We didn’t plan on it, but it ended up being a burger weekend, and it all started with a stop at Costco on Friday after work.
While shopping through Costco looking for meats and other essentials for our December parties that we are hosting, we stumbled on something slightly unique. Costco was selling large size hamburger buns. It’s easy to find regular sized buns in Japan, but the homemade burgers that we make overwhelm the tiny little buns – leaving lots of burger meat and toppings on your plate in a big mess. So we were pretty excited about picking up the buns – a package of six – and I changed my weekend dinner plans from carne asada to burgers.
Saturday was a beautiful day, and I spent most of it at home relaxing. I walked Kuniko to the train station since she was attending a festival held at her university with friends, and I did some shopping for the burgers. I bought all the toppings we’d need – and some German beers to drink with dinner.
Saturday’s beautiful weather had me outside grilling two big patties, with a little indentation in the middle to avoid the “bulge” in the middle of the patty. I put on some Colby cheese at the end to melt on top, and then we topped the burgers inside on our plate with tomato, red onion, and smashed avocado.
And they were delicious! They were nicely browned, with plenty of juices inside and pleasantly smoky flavors from being inside the grill while cooking. This is my usual method for doing burgers at home, but since good buns are hard to find it had been quite a while since we’ve had them.
We each had one big burger, rubbed our full stomachs and were in a kind of cloud of burger bliss. I looked over at our Costco package of buns – still four left – and then at our toppings, with plenty of leftovers for another go. So we decided to go ahead and do burgers on Sunday night, too. The only problem was the weather. Sunday was forecast as rain all day, and it turned out to be true.
Recently I bought a great book by Kenji Lopez-Alt called The Food Lab, and in it he makes a lot of American classic dishes while doing scientific experiments to understand all the different factors and decisions that could influence the final taste of the dish. His section on burgers was really interesting, so this weekend was the perfect chance to experiment. One section described how to make a good “smashed burger” – and since this method was on the stove and not on the grill, that took care of the weather problem right away.
Sunday night I rolled up another two big patties, this time in kind of a ball shape, and heated up the cast iron skillet. The idea behind smashed burgers is to squish the meat ball that you’ve made into a patty in the hot skillet to maximize the contact of the meat with the hot metal. This causes lots of brown crispy surfaces, making for some complex and rich flavors to go with the crispy crust.
It was surprisingly easy to do since I was lucky enough to have the skillet, and a stainless steel spatula to hold the meat down. According to Kenji, smashing should happen just in the first 30 seconds of cooking to retain the juices of the meat – smashing too long means a dry patty. Ours turned out great – we really liked the crispiness of the edges and the juiciness of the meat. The only thing we missed was the smoky flavor of the grill, but it was a trade-off I was willing to make. Overall we prefer the grilled burgers, but we’ll definitely do smashed burgers in the future, too. It’s nice to have burger options!
So it was a very happy burger weekend, and we’re back to healthy dinners this week. The colder weather has converted us from cabbage salads to Japanese nabe – just as healthy and filling but a lot warmer.
