May-July 2022: Hamburgers
Looking at the items I’ve cooked so far this year, I’m realizing that I don’t have a very sophisticated palate. Pizza, tacos, crackers, applesauce. Clearly I have no interest in making my own foie gras. I did make Beef Wellington (post to come) but honestly, Beef Wellington is essentially a hamburger with a more expensive cut of meat. But whatever… hamburgers are delicious and if I wanted to have one, I was going to have to learn how to make buns. Thankfully, New York Times Cooking has a great recipe (ugh. you need a subscription to see it, but I found this very similar recipe: https://bigworldtale.com/world-news/for-better-bakes-perfect-this-versatile-dough-the-denver-post/).
Buns are fun! I thought I was going to need some fancy equipment to shape the buns, but they pretty much shape themselves. And the recipe calls for ingredients that most cooks would already have in their pantry. I did have to purchase hulled sesame seeds, which is different from the sesame seeds you find in the spice section of your local grocery store, but I had good luck with these.
But then I got to the ketchup. In my opinion, you can’t eat hamburgers without ketchup. I picked up a bunch of tomatoes, skinned them, cooked them down with some cinnamon, brown sugar, and apple cider vinegar and then filtered the whole mess through a fine-mesh sieve. It was pretty messy and tedious, and unfortunately, not as good as a standard bottle of Heinz Ketchup. My biggest complaint is that the result tastes very acidic. I tried adding some baking soda to tone it down a bit, and that solution helped. But still not great. It’s fine for burgers because there is so much going on that the ketchup isn’t as important, but I would never use my ketchup on fries. I’d like to try again using another recipe, but I’ve made so much ketchup that it will be years before I run out. Plus, I lost the recipe so I don’t even know what I want to improve. Oh well! The burgers tasted great, and I love my puffy sesame seed buns.
This…
…becomes this.