The man who cried “best burger I’ve ever had.”
I realize that by this point it’s a Food + Gasoline cliche to ascribe a superlative to any and every burger that I cook. I’m constantly going on like this was the best burger I’ve ever had, until I don’t even know if I even believe myself anymore. I mean, I’ve had a lot of burgers. A lot of tasty burgers. Was the latest best burger really really the best burger? Out of all of them? Even that one with the peanut butter chipotle barbecue sauce on? What about that one with the egg and the guacamole? Did I even stop to consider the great preceding burgers before littering the now meaningless words best and greatest all over my most recent post? What’s sad is that the answer is often, no. No, I did not consider these things before I made thoughtless and flippant declarations of greatness, motivated only by the emotion of the moment rather than elevating my judgement with the perspective of sound logic. By doing so I worry that I’ve sacrificed the integrity of this blog, that I may have trampled on and then fallen through the very thin ice that was my authority as a food blogger. Worst of all, I worry that I’ve trampled on and then ultimately lost your trust.
And for that I’d like to say two things:
- I’m sorry, it’ll never happen again. And…
- The following was the BEST BURGER I’VE EVER HAD!!
I can explain. But first, a video.
Dave Arnold, “Patty Melt” from Eater NY on Vimeo.
The folks over at Eater.com have been posting these great video montages of chefs making badass dishes all set to a pretty terrific soundtrack. They call them Sound Bites. Get it? Hilarious! But so anyway I think these videos do a great job of presenting in an entertaining way the process behind cooking a dish, all without having spiky hair or yelling bam at you. It’s refreshing really. Of all the videos, this particular patty melt by my recent favorite culinary mind, Dave Arnold, just seemed too good and too simply convoluted to pass up. Plus it presented me with the opportunity to cook meat in a water bath, something I’d never done before. Generally, when referring to cooking in a water bath, it normally means using an immersion circulator to control the temperature of that water. I do not have an immersion circulator, yet, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me. Why? Because I had both a beer cooler and recently read this great article about rigging up a ghetto sous-vide (and I know it’s not “technically” sous-vide) at home.
A quick two things before we move on from the video to the cooking.
- How much of a badass is Dave Arnold for grilling over charcoal inside his NYC apartment?!?
- A request: Can that kitchen become my kitchen? Thanks in advance.
Here’s how the whole, cook a patty melt in a mere three hours, went down.
First off, grind meat! Now normally when I make burgers I get all my toppings figured out first, and then finally once everything is organized go about cooking the meat. But since I’m putting this in a water bath for at least an hour, I can focus on all the other stuff then.
Get some chuck and short rib.
These were going to be some serious patty melts so I factored in a half pound per person.
Grind.
At this point in the afternoon was I cooking by myself? Yes. So then does that mean I had to set the camera up on a tri-pod and then run around the counter while the light was blinking with just enough time to take a picture of me pretending to grind this? I’d rather not talk about it.
Form into large patties, being careful to work just enough so the meat sticks together but not so much that you compact it into a hockey puck. One thing I learned from watching this video is that I don’t salt my burgers aggressively enough.
Really go for it. I imagine a lot of the salt will be lost in the next step anyway.
The next step!
Deep fry.
What an awesome next step, if I don’t mind saying so.
Heat some peanut oil in a pan until it reaches 350°F.
Gently submerge the patty, being careful to cradle it with your spatula the whole time. If you let it just bounce around in the oil there’s a good chance it’ll fall apart. Don’t let that happen. After about 30 seconds take the patty back out of the oil. It should be cooked on only the very exterior. The point is to get the meat set, and tasty of course, but not cook it through. This is only the first of three cooking methods after all.
Next cooking method!
Grab a beer cooler and fill it with really hot tap water from your sink. Get a thermometer and check the temp. The goal is to get the water at about 128/9°F, so start adding colder/hotter water to the cooler until you get it dialed in just right. Now grab some high quality Ziploc freezer bags and dump in a few tablespoons of melted butter, gently followed by the deep fried but still mostly raw patty. Next, get all the air out. How? Well, close all but about an inch of one side of the bag and then push it into the water until only the open corner of the bag remains in the air. Then seal that part. Your bag should be more or less devoid of air.
Next, simply place the bag in the water, put the lid on the cooler, and then leave the whole thing alone. Check the temp every half hour and add a little bit of hot water to keep it all at or just above 127°F. The beauty of this technique is that you can’t overcook the burger. You can leave it in the water for like 4 hours if you want, but the burger can’t get any hotter than the water around it. Instead, it’ll be cooked evenly throughout to a very precise temperature, all the while not losing any moisture. Plus it’s sitting in butter, so that can’t be hurting the flavor.
While the burger is in the water move on to the non-patty parts of the patty melt.
First non-patty part
Caramelized onions.
Including myself, how many people was I feeding? Four.
So how many onions did I cut up? Six.
That’s right. One and a half onions for every single person eating. That sounds excessive but when you fully cook these things they lose a ton of volume. Also, they’re really delicious so it’s never a bad thing to have a little extra. But yeah, I can almost guarantee you won’t have any leftovers.
The process is easy. Take a bunch of sliced onions and cram them in a pan. Saute that on high for like twenty minutes, turning occasionally, and then crank the heat down to medium low for another forty. This whole process should take about an hour, if not longer. It’s not labor intensive though, you just have to stir the onions every few minutes to make sure they’re not burning.
What should start off looking like this:
Should end up looking like this:
If you don’t start off a little worried that you went overboard with onions, chances are you don’t have enough onions.
And sorry again about the not having leftovers part. Snack on these while you’re doing other stuff. They’re so good.
Other stuff!
Saute some shiitake mushrooms.
This wasn’t in the video but it seemed like a worthy addition. It’s basically the same cooking approach for shiitakes as for onions but with a smaller amount of time.
It’ll start out all like:
And then end up all like:
For all these things I wish I didn’t, but I feel compelled to remind you to put salt on this stuff when you first start cooking. That will help draw out moisture and make it all taste better.
There’s no reason not to multi-task.
Next!
Assemble and melt.
Cut some bread. Cut some cheese (I used Swiss). Put all the things on it except for the meat and then toast it on a hot buttered pan.
I used really thick bread for these and that insulated the cheese a bit while toasted, thus preventing it from fully melting. Solution? Place in a 200°F oven. This both melted the cheese and kept everything nice and warm while I grilled the meat.
Grill the meat!
After nearly 2 hours in bags it was safe to say that my burgers were a perfect mid-rare.
They were also still absurdly juicy.
The next step is to get a grill super hot. And remember, we’re not grilling a typical burger, so the method here is a bit different. Since the meat has already cooked through perfectly, the point of grilling the patty is strictly to develop a tasty, crusty exterior. But you must do this quickly or else you’ll cook the inside of the burger and then render void the buttered Ziplocs in your trash. Best way to do this quickly is to get some coals raging hot and then cook the burger right up next to them. I have a grate on my smoker that is a bit too small for my grill and ends up settling about halfway down. This worked perfectly, allowing me to cook the meat an inch above the coals.
Things got a little warm.
I cooked the burgers for no more than a minute on either side and then took them off the grill.
These patties were so crusty they got a dog, back patches of punk bands you haven’t heard about, and then train-hopped all over America asking for spare change.
And then finally, three hours after I started cooking:
Insert Homer Simpon-esque drooling noises
This was the best burger I’ve ever had.
I promise.
