It’s very human to want to elevate something beyond that which you’ve experienced. It’s also very natural to want to change and modify something to make your own interpretation and in the right hands and with the right frame of mind, there is no one in the world that should tell you not to. Evolution in anything is fundamental not only to what we do but to our entire existence on this earth. Without it we would just be plankton food.
Another human trait is that of wanting to please everybody, which while very noble in it’s intentions is also profoundly stupid on many levels. Our greatest governments, artists, architects and fatcats have know this for centuries and as sociological rules become more transparent though media and art it is as readily available for the masses to digest as a big Mac and fries. Sadly the last people to realise this seem to be the British restaurant industry.
A lot has been written about where we go wrong in this country with food. A lot of trash has been talked by visiting tourists about how they can get a decent this or that or how that or this is so much better where they come from and how we should blah blah blah blah. It pisses me off up until the point that most of them are probably right. Truth is there is some incredibly good, world-beating food in this country, which we should be envied for and golf clappingly proud. We also have this richly diverse portfolio of cuisine available to us that should shame most of Europe and the States. On the down side the ratio of great to embarrassingly bad restaurants in this country is a cause for national shame. Perhaps more embarrassing is the fact that we don’t seem to be bothered. For every St Johns serving seriously focused British food there are tens of thousands pounding the life out of our culinary heritage 365 days a year and trying not only to kill our own food but that of every nation on earth. Just because we have a rich diversity of culinary culture in the UK doesn’t mean every UK restaurant has to serve all of it to every possible customer.
I remember clearly talking to my business partner a few years ago about my plans to retrain as a chef. We had lost most of our nationwide sandwich business in the 2008 banking crisis. I told him I was going to take the money I had invested and learn how to cook in the best restaurants in the country, then take things from there. He laughed in my face and told me I was much better off using my money to start up a new venture. Reasoning that being able to cook had nothing to do with running a successful food business. Looking around at some of the richest restaurateurs, he did have a valid point, it just wasn’t very me.
Imagine if you will a pure white space with pure white tables and chairs. You come in you sit down with the whole family and are greeted by your own cybernetic waiter who looks after you in the way you specified on your reservation. You order your food from the encyclopedic digitised menu and receive your food in the strict time limits you demand and the restaurant has agreed to. The food itself has unquestionable mass appeal which will also be suitable for the now millions of modern day allergies and social restraints its customers have in abundance. Now imagine what it tastes like?
Now imagine a farmer’s son from the West Country brought up raising chickens. Carrying on his father’s obsession with feed quality, habitat and breeding. Working with chickens every day of his life until he is 17 and wants to discover the world. He goes to culinary school to learn how to cook then travels the world tasting and searching out for new methods of preparing and cooking chicken. He spends 5 years traveling and tasting the world until he finds what he thinks is the prefect chicken dish. He works with the restaurant in question for another five years eventually taking over the business as the head chef. Brought back to the UK by the news of his fathers deteriorating health he goes back to working at the farm. In this time he begins working on creating a similar cooking environment to that he had back when he worked in the restaurant. He builds his own rotisserie; as nothing on the market quite has the same appeal. He builds his open charcoal BBQ and spends months sourcing the right ingredients for his brines, marinades and sauces. He then uses his knowledge of feed and breeding techniques to create the perfect chicken.
One year later he opens for business selling just that product, cooked one way only, to no more than 10 people at a time. The setting is a barn with bales of hay and picnic tables. There is a barrel of local cider in one corner and the farm dog asleep in the other.
Now imagine what it tastes like?
Whilst both ideas seem over exaggerated and contrived (which they were) the sad fact is that the direction we are going in is far closer to the first example than the second, and whilst id like to place sole blame on the profiteering restaurants for this, I really cant. It’s our own fault as a customer. It's our fault we never complained about how bland the meal was and it’s positively-defiantly our fault because we went back the next week! It’s our fault that every time we fail to notice the new butcher, sandwich bar or restaurant around the corner because ‘well’ Tesco, Prêt and Zizzi are on the high street and ‘well’ we just feel more safe and secure in the knowledge that we know what were getting. Every time a pub is made to feel that turning away children is a discriminatory action, every time you pick up a menu that’s five pages long, every time a menu item says something is ‘Gourmet’ and every time you pay more than two pounds for a cup of coffee that someone isn’t sweating over to make sure it’s the greatest coffee you have ever drunk, you should be angry as hell, otherwise example ‘A’.
One idiot internet blogger (I wont name him, though I probably should) once reasoned that British burgers were never as good as American burgers because of the fat ratio in the meat, and whilst I suspect after reading many of his reviews that he knows virtually nothing about food or cooking, I was quite surprised that someone of his age and relative intelligence has so little grasp on the modern world. There is no material reason why British burgers and British burger bars cannot not produce burgers of not only the same standard, but also possibly even better than any other country on earth (and why not aim this high?). The problem has never been with our meat or our burger making apparatus. The problem as I see it, is in our desire to overwork our menu and mildly please the masses rather than concentrate on perfection and deliver divinity to the few.
Burger perfection (or any perfection) cannot be found in a single breakthrough recipe or technique. It’s a samurai'esque journey of infinite frustration, which will lead loss of hair from your head, loss of money from your bank, loss of friends from your address book and the addition of tonne of red meat to your belly. And if the thought of any of that sounds unappealing, join the queue.
Restaurant chefs share recipes and techniques all the time with each other, freely and without question. Any recipe you get from a burger perfectionist you do so at the end of a loaded gun with his wife and kids tied up in the room next door. And if you do shame on you, because the important thing here is not the recipe or the method; it's the journey itself.
So here begins my journey. You can have all of my recipes and techniques but be warned by the time you read this they have probably already been superseded by something new and better….so there!
The Patty
The cow is a big beast and there are many cuts available, but I chose straight up that no lean cuts of beef would be used in my recipe at any point. This is not a matter of personal taste, but more a matter of me not being an idiot. The very idea of taking an expensive cut like fillet or sirloin, which have very little fat content or flavour, and mincing them to within an inch of there life is truly unthinkable. Common sense says if you are going to tenderise the cut by mincing it, make it a cut that provides good flavour and texture.
First of all I went a little Heston. I knew I needed a good fat content for a great burger so I came up with the genius idea to use different rendered cuts of fat and see how this worked.
Along with different cuts I added herbs to some and umami rich additives to others. The best flavour of all though was the one that I just simply pan fried hard to add some browning flavuors rather than slow cooking in a waterbath for a perfect result.
I began cooking with just a simple chuck mince and tried using the fat in different ways to enhance the meat. Unfortunately all my hard work taught me was how to make a rubbish burger that tasted pretty much of beef fat and nothing else, and although that may sound nice to some, rendered beef fat is incredibly over powering.
So lesson 1 learned. Rendered beef fat in small amounts from now on.
I was at no point ever tempted to use breadcrumbs or any binding agents. To me meat is meat and needs no binding and if you need to bind a burger then you need to overwork it and to overwork it kills the texture.
So instead I set about looking for other cuts. I tried a few but the best results by far was a simple 50/50 blend of good quality chuck and short rib. The meat was bought from Barbecoa burchers, who themselves do some pretty excellent burgers. I bought from them whole cuts as I wanted to play around with the mincing as as well as the cuts.
I first removed the sinew and passed the short rib though the small mincing plate twice chilling in between, then passed the minced short rib through with the chuck on the thicker setting. This tenderises the more fatty meat slightly more and also adds different textures to the patty. The final mince blends the two together for a more even flavour.
After mincing, the patty was molded gently into a ball then pressed down to flatten and lightly shaped. I also made a slight indent in the centre of the patty to help counteract the ballooning reaction when cooking ( a bit like when you make a well in a fruit cake before cooking ). Don't be concerned if you have uneven surfaces or breaks. The texture with enhance surface area and therefor you get more browning.
The patty as you can see was then seasoned liberally, and by liberally I mean a bucket load. There is no salt added to the mince before shaping to you have to season well, and a lot of that salt and pepper will come off in the cooking process.
I used a cast iron pan to cook my patty in, preheated to a very high heat. I basted a little butter and beef fat render to enhance the browning and moved it about a lot after an initial sear.
I cooked all my burgers to medium rare (50oC) and used a precision thermometer to best judge when it was done.
The initial results from plan d were stunning, and thank god cause by this stage I was ravenous.
One thing I did realise at this stage was that my initial theory about keeping things simple seemed to be correct. I only ate this using a supermarket bought burger bun and a bit of mustard and ketchup and I still felt it needed very little else. If the meat is good enough why cloud it with oversized buns and random garnishes. Also the size was perfect. 110 grams, a perfect Quarter pounder. Any more and it becomes a full blown meal rather than a sandwich and the cooking time was perfect to get a good colour and a moist delicious centre.
Garnish aside, I do like a bit of cheese and maybe a sauce. But what cheese and what sauce ?
The Cheese
It had to be melty it had to be full of flavour to warrant it being there in the first place but not so overpowering that it distracted my taste buds from the main event. A lot of blogs and posts I read on the internet had had similar problems in selecting a good burger cheese and I'm not aware of any decent american cheeses being available even in london and if they were they would be vastly over priced. So I first tried several of peoples online suggestions even looking at an M&S low fat cheese slice that someone suggested on Chow. Nothing seemed to get close to what I was looking for until the thought hit me that maybe nothing needed to ?
What if I could find different characteristics in a range of cheeses and blend them together myself to make my perfect burger cheese. My own processed cheese if you like, but without any chemicals and nastiness you get from a store bought processed cheese.
I have to say that when this idea hit me I really didn't think it would be half as easy as it sounded, but it was. In the end I settled for the colour and flavour of a mild Red Leicester and the melting characteristics of a gruyere. This is how I did it.
First of all I cubed both cheeses and added the same amount of each to a bain marie and melted them down. Once properly melted I stirred until the colour became even then transferred the gooey deliciousness to a pre warmed baking tray where the mix continued to melt and rework itself flat. The cheese was then chilled and then sliced to the appropriate size and shape.
As you can see from the last picture the melt was near perfect.
Burger Sauce
I thought long and hard about what I wanted out of a burger sauce. I thought about the flavours that made me think of a burger without over shadowing the taste of the meat.
To me Ketchup is a must, along with a mild mustard. I also wanted to use some pickles, maybe gherkins. Which made me think the common idea of a thousand island type sauce could be the way to go. I began on thousand island to a point then was bothered by the idea of using mayonnaise. I like mayonnaise but to me here it's a filler that dilutes that flavours I'm so desperate to promote.
Another garnish I was going to use in my burger was caramelized onion. To me it's what adds that extra sweetness and aroma that brings you back to the best burgers you've had. When you think of the smell of burgers cooking at a roadside burger hut , it usually the onions your smelling.
So I took out the mayo and instead replaced it with a puree of deeply caramelized onions. To which I added ketchup, frenchies mustard, cornichons + their liquor and cayenne. This was blended until smooth.
The Burger Bun
Each element in creating something special has to really on the basic principle that each element can stand alone as being great and also perform the task is needs to to aid enjoyment in eating. Nothing highlights this more than the burger roll. It must taste great while at the same time be the right shape constancy and size to deliver the flavour of the burger to the last bite.
To understand my line of thought in this you have to grasp the science of baking which is in fact relatively simple. Every bread recipe you ever use has two basic ingredient types. One is the wet ingredients, which include, water, butter, milk, eggs etc and the other is the dry ingredients which include, flour, potato, sugar, salt etc. Every successful recipe requires a strict code of ratios between the two. Which is not to say that all ratios are the same for all baking but for similar results they are.
For example if I wanted the lightest bread I can make my ratio of water based ingredients would be as high as I could get away with. Producing a difficult wet dough but in cooking as the water heats and produced steam the dough rises and holds due to gluten created during kneading. The more water the more air and the less dry ingredients the lighter the final product.
Outside that the nature of each of the ingredients determines other factors in the bread. Butter and eggs will add mouth feel and richness, potato will add some strength and sugar and salt will not only had sweetness and saltiness but also affect the way your yeast behaves.
So what I did was take the overall ratio composition and play around with the ingredients to make the best bun I could. I was going initially for a replica of the classic american potato burger bun. I even tried a recipe for using instant potato flakes but poo poo'd it because it didn't carry enough flavour. Also after a chat with Cris Bianco at work I was told the flavor of a good mash will make all the hard work worth while once I got it right.
In the end I settled for a kind of brioche/potato roll crossbreed.
I started out by making a mash as I always would. Salty water, cooking until starting to fall apart, then instead of just adding hot milk and butter I mixed together my whole wet ingredients and added that slowly until the mash potato was emulsified into a very this sauce with everything else.
I then rubbed my yeast into my dry mix and added the wet ingredients slowly in a mixer.
Wet
100mg milk
65mg yogurt
100mg potato water
35g butter
50g 1 egg
Dry
430g flour
70g mash potato
35g sugar
10g salt
I used the yogurt to add a nice acidic note and really just to see what would happen. So far I liked it therefore it's staying for now.
The size of the buns are also important. Unfortunately the one in the picture below in my mind was still too big. For some reason the pic of the final one didn't come out but it was a 90g bun (the one at the top of the page is the right one). The one below was 100g. You might be thinking why do I care about 10g but it is details such as this that make all the difference. If the bun is too big the bite you take will dilute the taste of the patty too much. Interestingly enough the exact measurement of bun+cheese+sauce to patty is exactly 50/50. Whether of not that means shit I don't know yet.
Next on the agenda is the lettuce and tomato 'do I don't I' issue ? but that's all for now folks.
Welcome the Patty Smith.
Wow, great post, great efforts, will have to take some of these on board next burger day!
I did a post recently about ultimate burgers, starting with the debate on whether the patty has to be pure beef or whether recipe patties are the way forward? I like both but there are adamant purists chiming in on this one!
I also considered the buns and accompaniments, but didn't make my own relish, though I did use pickled gherkins I grew and pickled myself.
Would love your input:
http://www.kaveyeats.com/2011/06/what-your-ultimate-burger.html
Posted by: Kavey | June 29, 2011 at 10:53 PM
I like the cut of your jib in this post sir. I hear some of your frustrations and full heartedly agree. But hey, sounds like you've been having fun with the on-going quest for the perfect burger (is there one I wonder?). The question remains though, why did I try to 'clinch' that burger on the barbecue? It's all your fault you know, all your damn fault........
Posted by: Food Urchin | June 30, 2011 at 03:16 PM