Your favorite burger?

[pinto]

Much of the US is BBQ'ing today and that means burgers along with everything else.

Here's mine -

Ground beef, ground pork 50/50 mix.
Medium sized patty to fit the bun. Salted and peppered.
Jack cheese - 3 slices.
Dressing - Mixed mayo, ketchup and Dijon, to taste. I go 3-2-1.
Tomato - Sliced as thinly as possible, 2 slices.
Red onion - Sliced as thinly as possible, 2 slices.
Iceberg lettuce - 2 leaves, pressed flat. (the idea - I don't want a salad, I want a burger.)

Set an aluminum foil pie pan to one side of the grill.
Sear the patty to get a good char on both sides.
Put the burger in the pie pan, add the sliced cheese and cover tight with a metal bowl.

Brown the buns. Coat both halves well with the dressing.
Layer - lettuce, onion, cheese burger, tomato on the bun and cap with the other half of the bun. Let rest and cut in half to serve.

[no_hypocrisy]

1. Grilled. With blue cheese and applewood bacon.

[greatauntoftriplets]

2. 85/15 ground beef.

Lots of butter in the skillet (to brown the bun -- a pretzel bun -- as well). Salt and pepper. Cook the burger to rare-medium rare, then add the bun cut side down.

If I put anything on it, tomato if it's good enough and sometimes sliced onion, but preferably grilled onion. Cheese now and then, Swiss. No ketchup, mustard or anything else.

[NJCher]

3. a Tierney's burger!

A Tierny's burger has the best grilled taste and is served by a genuine Irishman who actually looks like a leprechaun. I get mine California style, with raw lettuce, tomato, and onion. The bun is coated lightly with butter and is grilled, too.


Here's a Tierney's burger:





Here's a pic of our local dive!



Have had so many good times at this place. And even the RG says their burgers are unsurpassed. In fact, he's usually the instigator when we go there and he orders a Guinness to go with.


Cher

[cbayer]

4. Ok, I will have one of yours.

The best burger I have ever had is in a small diner on Bourbon Street. It's just perfect.

The most interesting burger I have ever had, and one of the best, is the steamed cheeseburger they make in Connecticut. The hamburger and cheese are cooked separately in tuna fish cans over a steamer.

And then there is the famous New Mexican Green Chile Cheeseburger, best eaten in San Antonio, NM.

You are making me crazy for a hamburger. Haven't had one in months!

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

5. Stolen from Howard Tayler, author of the Schlock Mercenary webcomic

http://www.schlockmercenary.com/blog/march-23-2003

The Perfect Hamburger is, unfortunately, variable from person to person. Here's mine:

•Start with fresh ground beef. The frozen beef is only fit for chili or spaghetti sauce. Form a 1/3 pound patty in a disc roughly half an inch larger in diameter than the buns you'll be using. Shape the patty so that it's thicker right at the edges than it is in the middle -- this ensures that as it cooks and shrinks, it doesn't bunch up too much in the middle.

•Cook it over open flame. (Gas is fine. If you use those little hardwood briquets you're just wasting money.) Salt and pepper to taste (liberally, please). Make sure the fire is hot enough so that when the burger has carcinogenically charred bits on the outside, the inside is still moist. Halfway to done a few thin slices of mild cheddar should be placed on the patty, so they're bubbly and melty when the payload is ready to be delivered to the target. At launch time, short, thin strips of crisp bacon should be laid into the bubbly cheese.

•The bun should be a cornmeal-dusted bun similar to that used by Wendy's on the Big Bacon Classic. Butter the insides of the bun, and then toast it in a fry-pan. Naturally, for The Perfect Burger, the bun toasting operation is going on simultaneously to the payload preparation.

•Lay the patty on the BOTTOM half of the toasted bun, cheese-side DOWN. The cheese/bacon/beef-char medley should fuse to the bread instantly if you've done it right. This ensures that the final product will only tend to slide around on the top half, and then only if you've tried to lay too much vegetable matter on it.

•Said vegetable matter must include catsup, mustard, sliced onion, dill pickle slices, thin tomato slices, COLD iceberg lettuce, and a little Miracle Whip. This layer is where many of the vitamins come from, as well as a lot of the flavor, so the temptation is to add too much, resulting in a mess. The Perfect Burger, however, is not messy. The best way to order them is to put the mustard, catsup, and Miracle Whip on the bun first, spread them around with two-to-four pickle slices, and then layer the lettuce, tomato, and onion.

•The last step in the creation of The Perfect Hamburger is to get someone else to go to this trouble for you. Unfortunately, this is difficult, even for happily married people like myself, since it is quite difficult to convince even the most doting companion the importance of each of these steps. Building The Perfect Hamburger is like forging a sword... if you take shortcuts it may still LOOK right, but in the heat of battle you'll end up with bacon in your lap, so to speak.

I don't completely agree with him -- Miracle Whip, as far as I am concerned, is evidence that Satan is actively working in the world, and if I get a burger with lettuce and tomato on it, I will take them off -- but it's fairly close to what I like. And the description is better written than I could do.

[azurnoir]

6. 80/20 ground beef

seasoned with a bit of season all, garlic and Crystal hot sauce, grilled over hickory smoke until medium and served on toasted sesame seed bun with a a good creamy type coleslaw as the condiment

[fizzgig]

7. mushroom swiss burger

sauteed mushrooms and onions, swiss cheese, mayo and a dollop of sour cream. even better if there is bacon on it.

burger must be medium rare and bun must be grilled/toasted.

[DavidG_WI]

8. Ginormous burgers

Always made mine half pound or a bit bigger burgers.

Mix the meat with salt, pepper, Worcestershire sauce, diced vidalia onion and fresh jalapeño and/or habenero peppers. Form large pattys with a deep dimple in the centre, grill to medium well over real wood lump* coals, not the petrochemical based charcoal briquettes, if you are going to pan fry add a little liquid smoke to the meat mix.

Serve on an onion poppy seed roll with smoked gouda or extra extra sharp cheddar cheese, sun dried tomatoes, more peppers and onions, a mountain butter leaf, red leaf and spinach, garlic or bread and butter cold pack pickles, deli mustard, horse radish sauce and a bit of ketchup.

Best drinks to go with it are marzens and red ales or grapefruit or tamarind mexican soda made with real sugar.

It's a burger that needs no fries or onion rings and with the amount of veg on top of the mammoth sized slab of beef you'll have to unhinge your jaw to take a bite.

* for those of us that take our grilling seriously read the reviews on various brands of coals here http://www.nakedwhiz.com/lumprankdata.htm?name to learn everything you never even knew you wanted to know about charcoals.

The best you can find nationally is Royal Oak, avoid the Cowboy brand you see at Home Depot, they use treated wood and even plywood in their stuff as I noticed when I had someone run and grab me a bag and they went to HD as it was closest, opened the bag and pulled out a 3"x6" board that was obviously a sheet of plywood in a previous life.

[Luminous Animal]

9. Spicy black bean.

Black beans some mashed and some crushed
Caramelized corn
Minced jalepeno
Diced onion
Melted Kombu
Melted sundried tomatoes or tomato paste
Minced garlic
Smoked paprika
Rolled oats soaked in liquified silken tofu for binding
A dash of dijon

Served with:
Caramelized onions
Pickles (refrigerator is my preference)
Hummus
Fresh cuke slices
Tomatoes (but only in season)
Mustard (an array)