Even though there are numerous burger options in Beijing today, it's still hard to find a good one.
Amongst the most common problems are:
Lousy buns
(Although there are some foreign-run bakeries here that know how to make good bread, restaurants always seem to opt for crappy mass-produced Chinese-made buns - and Chinese bread always seems to have a nasty hint of sweetness about it.)
Poor quality meat
(I've mentioned before the shitty quality of most of the beef in this country. If you want a really good burger, you're probably going to have to pay a premium rate for imported Australian beef.)
Iffy consistency/excessive fragility
(Even the better burgers here have an alarming tendency to fall apart. Perhaps you need to use a little beaten egg to bind your patties, gentlemen??)
Eccentric sizing
(Either too big or too small - rarely just right.)
Lack of sauces/relishes
(Well, other than ketchup. Or, if you're really lucky, mustard. On the other hand, some places want to use wildly inappropriate sauces such as thousand island dressing! Without asking you.)
Lack of decent fries/salad
(Even when the burger's sort of OK, the accompaniments rarely are.)
Soggy burger/soggy bun
(None of the grill chefs in this town seems to have acquired the basic skill of squeezing the excess fat out of the burger while it's grilling. 9 times out of 10, you have to do this for yourself after your burger arrives - leaving a huge pool of unappetising grease on your plate. Even worse, a lot of the burgers here seem to have a huge amount of water in them [not sure if it's just down to their being deep frozen, or if the meat is being injected with extra water to bulk it up, or...] which leaves an even bigger and nastier puddle on your plate, and/or completely saturates the bottom half of your burger bun. Honestly, some of these buns/burgers you have to wring out like a flannel. It's not nice.)
This is not rocket science - but I'm not sure that anywhere in Beijing has really managed to get it right yet. I'm still looking.
To be continued (again)......
10 comments:
Well, just about every chef I've ever met recommends this. There may be other binding agents you could use too, but this is the easiest and least offensive. If you don't use this, the burger is going to fall apart - unless you've packed the mix with breadcrumbs or some kind of shit like that. And that really is sacrilege, if you ask me.
Horseshit it will fall apart. Mine don't. Egg makes it meatloaf. Which is tasty, but it is not a burger.
I do personally use a (small amount of a) binding agent, but for flavor, not to keep it together. I know many people who use nothing, including top chefs.
If it is falling apart, then the person is shaping it wrong, or handling it too often on the grill.
I just noticed as well. Squeezing out the fat from the burger on the grill? That might fly at McDonald's but any chef would beat you and throw you out of his kitchen for such heresy.
If that is what you want to do with burgers, just wrap styrofoam packing peanuts in cling film, microwave, and add ketchup.
Everyone I've ever watched grilling a burger does this. And that includes the folks at Five Guys. If you don't give them a gentle squeeze with the spatula every few minutes, they are going to be oozing with liquid fat - which ain't nice. You maybe don't have this problem because - either you use very lean meat, or you don't cook them long enough to melt the all the fat.
Your regular, bog-standard commercial burger needs to be de-greased a little.
And it's the SHAPE that makes something a burger (or a meatloaf); the composition is essentially similar, if not, in some people's conception, identical.
As with your recent "not a bourbon" outburst, you appear to be getting on a high horse about something without having any rational basis for your opinion. US law defines Jack Daniel's as a bourbon. A majority of professional chefs recommend egg as a binding agent in burger mix. Only The Cowboy says different.
But one day, he will change the world, oh yes.....
Froog
I love you with all my heart, you know that. But if you ever go near my burgers, I will beat you to death with a baseball bat.
While a fast food place may press it's burgers down to squeeze fat out, NOWHERE good should be doing it. It is the first rule you are taught when cooking burgers - it is also, btw, a good way to get food poisoning.
A burger is about the meat - good meat is the prerequisite for a good burger. If the meat is not good, nothing can save it. The fat content is utterly critical. People I know who buy lean ground beef for a burger get an ass patty in response. 80-20 is the correct beef to use.
You then need to decide what is going into it. I asked a few professional chefs yesterday if they would ever put egg in, and they laughed at you. Laughed, I tell you. Some will simply use beef. Others beef with a few spices. I go a little further than that.
Ground beef, chopped onion (I like my onion a little chunky, to give texture), fresh ground black pepper, dijon mustard, herbes de provence. Mixed all together by hand, then pressed into patty shapes - I tend to do around a 5 oz patty - using my burger press. That way they are all the same size and will cook consistently.
Then, and here is the key, left overnight in the fridge so the flavors can meld.
Burgers and meatloaf are simply not the same. They are cousins at best, and should have markedly different textures.
Aha, so we have finally goaded your 'secret' recipe out of you! Success!!
Not sure about the 'food poisoning' point?! Are you thinking of places like McD's where they cook them on a hotplate rather than a flame-grill? I worry about how often and how carefully they clean the equipment in dodgy kebab places, but I really can't see it being a problem where you've got a proper barbecue setup - the fat just burns up in the fire. And I imagine McD's - whatever else we may hate them for - are fairly strict on matters of food hygiene.
They may do things differently in America (probably, they do it differently in different parts of America - all kinds of odd prejudices about this subject!). However, I am pretty sure that everyone I've ever seen demonstrating burger recipes on TV cooking shows (and everyone I've found in a quick online review) recommends using a little egg as a binding agent. I rather suspect that any chefs who say they don't are: a) lying; b) using something else; or c) turning out out very crumbly burgers for the sake of some perverse notion of 'purity'.
80/20 is a key ration in a lot of things, but I've never heard it suggested for fat content in a burger before. Frankly, it seems on the high side to me. However, I suspect most of the burgers that are inflicted on us here in Beijing have a far higher fat content (certainly a far higher 'non-meat' content!) - hence the tendency for them to ooze liquid fat out of every pore the first time you bite into them. Ugh!
I worry about cooking times here too. I'm sure most of the fat leaks out and drains away (even without any pressing at all, if you insist, Cowboy) if you take your time cooking them. But here in BJ, I suspect they're often cooked from frozen (with perhaps just a bit of pre-thawing in the microwave) and cooked on a high heat in the minimum possible time.
A departing American friend threw a 'White Trash BBQ' leaving party this summer, and managed to find some really good readymade burgers - unbelievably, in a neighbourhood Chinese supermarket. Unfortunately, she has a hopeless sense of direction, and was completely unable to recall or describe where this supermarket was. I have scoured the area looking for it, but have come up blank.
It's been YEARS since I attempted to make a burger for myself. I am discouraged by the poor quality of the meat here (and the expense of anything half-way good), but this debate has encouraged me to give it a go again. Perhaps next Spring, when the weather becomes conducive to outdoor barbecues again.....
The food poisoning is the result of the bottom of the spatula being pressed into undercooked meat and transferred from burger to burger.
Not a problem if one can properly source one's meat, but I am unlikely to go to my local butcher and pay top dollar for ground beef for burgers. But the key reason for not pressing is it is the damn juices that give the thing flavor - you want them in the burger, not on the flames.
Anyway, I did some research last night when waiting for word processing to perform their magic. I looked at over 40 online burger recipes, and 2 mentioned egg. They were also identical recipes, which makes me think they may have a common source. And they both included bread crumbs, which is heresy as well. As for going on about American's doing it differently, well, it is the quintessential American food. Maybe US recipes should be considered the most authentic?
A local Latin-fusion restuarant does an incredible burger at lunch. 75% beef, 25% chorizo. It is to die for.
As for 80-20, that is the right fat quotient. This isn't just my statement, it is agreed to by professionals.The fat predominately cooks out (without smashing your burger into nothingness in a ham-fisted atttempt at health), but is sufficient to maintain moistness. And if you are using 90-10, or even, perish the though 95-5, it isn't surprising the burger will fall apart. Though even so, the idea of binding a burger with a egg is making me irate again.
Don't get the spatula thing at all. The problem surely comes if you're picking up your uncooked meat with the spatula.
But a one-second exposure, from fresh meat, on a utensil that's getting a lot of heat put on it.... I can't see that's really a problem. But if there's a problem, that's where it would be.
You're only subsequently going to be touching a burger that is already well sealed and seared, and there ain't going to be no bacteria living on the surface of that.
Interesting that you get different Internet search returns over there. Not surprising, but interesting. And I only looked at 4 or 5, not 40, so you got the best of me there - but you are SAD.
It isn't only FAT that gives the meat the flavour; and you want the flavoursome fat IN the burger, not squirting out of it all over the plate.
I'd bet even you - quite unconsciously - press the burger on to the grill just a bit when you flip it. Just about everyone does!
If you don't, and you've got excessively fatty 'meat' in your burger, it's a horror show. That's the situation we've got here in Beijing. The Platonic-ideal burgers of DC are not relevant to this discussion.
well the squeezing itself creates a problem...
Meaty juices containing bad things (ie not yet cooked spill out on spatula). Spatula then transfers them to surface of other burgers which has already been cooked, and therefore does not return back up to heat needed to kill said bacteria. Night spent pooping like a steam train.
And don't get fooled by fresh meat... ground beef is a potential disaster, because of the processing. on a steak, bacteria is on the outside, therefore gets kileld by the heat. Once ground, teh bacteria is distributed through the meat, and so the danger is much higher.
The ideal is to buy steak, and grind it yourself. That way also you can control the fat content to the level you want. But your alternatives are a) cook a burger to buggery (which destroys the point of a burger, which should be served medium rare, medium at worst) or b) trust your meat. I buy from a regular supermarket, but one that seems to have a very good supply chain. Even so, and especially if one is "undercooking" meat, elementary food safety procedures, including not rpessing on the patty (which is bad for flavor too) should be followed.
If you say so, sir.
But despite years of 'bad practice' on the barbecue, I have never contracted a dose of the squits from a burger.
And that whole "uncooked juices" thing seems like a bit of a superstition to me. Most of the juice escapes out of the underside of the burger (especially once the top side has been sealed by a bit of cooking). And once the fat is hot enough to have melted, it's probably hot enough to have killed most of the bacteria in it too.
After all, some fat and juice are dribbling out of a burger all the time, even if you don't press it - so a spatula always gets exposed to some of that while cooking. I can't see that it's nearly as bad - in terms of bacteria exposure - as touching the uncooked meat when you first put it on the grill. But maybe you recommend doing that by hand?
A little bit of fat gives you flavour, sure. But excessive fat is unwholesome. Our problem here is really grotesque amounts of excess fat (and WATER!).
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