The burger is often considered a rather lowly dish, suitable for fast-food joints and late-night exam bingeing. However the delicious American cultural export has a long and delicious history stretching back millennia. Or at least so I assume. I didn’t bother to look it up; the cultural heritage of the food I eat has no importance to me. All I care is that cheap ingredients go in, and delicious nutritious food comes out.
The burger is a very versatile recipe, so you should have no problem following the rules of the kitchen: no buying new food (that’s what a grocery-distribution middle-man is for), no measuring ingredients (that’s what scientists are for), and no giving up hope when things go poorly (that’s for the Federal NDP).
The most important part of a burger is the meat. Traditionally, this is ground cow, but the reality is that any ground meat could be used. Pig might be nice, as would deer, chicken, rabbit, or kangaroo. Don’t try koala though; it’s far too robust a meat to use on anything but koala-schnitzel. Now if you don’t have ground meat on hand and you’re homemade meat grinder burnt out last month when you helped the Austrian embassy destroy some critical documents, you can made a good facsimile with just your knife and cutting board. (No, a piece of paper does not count as a cutting board; you need at least 2 to make a wood laminate.) Take your pig and chop it as finely as you can. Make sure you use a sharp knife, since raw meat tends to be difficult to cut. Incidentally, that’s part of the reason why we cook it at all.
Once your deer is nicely chopped, put it in a bowl. Add katsup, plenty of panko, mustard, paprika, and any other ingredients you would like integrated into the patty. Do not add salt. Do I look like Alton Brown? No? Then just do what I say without a detailed explanation. Obviously panko has a lot of substitutions; raw flour, corn starch, corn flour, torn up pieces of bread, the entrails of your enemies. Everything else equally so; paprika could be replaced with carmine, mustard with chlorine, and katsup with tomatoes squished by the flat of your knife. Just experiment, you’re sure to make something cool, if not delectable.
Once all other ingredients are in, it’s time to add the binder. Normally this is an egg. If you have chopped, rather than ground, chicken two eggs might be in order to get everything to stick better. If you and your roommates are oviphiles, and thus you went through the 70 eggs that you bought a week ago, there are a number of substitutions. If you used corn starch instead of panko as your filler, just add water. So long as you keep quickly and forcefully flipping the patty as it cooks it should hold together pretty well. Other options for those with less wrist strength include honey, syrup, Elmer’s Wood Glue, and liquid nitrogen.
Mix up your bowl until it’s entropy tends towards the maximum for the mixing process. Make fist-sized balls. (This technique is particularly advantageous because it regulates the portion size to your body size, at least to a degree.) Put two or three balls at a time into a pan that you’ve had the foresight to pre-heat for the last 5 minutes. Before you do so, put a little salt in the pan. If you don’t have a pan, you can put them directly onto the grill; if it’s an electric stove it’s like using a flat-top grill like in a restaurant. If it’s a gas stove, on the other hand, it’s functionally identical to using a barbeque. Just try to keep the grease out of the flame. And of course if you have a barbeque you can also use that.
Use your spatula to squish down the patty into an elliptical-prism with a height much less than the semi-major axis. Put a lid on top of your pan/oven so that the top of the patty cooks a bit as well. After a few minutes, flip the patty.
Serve with olives, pickles, pickled onions, beets, and anything else you can find in the back of the fridge.
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