March 23, 2003

Sunday March 23, 2003 • Howard Tayler

Saturday, shortly after I packed a double Whopper with cheese down my pie-hole, it occurred to me that fast food is an exercise in compromise. None of the fast-food sandwiches I enjoy are perfect, and their imperfections are varied enough that I have to eat around a little bit to approximate The Perfect Hamburger.

The Perfect Hamburger is, unfortunately, variable from person to person. Here's mine:

Start with fresh ground beef. The frozen beef is only fit for chili or spaghetti sauce. Form a 1/3 pound patty in a disc roughly half an inch larger in diameter than the buns you'll be using. Shape the patty so that it's thicker right at the edges than it is in the middle -- this ensures that as it cooks and shrinks, it doesn't bunch up too much in the middle.

Cook it over open flame. (Gas is fine. If you use those little hardwood briquets you're just wasting money.) Salt and pepper to taste (liberally, please). Make sure the fire is hot enough so that when the burger has carcinogenically charred bits on the outside, the inside is still moist. Halfway to done a few thin slices of mild cheddar should be placed on the patty, so they're bubbly and melty when the payload is ready to be delivered to the target. At launch time, short, thin strips of crisp bacon should be laid into the bubbly cheese.

The bun should be a cornmeal-dusted bun similar to that used by Wendy's on the Big Bacon Classic. Butter the insides of the bun, and then toast it in a fry-pan. Naturally, for The Perfect Burger, the bun toasting operation is going on simultaneously to the payload preparation.

Lay the patty on the BOTTOM half of the toasted bun, cheese-side DOWN. The cheese/bacon/beef-char medley should fuse to the bread instantly if you've done it right. This ensures that the final product will only tend to slide around on the top half, and then only if you've tried to lay too much vegetable matter on it.

Said vegetable matter must include catsup, mustard, sliced onion, dill pickle slices, thin tomato slices, COLD iceberg lettuce, and a little Miracle Whip. This layer is where many of the vitamins come from, as well as a lot of the flavor, so the temptation is to add too much, resulting in a mess. The Perfect Burger, however, is not messy. The best way to order them is to put the mustard, catsup, and Miracle Whip on the bun first, spread them around with two-to-four pickle slices, and then layer the lettuce, tomato, and onion.

The last step in the creation of The Perfect Hamburger is to get someone else to go to this trouble for you. Unfortunately, this is difficult, even for happily married people like myself, since it is quite difficult to convince even the most doting companion the importance of each of these steps. Building The Perfect Hamburger is like forging a sword... if you take shortcuts it may still LOOK right, but in the heat of battle you'll end up with bacon in your lap, so to speak.

Thus, my quest. Wendy's Big Bacon Classic is the only sandwich with both the fresh ground beef and the right bun (although it's missing the butter). Carl's Junior, Hardees, and Burger King get the flame-broiling right, but they use frozen beef (and Carl's and Hardees are the same place -- don't be fooled!). McDonalds misses on pretty much all counts, except the bit about having the burger not fall apart when you try to eat it. In fact, McDonalds misses the mark by so much that their sandwiches end up in their own category, which I'm ashamed to admit I love for completely different reasons.

Your perfect hamburger (note the non-capitalization... this is MY website) is likely different from mine. If you've found a way to obtain it commercially, rather than having to contract the services of a master burger-smith, I envy you.

The matter of fried goods on the side is beyond the scope of this treatise. But I know you're going to want some.