Subj : Atk 1 To : SEAN DENNIS From : JIM WELLER Date : Sun Jul 10 2022 13:54:00 -=> Quoting Sean Dennis to All <=- SD> America's Test Kitchen It's the PBS show started by the Cook's Illustrated Magazine people. Both are famous for extensive recipe testing and very detailed instructions. One of their alumni is J. Kenji Lopez-Alt who blogs at Serious Eats and who I follow closely for those reasons. He not only does fancy super-cheffy stuff but recreates fast food favourites meticulously, unlike Gloria Pitzer or Todd Wilbur who come kinda close but never bang on. MMMMM----- Recipe via Meal-Master (tm) v8.06 Title: The World's Best Single Burger Pt 1 Categories: Beef, Groundmeat, Sandwiches, Ham Yield: 1 Servings Hamburgers It's time for another round of The Burger Lab. I'm a sucker for crisp, brown, salty crust, and up until recently, I thought the burger at the Shake Shack was about as crispety crunchety as they come but then I discovered this one. It's like a thin, small (four ounces), classic diner-style burger on crack. Don't cook it for company (the recipe only works for one burger at a time ). The Grind: Like most of my favorite burgers, the grind here is of utmost importance. For the ultimate experience, go with the oxtail and brisket-enhanced Blue Label Burger Blend. When feeling lazy, I sometimes use 100% short rib or 100% well-marbled ground chuck, but having at least 25% fat content is essential. Just push the beef together until it forms ragged piles that barely cling together. Forming the patties is the most crucial step in the whole process. Using a thoroughly-chilled meat grinder or food processor and cubes of beef that have been placed in the freezer for 15 minutes prior to grinding, grind the meat directly onto a parchment paper or foil-lined baking sheet. Then and this is key, form the beef into four-ounce patties without picking it up. That's right. Just push the beef together until it forms ragged piles that barely cling together. It's got to do with the structure of meat. When ground, beef proteins are very sticky—particularly to each other. Given the chance, they'll cling to each other like Japanese school girls to Hello Kitty bento boxes, and the more you work them, the tighter they cling. The goal here is to keep the meat as loose as possible. This offers a myriad of benefits, which will make themselves clearer as we work our way through the technique. Salt and pepper the patties generously on one side, then carefully flip with a wide spatula (remember, don't ever pick up the patties with your bare hands) and season the second side before slipping it (via a spatula) into a ripping-hot small skillet. N.B. This is the main reason that this recipe absolutely cannot be made with store-bought ground beef. Store-bought ground beef is ground too finely and already pressed together before you take it out of the package. Burgers and Mandelbrot fractals: If you look at a coastline from far away and measure it, which gives you a certain perimeter. As you zoom closer and closer, you realize there are tiny inlets or curves in the beach that weren't visible from far away. When measured again, these bumps actually add length to the total perimeter. This is a phenomenon known as the Richardson Effect, and basically states that the more precisely you measure a coastline, the longer the measurement gets. And the more bumpy or irregular the surface is, the more this effect is pronounced. Well, the same applies to hamburgers. While at first it may seem the two burgers above have the exact same mass, pretty much the same volume, and must therefore have the same surface area, because of the highly bumpy and irregular surface of the loose-packed patty, it's surface area is actually much much greater than the hand-formed patty. Posted by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt From: Serious Eats MMMMM Cheers Jim .... Anything can be improved. ___ Blue Wave/QWK v2.20 --- Platinum Xpress/Win/WINServer v3.0pr5 * Origin: Fidonet Since 1991 www.doccyber.org bbs.docsplace.org (1:135/392) .