
A new sesame seed "bakery-style roll" was also developed for the burgers by Brea-based Fresh Start Bakeries Inc., a longtime bun supplier to McDonald's.
The other two burgers are mushroom and Swiss cheese and a bacon cheeseburger. All three burgers sell for $3.99, on par with other fast-food chains featuring premium burgers and about $1.60 more than a Big Mac.
New York Magazine's just released their Best Of listings for 2007 and as always the eating & drinking section is interesting reading. Some shoo-ins, some surprises, making it this a good but not earth-shatteringly great list of places to revist or try for the first time. Our Adam Kuban's already written about their 2001 burger picks over an A Hamburger Today, but I'm more interested in personally verifying their best places for Sunday Brunch.
Posted by Lia Bulaong, February 26, 2007 at 11:48 AM
Restaurant Says It Has World's Largest Burger: "Weighing in at 123 pounds, this giant burger features an 80-pound beef patty, a 30-pound bun, 12 tomatoes and 160 slices of cheese. Denny's Beer Barrel Pub also throws on a pound each of lettuce, ketchup, mustard and mayo -- and up to five onions. The menu price for the Beer Barrel Main Event Charity Burger comes to $379."
If you think the photo on the left looks terrifying, go see the larger version on the Denny's Beer Barrel Pub homepage—it made me feel queasy, which I assure you is not an easy feat. I wonder if it comes with sides?
(You can read more about huge burgers in A Hamburger Today's megaburger archives.)
Posted by Lia Bulaong, February 15, 2007 at 3:50 PM
Our Adam Kuban spills the dirt on one of his guiltiest pleasures, a McNugget-enhanced Cheeseburger, over on A Hamburger Today. He justifies it by saying it's "two distinct tastes, yet a whole new experience. The whole as more than the sum of its parts."
Posted by Adam Kuban, February 12, 2007 at 4:40 PM
On Serious Eats burger site A Hamburger Today Zoe Hamburger is this week's Q&A subject. Yes: Zoe Hamburger.. Heh.
Q: So you've heard a lot of burger jokes in your life—any memorable ones? What's been the cheesiest? A: Aside from you asking what the cheesiest burger joke has been? When I was younger the cable company sent the bill to Bacon Double Cheeseburger instead of Peter W. Hamburger. My family thought it was hilarious. You have to have a good sense of humor if your last name is Hamburger.
Posted by Adam Kuban, January 16, 2007 at 12:12 PM
Don't mess with Texas. And, by all means, don't mess with Texas's hamburger. A state legislator there is embroiled in a burger battle with Louis' Lunch of New Haven, Connecticut, over which state can claim to be the birthplace of the hamburger. Says New Haven's mayor, John DeStefano Jr.: "We are even the birthplace of George Bush, who wants people to think he's from Texas. So yes, the hamburger is as much a New Haven original as President Bush. Get over it, Texas."
Posted by Adam Kuban, December 29, 2006 at 8:48 AM
The end of the year—always a time for reflection. So we thought we'd dig in to the archives of Serious Eats site A Hamburger Today and bring you some images worth highlighting again. They're from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog and offer a look at the early days of the hamburger.
Most of the photos here were taken by Russell Lee (right; 1903–1986), who was invited to join the federally funded Farm Security Administration as part of a team of photographers charged with documenting the plight of the rural poor during the Depression. (Esther Bubley, Jack Delano, and Arthur Rothstein, whose photos are also represented below, were members of the project as well.)
These photos are truly a fascinating scrapbook of hamburger—and American—history, and they're available for reproduction online at the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Reading Room (search the catalog for "hamburger"). Dig in!
Posted by Adam Kuban, December 19, 2006 at 11:24 AM
Over on Serious Eats site A Hamburger Today, we started an ambitious multipart series dedicated to sussing out the best burgers in each of our fine states. We got as far as "the First State," Delaware, before pooping out. Today we're resurrecting the feature, which we call "Where's the Beef, America?" This week's installment turns its meaty eye on Kansas. Why? Because it's my home state and I'm heading there in less than a week. What better way to combine personal research with work?
Posted by Adam Kuban, December 18, 2006 at 1:43 PM
After a brief hiatus, A Hamburger Today's Q&A column, Grilled, is back. This week's installment is Peter Meehan, who has discovered and then relayed the news of some of New York City's finest burgers in the pages of the New York Times.
Grilled, griddled, or broiled?
All of the above. Didn’t George Motz teach us that burgers can be steamed and deep-fried, too? Is there even a verb for what they do to the burgers at Louis’ Lunch in New Haven? I find grilling and broiling to be the surest approaches to properly cooked patties, but I have no allegiance to any one style.
Posted by Adam Kuban, December 6, 2006 at 11:16 PM
From Hollywood Rag:
"Gisele Bundchen has revealed the secret to her amazing figure - cheeseburgers.
The Brazilian supermodel, famed for her long legs and stunning figure, admits she is a carnivore when it comes to her diet and was even munching on a McDonald's meal when she was "discovered" at the age of just 14.
She said: "I like meat, real meat. It's delicious."
As most people know, we love fat in just about all its forms here at Serious Eats. We love bacon, barbecue, butter, lardo, guanciale, prime dry-aged beef, Wagyu beef, burgers, lard, prosciutto, cheese, and pastrami. But we try to advocate consuming these ultradelicious fatty foods in moderation.
The first is a set of photos from Joshua "
What inspired you to create Value Pack? 
, but I'm sure you can draw some parallels. To be honest, I was mostly interested in trashy supermarket aesthetics and the repetition of the letters resembling an assembly line or something.
Over on Serious Eats site 
