Fast-food Burger Eat-Compare

Burgers are great. Burgers are also terrible. What I mean by that is that the concept of a burger is superb, but the execution is almost always wrong. Or worse, the "correct" execution is just boring. At face value, it seems simple to make a good burger - a big, grilled slab of ground meat on a bun, with onions, tomatoes, ketchup and mustard. What can go wrong? So much.

Most burgers end up overcooked to the point of dessication. Condiments can be difficult to balance properly - I've had plenty of burgers that just tasted like ketchup, or worse, mayo. The bun is often neglected, and any old cheap by-the-gross "hamburger-style" bun is deemed sufficient. And I can't count how many times I've been served a burger without dressings at all, but only condiments - yes, I do actually want a salad on my burger, thank you! But even when properly executed, there are mistakes to make. The biggest mistake (in our humble opinion) is the fixation on having a 100% beef patty. Put some diced onion in there! Or some tomato paste! Or some spinach! Season the meat, for goodness sake! Mix beef and turkey! Go nuts! Beef, by itself, is really about the most boring flavor in the world. My mother says it tastes brown. I disagree - it's more like a gray.

The worst offenders against burgerkind are fast-food vendors, usually, even though this is supposedly the product that they make all their money of off. You might suppose that a global corporation with billions of dollars and entire teams of test chefs and engineers behind them would be able to discover the concept of "seasoning meat", but I've yet to encounter a major fast-food chain that could pull it off properly. Fast-food burgers are usually greasy, thin, dry, underseasoned, and underdressed - or so we supposed.

Mariam and I rarely eat fast-food anything. On the one hand, this is because we actually can cook, and enjoy our own cooking - nevermind fast food, we rarely eat out. But fast food holds a special place of disdain for us. If we're going to go out somewhere and pay somebody else to cook food for us, we might as well go somewhere good and sit down. Fast food? I know my way around a kitchen - don't tell me you can properly cook meat in twenty seconds! Can't be done! But here's the thing - this disdain, this indifference even to the offerings of fast food means that we don't eat it - ever. So realistically, do we actually know what we're missing? Are fast-food burgers as bad as we suppose? We think we've got burgers figured out, with our own methods and ingredients, but do we? To what, really, are we to compare?

This prompted us some time ago to actually do the test, and eat-compare some fast-food burgers. We went around to six major fast-food chains, as well as to two "high-brow" fast-food chains to pick up what we considered to be flagship burgers. That's eight different restaurants, and eight burgers to compare, chosen for their relative superficial similarity, and how much we thought they represented the brands of their respective chains.

Lavashak

When I was a kid we used to have these fruit rolls called lavashak (لواشک). These were made of different kinds of pureed fruits and were dried into rolls and kids really liked them. They are made of plums, barberries, dogberries, sour cherries, apples and apricots. Of course, I never liked the sweet ones made of apples and apricots. My favorite ones were the homemade plum ones. The store bought rolls usually had a mix of apples to keep it cheap. And I remember whenever I was eating lavashak my parents would sort of get angry and tell me not to eat that junk food. Comparing to the garbage kids eat these days I was on the rather healthy side, at least I was eating fruit. Real fruit with real colors.

Good thing I grew up and can do as I please. I came to the US 4 years ago and was so excited to see fruit rolls in supermarkets. I did the mistake of buying some and being terrorized by the super sugary fruit flavor garbage I got. Being disappointed and deprived from my tart vitamins, I decided to make my own fruit rolls.

Three-Layer Enchilada Casserole

Mariam and I were recently visiting my parents, and before we left, my mother mentioned that she would soon be making an enchilada casserole for some others of the family. At first, we were bummed that we wouldn't be able to taste this, as we were leaving town. But then we thought, well, we could do that, too. And then we thought, well, we might be able to do that better. Then, well, we tried to do it better. My mom doesn't know it, yet, but we were competing for the best enchilada casserole. By default, we win. Sorry.

Anyway, as with most of our cooking these days, this was mostly improvised, so the recipe is largely approximate. Pretend I didn't just tell you that. THIS RECIPE IS PERFECT AND REFINED. Yes. That'll work.

Making Mushroom Smoke

When I (Ian) was about ten years old, my parents and I lived in England for a little over a year on account of a job my dad had there. There are plenty of culinary stories to tell about that, but for right now, I want to focus on just one thing - Shake O'Cini. In Britain, there's a large supermarket chain called Sainsbury's, and there my mother discovered this product, Shake O'Cini, which is essentially a metal shaker tin full of pulverized dried mushrooms. I had completely forgotten about it until recently, when she reminded me. And then I thought - well, I can do that.

Shake O'Cini - which is still available, as it happens, though apparently not at Sainsbury's, if their website is to be the definitive word - is really kind of an MSG workaround. A delicious workaround, to be sure, and absolutely worth doing - but it's a workaround. The reason that anybody uses MSG - and you probably should, despite its reputation - is for its incredibly strong umami flavor. Umami, if you're not familiar with the word, is one of the five principle flavors, and is the sort of indescribable meaty, savory flavor that's lent by foods high in protein. Meats, nuts, beans, cheese, fish, and of course, mushrooms all primarily carry this flavor. MSG is what happened when somebody figured out that, strictly speaking, protein doesn't taste like umami, amino acids do, especially the abundant and relatively easy-to-purify glutamate. Mushrooms are incredibly rich in glutamate, and ground mushrooms are pretty much MSG plus impurities. Delicious impurities.

A Word About Salt

I tend to distrust salt. It's got nothing to do with sodium in my diet and blood pressure or any of that - as far as I'm concerned, if you want your food to taste like anything, you've got to have a salty flavor in there, and that usually means sodium, so nuts to it. What I mean is I don't trust salt. Just salt. Not salty things, mind, but salt itself.

Table salt.

There's nothing wrong with it. Not really - it's just sodium chloride, a basic cubic crystalline solid that makes up a decent portion of the oceans and tastes like salt, rather appropriately. By itself, it's not flammable, corrosive, or especially toxic, even in quite disgustingly large doses. Truth is, you need it to live - our brains rely on sodium ions to maintain voltage differentials that allow synapses to fire. Your blood needs to have a certain concentration of salt to prevent your blood cells from swelling up and bursting. Salt's really pretty good stuff.

But from a culinary perspective, I just don't trust basic table salt. The reason is simple - it's a pure flavor. There's really nothing else in your pantry or fridge that can deliver a more pure essence of one of the five principle flavors, save for perhaps refined crystalline fructose, if you happen to have that lying around. While that kind of sounds poetically beautiful, it's actually quite dangerous - you can really irreparably destroy a good meal with a teaspoon of table salt. And I have done that! Several times! The thing is, you really need salt - salt is the foundation of so many other complexities of flavor, that without it, you often can't really taste anything else. Most soups are pretty much dirty water unless there's some salt in there, and meats all just taste like gray until you put a pinch of salt on there. But two pinches of salt? Then that might be all you taste. Dangerous stuff.

I try to avoid salt whenever I can, as a result, and use less concentrated, more flavorful sources of salt. Spaghetti sauce? Add some olive brine. Thai curry? Fish sauce. Risotto? Anchovy paste. Stir fry? Soy sauce. Chili? Chicken stock. Goulash? Worcestershire. All of these are salty things we always have in our pantries (well, maybe not anchovy paste for most of you) that have a depth of flavor by themselves that they'll lend to whatever dish you put them in. Salt isn't just dangerous, it's boring, and by using a less concentrated salt source, I can make a more interesting dish without ruining everything because the appropriate amount of salt to add was actually an eighth teaspoon, and I had the utter gall to add a quarter. (You know another dangerous principle flavor? Bitterness.)

So I don't trust salt. To be sure, I use it when I have to, and there are several different varieties of granulated salt that have interesting flavors all their own - I have a special regard for smoked salt, for instance. But it's an edgy relationship I have, and only when I'm absolutely sure that no other salt source will work with the flavor I'm building will I pick up that shaker of sodium chloride, and slowly, hesitantly, lower it over my pot.