Hold the leafy bits, please.

You want to make a hamburger? The good tomatoes are gone. We're out of lettuce. You didn't bake buns. It's October.

Yeah. But it'll be great, really. Simple.

Just a few ingredients:

Onions: that red onion that I forgot in the pantry, and those half onions that I put in the fridge yesterday. Slow cook in olive oil with a bit of brown sugar, salt and pepper. Very slow. Raise the heat at the end and deglaze the pan with some orange juice. The onions should just melt in your mouth. That will be the base upon which the burger sits.

The burger. Half a pound of beef, fifteen percent fat maximum, grilled, with nice char marks on top. Seasoning: salt and pepper. Yeah, it's just a sketch but the char marks really were there. Trust me. I wouldn't lie about char marks.

The chips. Oops. Forgot about those two Russet potatoes in the pantry. What's this? A Yukon gold potato? Slice 'em up, blanch in oil, quick final fry, salt and pepper again. Ready to go.

Plate it like in the illustration. Except I drew a really fancy, expensive plate. That's the nice thing about illustration. If you can imagine it, you can draw it. And you don't have to actually have it in your hands.

The wine was a cheap Monastrell that comes in a beautiful bottle with a passion flower on it. The wine is great with this kind of food, and makes a great vinegar container afterward.

A lot of hamburger!

Yesterday was Annette's art show. We decided to eat dinner with a friend after the show, but nobody wanted to go out. So, our friend said he'd bring some ground beef. He did. Three pounds of it. We already had one pound. The expiration date on this stuff comes up fast, so it's time to be creative.

Today after running errands, I checked the expiration date on one pack of ground beef. Sell by today. Joy! Hamburger again! No time to make buns, since we were already hungry. So what if I made an arepa heavily spiced with pimentón pepper and a bit of salt... fry it off, slice it in two and use it instead of a bun. Then some of that Australian blue cheese, some uncured bacon, some sautéd onions, a bit of arugula from the garden. The result: something thinner and easier to eat than a bun, with a great crunch factor. Lots of umami richness from the cheese, smokiness from the bacon and pimentón and a bitter counterpoint from the arugula.

We were more or less traditional yesterday with our friend. 140g patties made into maxi-sliders, with sesame seed mini-buns, garlic aioli, fresh tomato relish, lettuce. The meat was really a tower of beef mixed with bacon and garlic and char-grilled. The buns got sliced in thirds, the burgers in half, the tomato and aioli sauces slathered on, everything stacked and held together somewhat tenuously with toothpicks.

Now we only have about 1-1/2 pounds left to go. This pack has a later sell-by date, so it looks like we'll be able to take a burger break and eat something else. Not that I'm getting really tired of burgers... yet.

Heirloom tomato burgers

bun, lettuce, patty, egg, pimentón aioli...

...tomato, more tomato, a bit more...

... more tomato, lettuce, bun

How much tomato is too much? Well, when they're fresh-sliced summer heirlooms, I really don't know. The slices were about an inch thick, but the burger didn't taste over-tomatoed. It did pour juice like a tropical storm hitting a mountain range, a deluge that filled the bottom of the plate.

These patties were a premium frozen brand. Lots of flavor, but nothing beats a hand-formed patty for thickness and browning without succumbing to dryness. With a half pound of meat (before cooking) beefiness was assured. Cooked medium, since I didn't grind the meat myself and thanks to my food safety class I know just what can live in the depths of ground beef.

Here's what went into these towering tomatoey treats:


The bun
Baguette dough using pâte fermentée, sesame seeds. Nothing on the buns, so they could better absorb the juice coming off the burger and tomatoes. They were formed flat so that with a bit of squeezing it would be possible to eat this like nature intended: with your hands.

The sauce
Pimentón agridulce powder, garlic, red wine vinegar, chopped green olives (paste, really), egg yolk, lots of olive oil. Kind of an aioli with benefits.

The tomatoes
Cherokee Purple and Brandywine, lightly salted and peppered after slicing.

The meat
Simply seasoned with salt and pepper. The aioli was there to add more spice and flavor, so the meat could be simple and pure.

How could this be improved? Maybe a bit of bacon, home-ground beef that's thicker and more seasoned, maybe broil the tomatoes to intensify their flavor and reduce moisture content, a touch more salt. I could have added fresh basil but that would have dominated the tomatoes, and the goal was to let their flavor come through to accompany the meat. I left off the cheese for the same reason, but it could have had a bit of goat, blue, dry white cheddar or Alsatian muenster for more richness (and calories).

Could it have had more tomatoes? Probably. Tomatoes smash down quite well, allowing the burger to be eaten despite its impressive initial height. At some point, still undetermined, the tomatoes would simply flow out under pressure like aa lava, ending up in a somewhat chunky pile on the plate.

Lunch at the Crocker Art Museum

Real food bloggers obsessively haul their cameras around, snapping typically washed-out, poorly focused images of whatever sits on their table. I happen to think this is going too far, and refuse to transform a convivial table into a food porn stage. Besides, sketches are more fun since I can alter reality a bit. Put the soup next to the burger when they arrived sequentially. Add art where there was none. Remove the other diners. Change the burgundy blend wine into a rosé that they didn't have.

I'd heard about the burgers, made from high quality beef, prepared under the watchful eye of someone from Mulvaney's, their buns a perfect balance of sponginess and structure. The meat beefy and succulent; the sauce dripping with blue cheese with a few strips of smoky bacon appearing randomly as the burger is devoured. The fries, recently whole fresh potatoes, now succulent and crispy.

The truth is, the burger was well executed. The rather sparse bacon hid like a shy pig, then resisted being bitten through. The meat and cheese played well together atop fresh leaves of lettuce. The bun indeed held it all together without being tough or disintegrating into sauce-laden stain bombs. So, despite the light bacon dose, one of Sacramento's better burgers.

The fries were more of a mystery. Although sculpted from fresh potatoes, flavorful and fresh, they lacked crunch. They lay on the plate, golden yet limp and relaxed, yielding to the teeth without that all so important initial crunch. Were they not pre-soaked to reduce their starch content? Were they fried in a single dipping instead of having a rest between dunkings? My friend asked if I was going to inspect the kitchen, but I resisted. Sometimes ignorance is, if not bliss, at least more conducive to an enjoyable lunch with friends than on the spot investigation of arcane french fry gastronomy.

Today's soups were sausage and gazpacho. I happen to love gazpacho, but initially received the sausage instead. It smelled wonderful, but back it went. Summer calls for at least one cup of gazpacho, when all its ingredients are at their peak. It arrived with a flourish. Mellow red, cool as a cucumber with a bit of spice coming in like castanets in a flamenco serenade, it soothed yet stimulated as tomato tangoed with cucumber, garlic and chili heat.

Overall, the prices were reasonable, considering that the cafe is located in an art museum - a locale known more for high prices and mediocre food. The burgers cost about what they'd run in a more upscale burger joint. There were some quirks, like one diner receiving about half the portion of fries as the others - but overall the service was prompt and professional. The high point was the gazpacho, not by any lack in the burger, but because it's not something I eat often and this version was done quite well.

Lucky Dog Ranch burger

Ciabatta bun, organic red leaf lettuce, Lucky Dog Ranch burger, orange tomato and scallion relish, fresh basil mayonnaise. Washed down with a Luc Pirlet Minervois, a great hamburger wine from Southern France.

These hamburgers come from cattle who roam around on pastures, living a tranquil life, munching on grass and finished on brewer's grain mix. They never even imagine those nightmare feed lots that you can smell miles before you pass them on the highway. Unstressed cattle taste better, apparently, and this meat gives weight to this claim.

Annette said, "This tastes like the beef we used to get in the market when I was little". That was a farmers' market in France, where the meat was fresh ground while you wait. The taste is complex, a bit gamy perhaps.  Rich and complex, with flavors going well beyond what you'd expect from a mere beef patty.

The goal with this burger was to let the meat shine. No Bordelaise sauce, no mushrooms. Only a light relish, a dab of freshly prepared basil mayonnaise and a thin ciabbata baked only hours earlier. Eschewing the umami-rich decadence of my last burgers, these tasted garden fresh, the grassy flavor of the lettuce mingling well with the complex, grass-fed note from the beef and the sweet-sour tang of the relish. If ever a burger could be deemed health food, this rendition should easily qualify.

Hamburger avec champignons sauce bordelaise garni avec os à moelle

This is really something that sounds better in French. Although it's really not so bad in English, at least until you get to the bone marrow part: a half pound (before cooking) hand shaped burger, mushrooms in red wine-beef reduction sauce, garlic-lemon-chipotle mayo, slow proofed French bun, organic red leaf lettuce, bone marrow.

Sounded great until that last part, right? Marrow? Zombie food! Undrool!

Really, the marrow isn't that dominant from a gastronomic point of view. Much less so than verbally. It simply adds a rich note, more beefiness and no doubt more calories. It might have some redeeming quality, like being rich in some mineral or other. I don't know, since this was all about taste.

The bones, cooked along with mirepoix and seasonings, made a rich beef stock that was perfect for creating a sauce for the mushrooms. The rest can be used for something else later, like a sauce for another no doubt unhealthful beef dish.

The mayo gives the burger a bit of a kick from the heat of the peppers combined with the tang of fresh lemon juice.

Still no tomato in this bad boy - with the cool weather, the tomatoes aren't yet ready for prime time.

The lettuce goes in under the patty because I think that the mushrooms "stick" better to a rough burger than to slick lettuce - so when you bite into the thing it holds together a bit better. I've heard laying the lettuce low keeps the bottom bun from getting soggy, but I really don't mind some juicy burger drippings getting into the bun. More flavor. This bread is able to absorb a bit of juice without disintegrating.

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NOTE: For reasons known only to the L.A. Times, even though I posted it to their Facebook site, it never got into their best burger competition. So much for that. Guess it wasn't so simple to enter after all.