This week’s topics include the WF’s new take on cheeseburgers, another opportunity to blame your upbringing, tailgating food you wish you ate, and more of the Gospel According to the Wannabe Foodie (wine prices).
What am I working on? Nothing earth shattering or particularly fancy. Cheeseburgers. To be more precise, inside out burgers. The cheese is on the inside.
Make 2 smallish patties (from fresh ground chuck, of course) and salt and pepper them. Put a wad of your favorite cheese on one and place the other patty on top of that patty. Pick them up and press the two edges together to make a complete patty. Give the completed patty a hearty push in the middle with the back of a spoon.
The spoon serves two purposes. It ensures and that the two patties have become one. More importantly, it keeps the patty from rising up in the center and becoming a ‘ball’ patty when it's cooked. Ever cook a burger that has a shape more akin to a racquetball than a burger? This will solve that problem.
I prepared mine with Point Reyes blue cheese in the middle. The Red and the Things had cheddar. I cooked them to about medium over hardwood charcoal on my Weber. I served them with fries, corn on the cob, and salad.
Check mine out:
If you like burgers and that doesn’t make you salivate, there is something fundamentally wrong with you and your upbringing. Personally, I blame your mama.
You can see the cheese oozing out of the middle. Just how you like it…… Note the toppings on the bottom so that as you bite through it, you immediately taste the toppings with the burger.
The review? Imagine soft, creamy blue cheese oozing out of the middle of burger. Pretty spectacular. I don’t know if this is my favorite way to cook burgers, but it’s close. You can put just about anything in the middle with the cheese – bacon, grilled onions, sauteed mushrooms, etc.
Tailgating Food. It’s college football season, which means I am often at home games of my beloved team and tailgating before the game. Most people cook frozen burgers, hot dogs, or if they’re really ambitious, brats.
Not this group. Most of us are pretty decent home cooks and we refuse to eat plain old tailgating food. Check out the fare from the latest game.
Appetizer? Home made spicy shrimp springs rolls made by my friend, D. Served with a tangy, spicy dipping sauce. Inside there was spicy shrimp, rice, fresh mint, and fresh cilantro. I’m sure that’s not the complete list of ingredients, but that’s most of them. The rolls had a nice and fresh taste, which you don’t normally associate with the crap spring rolls you have in most restaurants. Very nice, particularly when you consider that D is most definitely not Asian.
Main course – spare ribs. Not just any spare ribs. Spare ribs that have spent 30 hours in P’s Sous Vide machine in a sauce of his making. P then grilled them at the tailgate and served them with an Asian-inspired sauce. Think hoisin-based barbeque sauce. Check them out.
The review? These were very different than the hill billy ribs I usually make. But, they were very good. The sauce reminded my pea brain of Korean short-ribs, at least a bit. Very nice flavors. The meat literally fell off the bone, which is nice when you’re tailgating. You’ve only got one hand to commit to eating while you tailgate (there’s a beer in the other hand). You don’t want to wrestle with tough meat on a rib bone.
Here’s the ultimate review – Thing 2 had at least 4 ribs, and I bet he had closer to 6.
Nice work, P. By the way, P has his own blog and it’s very good. Give it a read: Irrelevant Discourse
The Gospel According to the Wannabe Foodie. Wine prices. I have lots of friends that are wine price snobs. A lot of them believe that it can’t be a great wine unless you spent a lot of money on it.
Do you know what I say about that? B.S.
There are some wines under $10 which are pretty decent, but they’re somewhat rare. One example was the 2006 Louis Jadot Beaujolais which Costco had in stock a couple years ago. It was a fantastic grape year and Costco had purchased a large number of futures of this wine at a specific price. $6 in the store and it was fantastic. A $6 wine that’s fantastic is certainly not the norm.
The vast majority of wine I drink costs $10-25. In my ever so humble opinion, that’s the true sweet spot of wine prices. Go into Total Wine and pick up a number of wines they recommend in this price range and I doubt you’ll be disappointed. Plus, you can serve a few bottles of wine at this price to your dinner guests and not worry if little Johnny will be able to eat lunch the next week.
If you have friends that drink wine like my friends, you need a lot of moderately-priced wine on hand when they come over.
Every once in a while, I’ll thrown down for some wine in the $25-40 range, but that’s certainly not the norm. One example is the Stags Leap Artemis I wrote about a couple of months ago. $40 or so, and worth every penny. Fabulous wine.
Anything over $50 or so better have fairy dust spewing out of the bottle and make me sing with joy in a language I previously didn’t speak. I’m talking a true Hallelujah moment.
$100 bottle of wine?! I have exactly two of them and they’re both magnums. This price range is just not me. You serve it and I’m happy to drink it. However, I have rarely found a $100 bottle of wine that is, for example, more than twice as good as that Stags Leap Artemis, or 3 or 4 times better than my favorite Petite Syrah, Vincent Arroyo.
I personally think most people simply fall for the idea that more expensive means better wine. It’s simply not a universal truism. At best, price is a partial indicator of quality. At best.
Happy cooking.
WF
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