The Best Damn Burgers

Here is how it is done: 

The patties are composed of ground beef, salt, pepper, garlic powder and Worchestershire sauce. Fresh meat from a butcher shop is ideal. With grocery store meat, I might add a little bit of MSG (i.e. flavor enhancer/umami), but that's just me. I tend to think that monosodium glutamate has gotten a bad rap over the years, but this ingredient is entirely optional.

Prepare a 9" x 9" baking pan (for four burgers) by lining it with aluminum foil, then cover the bottom of the pan with sliced onions and minced garlic -- plus I like to throw a whole jalapeno in there to be sliced up later. Preheat the oven to 375°F.

Heat a cast iron pan until it's visibly hot. Add a couple tablespoons or so of butter. After it melts, put the burger patties in. Keep the pan hot. Cook the burgers until they are nicely caramelized in the butter. I like to bring them as close to burnt as possible without going over, kind of like The Price is Right.

Once nicely charred, put the burgers in the prepared baking pan. I then pour all of the melted butter/pan juice over the burgers. This is how you make them juicy, charred and without any pink. They're also not greasy, because while the onions and jalapeno are cooked in all that fat, which can then be strained, the burgers aren't. Personally, I can't eat a hamburger that's not cooked all the way through, but in my experience, more often than not, a well-done burger is also dry. This solves that dilemma as well. I also added some chopped up fresh horseradish and put that on top of the burgers, and then I covered the pan tightly with aluminum foil. It cooked in the oven for about a half an hour. 

I often cook bacon on a separate pan alongside it, since the oven's already on anyway, and because I'm from the Midwest. If I put the bacon in five minutes or so after the burgers, then they're usually done at about the same time. 

This evening, I made these hamburgers and served them on some homemade wheat rolls. I challenge you to try this, and then see if you can make a better burger than that. These are so good that I don't even put cheese on them -- and like I said, I'm from the Midwest. 

I might also recommend a bruschetta composed of shredded carrots, chopped tomatoes, chopped mild green chilis, garlic, basil and green olives to top it off. Sometimes I cook a whole tomato in there with the burgers, too. It's messy, but it tastes a lot better than ketchup.

How to Brew an Excellent Pale Ale

This afternoon, I am making a batch of my all-time favorite beer, which happens to be a product of my own design. This one is a New Zealand pale ale that I call Flipside. This is how it is made:

1. Put three gallons of water on some heat. I have a six gallon stainless steel pot that I put on the stove on medium-high, and a remote (wired) oven thermometer probe that I clip to the inside of the pot to keep track of the temperature. The thermometer itself has a magnet that I stick to the side of the fridge and an alarm that I can set for when it hits a certain temperature.

2. Once the water gets to about 150 degrees fahrenheit, add crushed pale ale and crushed carapils malted barley in two separate cotton sacks. Steep the giant teabags in the water for about a half an hour, keeping the temperature between 150 and 170 degrees. After a half an hour, transfer the grain sacks to a bowl to collect the remaining malt extract as it continues to drip. Pour this back in once it stops dripping, then discard the used grain sacks (although I've heard of people drying it out, grinding it into a powder and mixing it with bread flour).

3. Bring the beer-tea (called wort) to a boil.   

4. Remove from heat. Add six pounds of pilsen malt syrup (I have not yet invested in a full-mash setup). Stir it in, then put the pot back on the stove. Bring wort to a boil again. 

5. Once boiling, add one ounce of New Zealand Green Bullet hops. Stir it in. Set a timer for sixty min (the full boil) and another for thirty minutes.

6. At thirty minutes, add one ounce of New Zealand Pacific Jade hops. Stir it in. It should now look something like a swamp on the planet Jupiter, if such a thing was possible. Set the timer that just went off to fifteen minutes.  

7.  At fifteen minues, add one teaspoon of Irish moss (a fancy term for dried seaweed). This is to help clarify the beer. Set the timer for ten minutes. 

8. At ten minutes, there should be about five minutes left on the main timer. This is when I add the New Zealand Wakatu hops. It's also when I go run cold water in the bathtub, as well as dump in some icecubes and reusable ice packs to get it even colder. 

9. When the last timer goes off, remove from heat and put the heavy pot of wort in the bath of cold water, leaving the thermometer in there.

10. Once it gets to 100 degrees fahrenheit, I take it out of the bathtub, stir the hell out of it with a whisk until it gets all foamy, and then I run it all through a sieve and a funnel into a sanitized six and a half gallon glass carboy. At this point, I add another two and half gallons of water, then the yeast. I use Safale-05, a dry American Ale yeast, but I'm sure that other yeasts would also produce good results. 

11. Once everything is in there, I put on an airlock cap with some vodka added to the chamber (as a sterile liquid), then stash the full carboy either in the basement or in a dark corner of the house. It usually takes about a week or two for primary fermentation to complete. 

12. After that, I transfer it to a five-gallon carboy, where I add one ounce of New Zealand Taiheke hops as a "dry hop." This one goes in the garage, where it's much colder this time of year, which essentially "lagers" the beer. Once the freshly added hops all sink to the bottom, usually after another week or two, I bring it back inside, let it rest for a couple of days, then transfer it to a keg. After about a week in the keg with the CO2, it's fully carbonated. It's really better if you let the flavors meld for an extra three or four weeks -- if you can wait that long. 

While I don't consider myself a professional brewmeister by any means, this really is probably the best beer that I've ever had -- and I'm pretty sure that I would say that even if somebody else made it. 

Taste, of course, is subjective, but to me, New Zealand hops just seem to have a fuller flavor to them. Compared to other hops that I have used, it's kind of like the difference between strawberries from the farmer's market versus those that you buy at the supermarket. The berries from the farmer's market just taste more like strawberries, if that makes sense. 

New Zealand hops are easily among the best that I use in my own homebrewing operation. One more reason to want to move to New Zealand, I suppose.