Experimental Chefery

Bad food is not worth eating!

You wouldn’t think that this would be a controversial statement, but then my wife sent me a link: http://www.fancyfastfood.com/ .  What is going on over there? Look, most of the food they are using to make the final dish is barely worth eating in the first place–how in the world can it be worth eating after you further mangle it? I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with you if you like KFC or other fast food restaurants, but let’s not pretend that it’s good food.  It’s not.  It’s barely worth calling food sometimes.  (As a note to you good people running the blog at fancy fast foods–nothing personal, after all your creations do take a certain amount of creativity and ingenuity.  I’m not trying to slam that.  I have a different goal.  All that said, I’m not attacking anyone personally.  This is just a rant about food after all, and my general peevishness in that regard.)

BAD FOOD IS NOT WORTH EATING!!

So often in this country we sacrifice quality in our food for convenience.  Restaurants try to cut costs in any way they can-often by hiring minimally competent ‘cooks’ who only know how to assemble a list of heated items onto a plate in reasonably presentable fashion–and that’s not even at the fast ‘food’ places where you won’t even get a plate!  There the individuals who prepare your ‘food’ are not even worth the title ‘cook’.  Sure they take the frozen meat/fries or whatever and stick it in the fryer, or maybe they warm the so-called burgers before assembling the sandwich you are served, but this is not true cooking.

In the same fashion, cooking at home is not about opening cans bought at the store, putting frozen ingredients in the microwave and then putting all that into a pot and heating it for a minute according to the directions on a package!  This is not cooking.  My seven year old can do that and better (he cooks his own eggs without supervision–and we have to be careful because he wants to do more and more and tends to make a mess)!  Cooking is NOT simply about heating up a bunch of stuff and putting on a plate.

I’ll focus on a specific example of bad food that’s really annoyed me recently: hamburgers.  I love a good burger.  I’ll admit it.  That said, I haven’t had one recently.   I had a decent one at my brother-in-law’s retirement party (army, 24 years), but they were doing them in bulk over the grill and so there was a limit on how good they could be!  The meat was good, but they were a touch dry.  Which is what I want to rant about.  The POINT of hamburger is to take what would otherwise be tough meat and grind it up so that it will be tender (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_beef).  Grinding or mincing a tough cut does the rather difficult work of chewing before the meat is cooked…making it easier to chew again.  However if you pack it tightly and then dry it out you’ve essentially defeated the ENTIRE purpose of having a ground beef.  You might as well slap a whole steak on that bun!  Yippee!

Yes you do need to cook it enough to avoid concerns about food-born illnesses, especially if you don’t have a butcher that you know well and who will grind it fresh, but over cooking it is just as bad!  That’s what a thermometer is for people!

I also have decided that pre-formed patties are part of the problem.  People pull them out of the freezer the put them straight on the grill.  The meat has NO spices, no extra glue to hold it together, no flavorings, then it goes from FROZEN to being heated, so by the time the center is cooked the outside is BLACKENED and torn from sticking to the grill (the moisture and low temperature in the meat acts just like sticking your tongue to a flagpole on a cold winter day–see this movie if you don’t know what I’m talking about:  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085334/ ).  In the end you have an essentially flavorless (preformed patties use the absolute dregs for grinding) burger that has been tortured, blackened and has no redeeming qualities.  I’m going to bet MONEY that you’ll then take that and put it on a bun that came from a package of eight buns that cost a total of seventy or eighty cents and slather it with the CHEAPEST condiments you were able to find and then try to tell me you love grilling.  NO! This is BAD food! It isn’t worth eating.  By the way, aside from being charred and blackened, this is EXACTLY what 99% of all fast food restaurants do–cheap meat followed with CHEAP buns and cheap, cheap toppings.  No thank you!

How to make a good burger

First please start with good ground meat.  That doesn’t mean you have to buy 96% lean whatever, and in fact, if you do, you are likely to end up with a very dry burger–lean meats cook more quickly, and you must be careful with extremely lean ground beef.  Next don’t just form patties.  Mix in some flavor.  Some spices, maybe some dices onion, garlic and similar stuff–whatever makes you happiest–and then possibly some filler (if you use filler, use some egg too) to make it go a touch further.  Not that using filler will make your burgers more like a meat loaf than a hamburger, but that’s okay.  The goal is tender & juicy meat with lots of flavor that you can then put on a bun.  It has to hold its shape well, which means that it can’t have too much liquid in it.  That means what ever flavor you add needs to be in the form of DRY herbs and spices (not dried, but dry) for the most part, rather than things like barbecue sauce, tabasco, or liquid smoke.  That’s stuff you would probably reserve for a meat loaf.

Second, once you have flavorized your meat, form patties.  Not huge thick things, but flat and reasonably round ones.    I mean come on, this is NOT rocket science people.  Make it too thick and it takes too long to cook in the middle and you’ll have a black burger on the inside while it’s nearly raw on the outside.  Too thin, and it’ll dry out almost immediately.  No, I’m not going to tell you how thick or how big around.  Do your own research on that.  PART OF THE PROBLEM WITH MOST RECIPES TODAY IS THAT THEY DON’T REQUIRE ANY THOUGHT OR EFFORT!  These so-called recipes that call for “1 medium onion” drive me insane.  Well that’s nice to know, anonymous recipe writer, but there is a LOT of variation in expected onion size, so what I think is a medium-sized onion is PROBABLY a LOT bigger than what SOME people would select as a medium-sized onion.  Twit.   Give me a real measurement: Onion, diced, 300 grams.  That’s what I want to see IN THE INGREDIENT LIST.  WHY?  BECAUSE IT PREVENTS BAD FOOD!

BAD FOOD IS THE RESULT OF BAD RECIPES!  BAD RECIPES ARE WRITTEN BECAUSE WE ARE CONDITIONED TO ACCEPT BAD FOOD!!!

I never finished telling how to make a good burger–last point of advice–use a thermometer, cook one burger on your grill at a medium-high temperature and see how long it takes to cook it through turning it ONCE about half-way through.  Practice this a few times.  Eventually you’ll get to the point where you can set a timer after you get all the burgers on, flip them when it goes off, and then set it again, and take them off the grill when it goes off again, confident that they’ll be perfect.   Charcoal grills will need a LOT more practice until you are much more comfortable with your temperatures are (hint, get a grill thermometer too)!

Back to the recipes!  In our culture we accept bad recipes that include a lot of imprecise measurements (a bag of this weighing an unspecified amount, an can of that of an uncertain volume, etc) and that use a lot of BAD ingredients (cream of chicken soup to make chicken enchiladas is my current annoyance–yes they taste fine, but while convenient it is NOT a recipe in the traditional sense–it results in BAD food).  If you find a recipe that doesn’t tell you how much you need of an item in precise terms–do yourself a favor and skip it.  If a recipe relies heavily on prepared stuff like cream of *whatever* soup, skip it.  Sure you might get a tasty meal, but then again you might not.  This is especially true of baked goods.  If you are baking and you have a recipe that calls for 3 cups of flour, either figure out how to convert that to a weight measurement, or skip it.  You are safer skipping it.  The sad thing is that for the MAJORITY of baking recipes you are going to end up with nothing to cook.  Why?  Because we don’t use weights in American cooking, even though we should.  But this leads to BAD food.

How did we get here?  Laziness.  We wanted our food faster and easier.  We didn’t want to spend all day on cooking a meal.  We didn’t want to think about dinner right after lunch, let alone the night before.  But truly great food from fresh ingredients requires that one magical ingredient that you cannot buy: time.  There are ways to speed things up, and as shown on Iron Chef in its various formats, you CAN do a lot in an hour, but if talk to those chefs, they’ll tell you that there are just some things that cannot be done in an hour, even with mystical machines like blast chillers and pressure cookers.  If you want truly GREAT baked beans, you are going to have to spend some time on it.  Don’t expect it to happen in 20 minutes or less–and don’t expect it to come from a can.

If you want great pasta sure you can buy it, but that’s going to be expensive.  Or you can invest some time and learn how to make it.  It’s labor intensive, true, but even though I’m just learning I already see that it’s cheaper and and better–and I can get flavors that I choose, which is something that would cost a LOT of money at a store.

So you can keep on eating bad food, working from BAD recipes, and wasting your time and money of worthless junk, or you can join me in standing up and saying “No more BAD food, no more BAD recipes, I want stuff that is worth eating!”.

Tags: bad food, burgers