Gourmet Burger Kitchen, Hamburger Union and Byron are slightly better, with the latter being the best of the bunch. Though I’ve got to say that with Byron Burgers’ rapid expansion throughout London I’ve had mixed experiences at different venues. I also think there’s something fundamentally wrong with paying close to a tenner for a cheeseburger – which by definition should be a lowbrow, low cost food.
The consensus seems to be that the birthplace of the hamburger is the German city of Hamburg where to this day one of the local delicacies is the Frikadelle: a flattened meatball with lots of onion, egg and filler. I’ve eaten the occasional Frikadelle, having spent some time in Germany, and it’s a bit of an acquired taste if you ask me.
But apart from the name and the vague resemblance to Hamburg’s favourite chopped meat snack I don’t think anyone would deny that the hamburger we know today is really an American invention. There are various contradictory claims about who first popularised the burger but most accounts seem to date back to the turn of the twentieth century. And here we are more than a hundred years later, still enjoying a grilled meat patty on a bun, from its most basic version to the simultaneously terrifying and intriguing sounding McAloo Tikki with Cheese.
So can you get a decent hamburger in America? Yes you can. That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of terrible versions to be had in the US, but their highs are so much higher than our highs, so to speak. The best American burgers seem to be simpler, purer; letting the core ingredients speak for themselves and focussing on the real star of the show: the salty, crusty, juicy meat.
Take the independently owned In N Out Burger chain, for example. The mere mention is enough to make a hamburger aficionado stare wistfully into the distance, remembering burgers loved and lost / eaten. In N Out has a cult following. Mainly because of the quality of the food, but no doubt partially due to the Secret Menu – all manner of unusual combinations of ingredients that aren’t advertised in store. In fact the secret menu isn’t remotely secret because every regular customer knows their Animal Style from their 4 by 4s, and most of the variations are even listed on the company’s website.
(In case you’re wondering: Animal Style is with grilled onions, extra pickles and ‘spread’ (sauce), and mustard cooked into the patties. 4 by 4 means four patties and four slices of cheese.)
You may hear the singing of a heavenly choir whilst looking at this photo of a Double Double. That's normal.
The problem with In N Out is that they only exist on the Western side of America - California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah. In fact one of the company policies is that they will only open a restaurant within one day’s drive of their meat processing plant in Baldwin Park, California. So I’ve got no hope of getting a Double Double anywhere near the office at lunchtime. Being more than five and a half thousand miles away, and all.
Only one thing for it: I’ll have to make my own. I’m not going for an In N Out clone, just a perfectly made, delicious hamburger.
My inspiration was Kenji Alt-Lopez, currently my absolute favourite food writer on the internet. In his Food Lab column on Serious Eats Kenji goes to fabulously absurd lengths to understand the science and cooking technique behind various foods. Want to know how to make the perfect home-made French fries? Kenji is your man. He cooked dozens of batches in his New York apartment, chopping, frying and eating kilos of potatoes until he’d cracked it.
In a recent column Kenji had several In N Out Burgers shipped overnight from the West coast in order to carry out a CSI style forensic investigation and make his own version. If you like food and science this is the site for you.
My recipe for the perfect hamburger is in the next post below.
No comments:
Post a Comment