Burgers of Distinction

People often ask me why with all the things I write about, why the avoidance of burgers, those pulchitrudinous patties, those savory pockets, those towers of oozing goodness, those hamburgers. Hold onto your napkins, here we go with a few outstanding items.

1. The Butter Burger

The first burger of renown is from Serious Eats, where you can watch an entertaining little video showing the making of the Butter Burger (it doesn’t embed properly so follow this link and enjoy).

2. The Bacon Burger

And this heartstopper of a meal from Peppers and Smoke:

Our goal today – one pound of bacon, stuffed with cheese, deep-fried, topped with more cheese.

I cranked up the meat grinder and ground the bacon twice, once with the coarse plate and a second time through the fine plate.

I made a hollow in the patty and filled it with the mozzarella. I sealed a second patty over this and kneaded the edges together.

I mixed up a beer batter and coated the entire patty. The final layer wasn’t as thick as it looks here.

Into the oil it goes!

Almost done. It was hard to get it to cook correctly. The patty was almost an inch thick and I didn’t want to burn the outer parts.

Served with a cold Shiner Bock and a side of deep-fried jalapenos.

It was pretty good, but not as good as the original 100% Bacon Burger. I think using a smaller patty and cooking it on the grill would have been better. Perhaps that will be Bacon Burger 3.0…

3. Ordering in the Court

Next we have a frivolous but actual lawsuit from Lowering the Bar where a group sued a number of restaurants including McDonald’s and Burger King because they had not informed their customers that they cooked their meat. This relates to the infamous Proposition 65 in California law which requires transparency (informing and labelling) if your product involves exposures to potentially harmful chemicals, and yes, cooking meat will produce some of those chemicals.

4. The Final Burger

For the piece de resistance, I am reanimating a dead post from a blog called The Idiot Behind the Iron Mask. We can only hope that we too will someday be lucky enough to have a similar adventure.

The Burger Of Death

They say, or rather, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism says, that Malaysians are a generous and hospitable bunch. Hospitable, maybe, but I’d rather call us hospitalising. Yes, hospitalising.

We are generous with foods that could hospitalise people who consume them.

For instance, just a while ago. I was at Great Eastern Mall, having dinner with a good old friend. Right after the meal, sensing insatiation, he suggested that we go to this lovely burger stall somewhere in Ampang. “OK,” I said. So we drove there.

And that was when I saw The Burger-Man Of Death.

The Burger-Man, And His Burgers, Of Death

We observed how he made his burgers.

First, he threw a bucketload of butter or margarine or some equally sticky substance onto the frying pan. And then some more.

We had an ayam special (literally: ‘special chicken’) ordered for each one of us, so the mamak tossed frosted chicken burgers into the oil.

Then, once the burger was half-fried, he threw in another bucketload of margarine. No, I’m not kidding. The whole burger meat was really fried in that much oil. Some cheese was thrown onto the layers of the burger, and some droplets of sauce.

The sticky, icky burger, finally fried, was then removed from the oily pool it was previously submerged in, and placed straight inbetween two separate pieces of bread. Here’s the cool part: he actually added some butter. (As if there wasn’t enough already.) Then, some chilli sauce, some soy sauce, a bit of mayonnaise, and voila! A completed Burger Of Death.

Sinking My Teeth In

The burger is the slimiest, greasiest, oiliest burger I’ve ever tasted in my life.

Of course it tastes good. Of course I’ve never tasted anything like it before.

But the more bites I took, the worse I felt. I could feel the oil in my throat; the thickness of it. Pure, unadulterated cholestrol. And my mind could never undo the fact that The Burger of Death is the equivalent of a heart-attack. (Hence, the name.)

“The human limit for eating this burger is probably 2. Eating three probably means instant death,” my friend says.

Not that I disagree.