Food and Drinks: September 2007 Archives

Burgers from McDonalds and Burger King are greasy and gross, and any self-respecting mom knows that she can cook a burger that is much healthier and which tastes better... unless you ask for the children's opinion. If nothing beats mom's food, burgers are the exception that proves the rule. Children don't like mom's burgers.

Single dads can take advantage of that. Here comes the secret behind making a home-made burger so greasy and unhealthy that moms will hate them and kids will love them. It is the kind of burger that only a single dad would make.

The beef recipe is straight-forward. It's simple, because good burgers aren't supposed to be good. Make the burger beef by mixing two pounds of ground meat, a spoonful of flour, two spoonfuls of water, half a minced onion, a teaspoon salt, and some fresh-ground pepper. This servers about six burgers. Make sure you mix the ingredients well. Don't be afraid to use your hands for the job.

The first secret lies in the frying technique. First, form pancakes out of the meat, making each burger beef about twice the diameter of the bun, and as flat as possible. Get your frying pan, and turn up the heat to almost maximum. Leave the frying pan completely dry without the use of fats, and put the burger beef onto the pan once it's hot. Within half a minute the beef will have reduced to the size of the bun. Press the beef hard against the pan with a flat knife. When the beef is done on one side, turn it around, and press it hard against the pan. For the last thirty seconds of frying, put a small amount of butter onto the beef, and let it melt.

As soon as you remove the beef from the frying pan, put a slice of cheese on each of them. You should use the kind of cheese that you use for toasts.

The buns themselves are purchased pre-baked. Now the second secret: don't put the buns on a toaster, because this will make them appear dry and fresh. Instead, put them in the microwave for little less than a minute so they will become hot and moist.

Assemble the burger from bun, ketchup, beef and various salads, and then top it off with Thousand Island dressing and the top of the bun. The third and last of the secrets is a psychological trick that reminds the children of the greasy burgers at McDonalds and Burger King. The secret is to include a pickle and a piece of salad that the children can complain about and remove from the burger before eating it.

Last Saturday a friend of mine gave me a special gift: "The Source", a hot sauce from Original Juan Specialty Foods, who claims this product as the world's hottest hot sauce. According to legend as told by Original Juan Specialty Foods, the god that held the Source of all energy had to protect this source from other gods quarreling about it, and hid it so well that eventually it became nothing more than a legend--until now.

The 1 oz bottle is beautifully packaged in a box with a fetish figure on the outside, stating that "All things good or bad are driven by energy," implying that that this hot sauce is the source of this energy. It isn't really a sauce but a chili paste for those that like hot food.

We're used to hot food in our family. Tonight we had pumpkin soup by request of our daughter, and both of our children aged three and eight ask for chili sauce for their soup.

Pumpkin soup also means hot chili sauce to me, and preferably much hotter than requested by our children, so today was a perfect day to try The Source, which until now had been confined to a shelf out of children's reach.

Upon opening the box, I received the first indication of just how hot The Source might be. You rarely find foods with liability release labels, but the back label of the bottle made it explicit that:


An appropriate warning for a bottle claiming to contain hot sauce equivalent to 7.1 million Scoville units, meaning that it will have to be diluted 7.1 million times before the irritant active component causing chili to feel hot is undetectable, or about thirty times hotter than the hottest chili. In other words, whatever The Source is, it must have come straight from Hell.

The contents, a maroon paste, was to be applied with a plastic spatula. Wise from experience with hot chili, I scraped a barely visible amount off the spatula and mixed it into my bowl of soup.

It tasted wonderful. It was truly a great taste of fine chili, but as chili lovers can tell you, if hot chili feels hot right off the bat, get ready to burn, baby.

The sensation of a lit fuse came almost immediately. And it became hot. Burning, freaking hot. My nose started to run, and my eyes watered. If I had put anything more than just a pinch of the paste into my full bowl of soup, I swear I'd have had to see a doctor.

Yet the taste is addictive. I can't wait to experiment with this product in a dish that requires chili as a critical ingredient. I'm not sure which god held The Source, but I suspect he is to be found among those with horns and cloven hoofs.