“The Islander” Burger

When the day started in the office we all knew only our Leader can give us strength and wisdom for the day. As time passed our mind began to wander. In our imagination we visualized a cute hairy cow on a wonderful green field picked up by a trolley and minced to shreds by a massive grinder right onto our frying plate. Our dreams had been followed by real-life events as soon as we were able to put down our axes and leave the mine (some call it office). We headed straight to our greatest benefactor: The Butcher. He provided us with the quality meet needed for the monster burgers we intended to make. Our plan was to make some massive patties, place them atop some salad leaves in medium sized buns, put slightly fried onion slices on top, pour thousand island dressing on it and sprinkle it with a mix of smoked and regular grated cheese.

For our short-term survival we needed 10 burgers  – 2 each for three of us, one each for the pussies and some emergency leftover burgers, you know, just in case. The ingredients were as follows.

• 1.4 kg (3 lbs) of  beef mince (it can be substituted by beef/pork mix but not recommended)
• 10 medium sized burger buns
• fresh chopped coriander leaves OR/AND parsley
• freshly ground black pepper
• salt
• 1 head of fresh ice salad
• onions
• 1 cucumber
• 2 tomatoes
• 2 cloves of garlic (no food is suitable for human consumption without it)
• 1 hot pepperoni
• mix of grated cheddar and some smoked cheese

For the thousand island dressing:

• mayonnaise
• ketchup
• chili oil

We got back to the apartment and got to work immediately. One of us mixed the beef mince with salt, freshly ground pepper and a generous amount of dried parsley. Unfortunately we couldn’t get our hands on any coriander leaves so we used parsley this time. We still recommend coriander as the primary option. Finally, we pressed 2 cloves of garlic into it.

We formed inch-thick patties from the spiced mince and laid them on a tray.

While one of us was busy with the meat the others prepared the thousand island dressing. We choose the simplest method, which is 3 units of mayo, 1 unit of ketchup and a little bit of chili sauce. Nothing fancy really, but delicious enough and as such serves our purposes perfectly.

We did the final preparations before cooking – sliced the tomatoes, cucumber, pepperoni and onion, cut the buns in half, separated the leaves of the ice salad, washed them and put them aside.

We were ready for our favourite part – frying the animal! With this American style burger we felt obliged to listen to some appropriately American music. Our choice was a new US supergroup called Killer Be Killed (well, it’s actually 25% Brasilian ’cause Max Cavalera was born there). The members came from various “anonym bands” like: The Dillinger Escape Plan, Mastodon, Soulfly and The Mars Volta. Their first album is going to be released this year. And here is their brand new song (update: A great video clip has arrived):

We threw the inch-thick patties on top of the hot frying plate and placed a spoonful of mustard on top of each. Both the song and the sound of the meat on the hot metal was music to our ears. We opened the whiskey bottle and poured liquor generously on top. Sweet smell of raw meat heated to almost burning temperatures and the aroma of whiskey lingered around the balcony.

We like beef patties medium fried so we turned them over, mustard side down before they got too dry and we poured whiskey on top again. The smell of mustard interacting with burning-hot metal is not exactly the best we can imagine (some compares it to the smell of hot piss) but believe us, the end result evaporated all our doubts.

At this point the patties had a nice dark brown colour, but were still soft and a hint of dark bloody juice was coming out of them when we pushed them on top with a spoon. We removed them from the heat and put them aside covering them so they would not cool off too soon.

While some of the patties were still cooking we laid the first few half buns on the heat source for a minute to make them a little crispy inside. When done, we put a big salad leaf on the bottom, followed by a patty, slightly fried onion slices, tomato, plenty of thousand island dressing, a few hot pepperoni slices and finally the grated cheese. Optionally you can pre-melt the cheese on the frying plate, which we did for some of the burgers.

The end result looked (and tasted) absolutely phenomenal. The first burger went down like it never existed,  but we must admit, we had to take a 10 minute break before finishing off the second one. But, as always, failure was not an option!

Special thanks to Stoner Rock BBQ for the inspiration!