Burgers

The Cranberry Apple Walnut Grilled Chicken Salad is back at Carl’s Jr. but former celebrity spokesperson Kim Kardashian, who last showcased it in December 2009, is otherwise engaged with family matters. This time, actress Jenny McCarthy has been enlisted to show both the salads and the requisite cleavage in a 30-second TV spot titled “Forget You’re Eating Salad.” The chain’s traditional “behind-the-scenes” teaser can be watched now on YouTube. The real commercial breaks next Monday (6/24) in selected markets. 72andSunny in Los Angeles is the chain’s agency. Last time Carl’s Jr. promoted salads its aim was to attract a broader audience than its traditional “young, hungry guys” customer base. No doubt that’s the hope again. In a tight, low-growth market, every customer counts. In addition to the Cranberry Apple Walnut Grilled Chicken Salad (featuring apples, dried cranberries, crunchy, candied walnuts and marinated grilled chicken), Carl’s Jr. is offering a BBQ Ranch Grilled Chicken Salad with tortilla strips, black beans, corn, salsa, ranch dressing, the Memphis BBQ sauce from last year’s burger special, shredded cheeses and marinated grilled chicken on mixed spring and iceberg lettuces. In 2009, when it first tried entree salads, Andy Puzder, CEO of Carl’s Jr. parent CKE, said his company would be “boycotting the burger pricing wars.” That defiance hasn’t changed in this time of Value Menu pricing: the two Carl’s Jr. salads are each boldly priced at a premium $5.

From A Hamburger Today [Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt] It's time for another round of The Food Lab. Got a suggestion for an upcoming topic? Email Kenji here, and he'll do his best to answer your queries in a future post. Become a fan of The Food Lab on Facebook or follow it on Twitter for play-by-plays on future kitchen tests and recipe experiments. I've been on a Greek yogurt sauce kick recently. It's something that I tend to slip into when the summer comes and I'm looking for something that's cooling, easy to make, and darn tasty to boot. That it goes on just about anything—as a dip for raw vegetables or pita, as a sauce for roasted meats, as a dressing for hearty salads, a rub for grilled corn, and yes, as a sauce for burgers—makes it all the more easy to slip into the trap of making a batch each week and applying it willy-nillilly. It's a trap I really don't mind falling into. At it's most basic, the sauce I make is a riff on my white sauce recipe, originally designed as a clone of the famous New York halal-cart chicken and rice condiment. A basic mix of thick Greek yogurt with a touch of mayonnaise, garlic, and some sort of acid, it's easy to modify to suit your needs. For this particular version, I felt it needed a bit more of a punchy, salty kick to stand up to the burger, so I added crumbled feta and plenty of black pepper. The feta also helps it to stay put on top of the burger a bit better. You'll find yourself wanting to put this on everything, if you haven't already finished it off with a spoon by the light of the refrigerator door, that is. For freshness and crunch factor, I went with some sliced onions and a simple relish made with diced cucumbers and tomatoes. The trick is to salt them in advance and let them drain, concentrating their flavor and seasoning them deeply. A splash of lemon juice adds a bit of brightness to the mix. Get The Recipe Burgers with Creamy Feta Sauce and Tomato-Cucumber Relish » More Burger Toppings! Pepperoni Garlic Bread Burgers Poutine Burgers Muffuletta Burgers Barbecue Bacon Burgers Korean Barbecue Kim-Cheese Burgers Quadruple Chili Cheeseburgers Hot Hawaiian Burgers About the author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Chief Creative Officer of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at @thefoodlab on Twitter, or at The Food Lab on Facebook. Love hamburgers? Then you'll Like AHT on Facebook! And go follow us on Twitter and Pinterest while you're at it! Get the Recipe!

From A Hamburger Today Of course we love our mom & pops, and our favorite burger joints around the country are pretty much all independently owned, but there are certain times in life—overnight layovers, hungover Sunday mornings, all-day shopping trips at the outlets—that the only options around are the chains. This column is here to help you decide when to go for the burger, and when you're better off sticking with the chicken fingers. [Photographs: Damon Gambuto] BJ's Restaurant and Brewhouse 107 South 1st St., Burbank, CA 91502 (map); 818-557-0881; 137 other locations in the US; visit bjsbrewhouse.com for list The Schtick: A casual brewhosue that makes all manner of bar food The Burger: The BJ's burger is a solid, large scale pub burger at a fair price. Setting: Midscale comfortable Want Fries with That? Sure; solid, if not standout spuds Prices: Classic Burger (w/fries), $9.95 These Chain Reaction reviews can be a bit of drudgery at times. Generally speaking, I'm not much for restaurant chains and their brutally consistent mediocrity. Dare greatness with an inspired chef's creation? Pshaw, market test every dish so that dinner becomes as exciting as a committee decision. Of course, the other side of this is, well, that consistency and ability to please a broad range of tastes. I see the appeal. I've been know to construct a dinner party menu with similar goals. Then there's the aspect of how they interest my fellow Serious Eaters. So when I stopped by BJ's Restaurant and Brewhouse for lunch in sunny Burbank, I hoped I might have a burger experience that wasn't just worth sharing but has already been shared by many of you. I'm happy to report BJ's makes a creditable cheeseburger that shows why this mid-scale chain has bloomed to 136 or so outlets around the United States. If you're looking for a reliable, if run-of-the-mill, burger, you might want to try it. BJ's is designed to be the kind of restaurant you can grab a quick, relatively affordable lunch and then come back later in the day to drink away the evening. It's a friendly enough environment that's a solid choice for watching a game while grabbing some eats and a few beers. The menu offers a wide range of choices, but there was little chance I'd be ordering anything other than the classic burger ($9.95). It's a sizable eight ounces of Angus chuck with a medium coarse grind that's—much to my delight—formed into a thinner round. (A quick note on this: forming large portions of beef into thinner patties than what we normally see would, in my view, improve most burgers. Ok, I got that off my chest.) In addition to the nicely formed patty the burger is topped with lettuce, tomato, and some Thousand Island. The bun is worth a closer look. It's got the sponginess of a commercial bun, but it's more substantial than you'd expect, which matches the scale of the patty nicely. More than that, the slight toasting adds a pleasing chewiness that makes me wonder why more restaurants of this type aren't using a similar bun for their burgers. The beef, however, isn't quite as pleasing. I wouldn't go so far as to say this is a weak patty—rather, it's without distinction. It doesn't have any notable seasoning, juice, or mineral beefiness. In its favor, it has a nice medium coarse grind and slim shape, but it doesn't jump out as the centerpiece of the burger that you'd hope it'd be for its half-pound size. The toppings are fine. The veggies are fresh, but they're not full of the freshness that would warrant additional remarks. BJ's further confirmed that Thousand Island is a good choice for a classic burger. Cheddar helped add some tang and fattiness. I'd have preferred America for a burger with this profile, but strangely BJ's doesn't offer it. The fries are solid though not standouts. They're slim cut and have a nice crunch from a serious blistering, but bec

From A Hamburger Today [Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt] It's time for another round of The Food Lab. Got a suggestion for an upcoming topic? Email Kenji here, and he'll do his best to answer your queries in a future post. Become a fan of The Food Lab on Facebook or follow it on Twitter for play-by-plays on future kitchen tests and recipe experiments. As a burger lover and a pizza lover, I've always liked the idea of some sort of burger-pizza hybrid, but it never really works according to plan. As our Home Slice Adam can tell you, designing a good hamburger pizza is no easy feat (I've yet to see a successful one anywhere, and pizza burgers rarely fare well either. This one, which is not quite a pizza burger, does a little better, I think. We start with the basics: the bun. It's a standard burger bun, but rather than toasting it in butter, I toast it in garlic butter, with a bit of oregano and parsley mixed into it. It's not something you'd find on a pizza per se, but it gives the whole thing a bit of that generic Italian Red Sauce feel to it, and that's really what we're going for here. I've tried making burgers with standard pizza sauce on them, but they never quite work—the sauce doesn't complement meat like it does pizza crust. Instead, I decided to flavor my sauce largely with pepperoni, fried in olive oil until crisp, then reduced in crushed tomatoes. A splash of vinegar at the end adds some tang, which is essential for any kind of burger sauce—it's the missing element in pretty much every pizza burger I've had. Finally, we get to the cheese. Rather than the mozzarella most opt for, I went with much sharper, tangier provolone, along with some shards of good quality parmesan added at the very end. Get the Recipe Pepperoni Garlic Bread Burgers (Grilled Cheeseburgers with Pepperoni Sauce Serve on Garlic Bread Rolls) » More Burger Toppings! Poutine Burgers Muffuletta Burgers Barbecue Bacon Burgers Korean Barbecue Kim-Cheese Burgers Quadruple Chili Cheeseburgers Hot Hawaiian Burgers About the author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Chief Creative Officer of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at @thefoodlab on Twitter, or at The Food Lab on Facebook. Love hamburgers? Then you'll Like AHT on Facebook! And go follow us on Twitter and Pinterest while you're at it! Get the Recipe!

From A Hamburger Today [Photograph: NPR] Until last week, you could get the T-Rex Burger—a cheeseburger featuring nine quarter-pound patties and nine slices of cheese—at just one Wendy's location in Manitoba, Canada. Not wanting to look like they condoned the 3,000 calorie meat tower, Wendy's took the semi-secret item off the menu after someone posted about the burger on Reddit. But nothing (aside from common sense) is stopping you from combining three triple cheeseburgers. And thus the staff of NPR's Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! did just that in their latest Sandwich Monday post, in honor of the fallen T-Rex. Read their commentary and you might want to try the burger, too—they call it "inexplicably delicious." More Burger Towers Lotteria Japan Promoting 'Evangelion: Q' With a 9-Patty Cheeseburger Steak 'n Shake's New AllNighter Menu Features 7-Patty Steakburger Lotteria in Japan Celebrating 40th Birthday with Discount Quintuple Cheeseburgers and Shrimp Burgers Seven-Layer Windows 7 Whopper at Burger King in Japan About the author: Robyn Lee is the editor of A Hamburger Today and takes many of the photos for Serious Eats. She'll also doodle cute stuff when necessary. Read more from Robyn at her personal food blog, The Girl Who Ate Everything. Love hamburgers? Then you'll Like AHT on Facebook! And go follow us on Twitter and Pinterest while you're at it!

From A Hamburger Today [Photographs: Erin Jackson and Adam Lindsley] Brunch Box 620 SW 9th Ave, Portland OR (map); 503-287-4377; brunchboxpdx.com Cooking method: Griddled Short Order: Big, crazy burgers that are more about entertainment value than being perfect specimens Want Fries With That? Meh, I'd skip them. The fries were on the dry and cardboardy side Price: YouCanHasCheeseburger, $7; Burgermeister, $9; fries, $1.50/$4 With the opening of their brick and mortar store on 4/20, Brunch Box expanded out of Food Cart Alley on the corner of SW 5th and Stark, offering Portlanders another place to get their mitts on budget-friendly and hunger satiating grub, including breakfast sandwiches, hot dogs, and burgers. At both locations, burgers go from over-the-top to Redonkdonk (an actual burger from the Brunch Box menu, topped with egg, bacon, cheese, spam, and ham with grilled cheese sandwiches for buns). Even with my hotel within easy stumbling distance, I knew I'd need some reinforcements, so brought along my defacto +1 (husband), and met up with Portland AHT contributor Adam Lindsley, thinking two burgers and an order of fries could be culled between the three of us. Both Adam and I went for fairly understated options: a YouCanHasCheeseburger for me, and a Burgermeister (aka: Big Mac clone) for the gentleman. The YouCanHasCheeseburger ($7), a take on the fatty melt, features a 1/4 pound of griddled Black Angus beef topped with the typical fixings and condiments, snuggled between two toasty grilled cheese sandwiches. Nailing this burger variant is all about proportion. There's the all-important bread-to-meat ratio, but when you're introducing that much cheese, you've also got to think about dairy-to-everything-else. Looking at the top photo, you've surely diagnosed yourself that the YouCanHasCheeseburger is a little heavy on the bread. Two slices of Texas toast would probably skew the burger's bread margin, let alone four slices. So yes, I'll confirm it: there is too much bread. But there is also too much cheese. The patty gets a slice, and each slice of bread does too, bringing the total to six slices of cheese. That's way too much for the beef to stand up and be noticed, but let me tell you something: with the mayo, tomato, spreads (ketchup and mustard, if you swing that way), and burger patty thrown in, this is one hell of a grilled cheese sandwich, and that's how you need to think of it. I'll pass the (greasy) burger baton to Adam and let him weigh in on his selection, the Burgermeister ($9): With twice the beef of Erin's You Can Has Cheeseburger, the Burgermeister should have packed a meaty wallop, despite the presence of a third bun in the center. No such luck. The overcooked, underseasoned patties barely tasted like anything even when I tore off a hunk and sampled the beef on its own. Compressed to an almost sausage-like consistency, the two slabs of desiccated cow provided textural resistance in each bite and little else. Too bad. Like the Big Mac it's mimicking, the Burgermeister keeps it simple on the toppings: American cheese, lettuce, grilled onions, pickles, and Thousand Island dressing. The salty cheese came through strongest, followed by the toasted bun, meaning this tasted like a grilled cheese sandwich more than anything. A grilled cheese sandwich with pickles and something vaguely beefy about it that you can't quite grasp however much you'd like to. In other words, it was totally fine example of an admittedly fatter-than-usual cheese sandwich, but a boring example of a double cheeseburger. Big burgers like you'll find at Brunch Box don't really require a side, but if a burger without fries leaves you with a gaping hole in your soul, these spuds ($1.50/$4) will fill it. I found them to be on the dry side, but Adam liked them, so go figure. If you want fries that are equally as festive as Brunch Box's burger, there ar

From A Hamburger Today [Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt] It's time for another round of The Food Lab. Got a suggestion for an upcoming topic? Email Kenji here, and he'll do his best to answer your queries in a future post. Become a fan of The Food Lab on Facebook or follow it on Twitter for play-by-plays on future kitchen tests and recipe experiments. Welcome to Burger Toppings Week 2013. Each day this week we'll be presenting a brand new set of burger toppings, all crafted in accordance to The Principles of Topping Burgers, a plan designed to maximize flavor and textural contrasts to provide you with the ultimate burgering experience. Let's jump right in, shall we? We all know how seductive a plate of poutine can be, right? You know, that Canadian late-night dish of fresh fries smothered with squeaky cheese curds and hot, meaty gravy? After a few beers it beckons to you, seduces you. A cheese-clad goddess enrobed in gravy, ready to nip your hangover in the bud. Heck, even without the beer goggles poutine is a pretty tough mistress to turn away. So what happens when your poutine employs her crafty wiles on an unsuspecting burger? The Poutine Burger emerges. This is what happens when your poutine and your hamburger slink off into some dimly lit corner and re-emerge a bit more disheveled and a whole lot messier. It's a delicious burger, to be sure, but one you probably shouldn't consume in mixed company. There are only three elements that make up a perfect plate of poutine. First is really good fries. When designing this burger, I started by taking a very literal approach: topping a burger with poutine made with standard, thick-cut french fries. It was delicious, but it was not more than the sum of its parts, as a well-designed sandwich should be. The problem? The fries, despite their crisp exterior, were simply too similar in texture to the burger itself. Moist-on-moist doesn't make for the most exciting bite of food. I gradually reduced the thickness of my fries in order to increase their crisp-crust-to-interior ratio until I finally reached the stage where they were literally matchstick-thickness, crisp all the way through. They weren't the classic poutine-style fries, but I felt that the added textural contrast they gave to the dish was enough to warrant a slight deviation from utter authenticity. In order to get the fries crisp without becoming too dark and acrid tasting, I washed them in water until all of their residual starch was washed away. This allowed me to cook them until completely crisp while still maintaining a nice golden-brown color with a clean, potato-y flavor. The other two elements of poutine—the cheese curds and the gravy—didn't require much tinkering at all; they worked as-is with the burger concept. If you have a local cheese maker, most likely they'll sell you fresh cheese curd if you ask them. You can order them online (there are a number of options available on Amazon, or you can do what I did: make them yourself with fresh milk and rennet tablets (the process is remarkably easy, requiring nothing more than a thermometer and a pot). As for the gravy, any sort of meat broth-based homemade gravy will do. This is a good place to start. Poutine gravy tends to be glossier and shinier than your standard roux-thickened American-style gravy, so if you want to get that look just right, you should thicken your gravy with a pure starch like cornstarch or arrowroot as opposed to flour. Once you've got your elements all set, it's a simple matter of putting it all together. You can cook your burgers in a skillet if you'd like, but this is a topping set designed for a thick, hearty burger from the backyard grill. Take a look at our Guide to Grilling Great Burgers for some good general principles on how to get the most out of the meat between your buns. Finally, for the sake of some fresh, non-fried crunch, I

From A Hamburger Today [Photographs: Wes Rowe] Hopscotch 1915 San Pablo Ave., Oakland CA 94612 (map); 510-788-6217; hopscotchoakland.com Cooking Method: Griddled Short Order: A delicious, flavor-rich burger is accentuated by uniformly excellent toppings, but it's brought to a new level of beef-vana thanks to a slab of griddled tongue. Want Fries with That? Chips come standard, but upgrading to duck fat chips is worth the $2. Absolutely do not skip the Yonsei oyster to start your meal. Price: First Base Burger, $14, + $1 for cheese; duck fat chips upgrade, $2; Yonsei oyster, $5 each Notes: Hopscotch is worth a visit for their cocktails, as well, and its proximity to the Fox Theater makes it a perfect pre-concert spot. I've got a confession to make. It's been a little while since I visited Hopscotch with the intention of trying their burger. A burger so good, so flavorful, that I sometimes find myself gazing eastward across the Bay, wistfully plotting my next trip to Uptown Oakland. So, why have I held back? For one, Hopscotch's pocket-sized space fills up quickly. I didn't relish the idea of fighting off my fellow burger lovers to get a stool at the bar in the charming classed-up diner space. But mostly, I sometimes get too wrapped up in the memory of a meal to sharpen my critical eye and do my journalistic duty. My first visit to Hopscotch included a few cocktails, the company of a great friend, and a wonderful concert at the nearby Fox Theater. And an absolutely stunning burger. For that, I apologize loyal AHT-ers. I was selfish and wrong to have held back. I hope that you'll forgive me, and perhaps we can raise a toast to the glory that is beef between bread together at Hopscotch sometime. So let's get down to it. The First Base Burger ($14) is a seven-ounce blend of scrap from high quality rib eye and chuck roll, with some beef tongue thrown in for good measure. It's ground in-house each day, hand-formed, and seasoned with salt and pepper. The meat cuts, sourced from Kansas City's NatureSource, remain consistent, but the fat ratio can change slightly based on what the restaurant receives. I tried the burger twice in the course of a week, and I found it to be consistently beefy and well-salted, with a nicely loose grind and a gorgeous medium rare interior. Cutting the burger in half resulted in a gush of juice which, thankfully, didn't lead to a dried-out patty: the meat stayed moist, flavorful, and intensely beefy Toppings include tangy-sweet pickled onions, wonderfully ripe jewel-toned tomatoes, and a swath of sesame aioli. Oh, and of course, a slab of griddled beef tongue. Yeah, man. BEEF TONGUE. Unctuous, salty, and tender, the tongue deepens the beefy richness of the burger, while adding a decadent oomph of texture and flavor. A decidedly unexpected topping, the tongue skyrocketed this burger to over-the-top amazing levels, without doing so in an overbearing, flavor-dominating way (see: grinding bacon into your beef). The inspiration for this unorthodox topping comes from chef Kyle Itani's half Japanese heritage. Itani spent time studying cooking in Sendai, where tongue is a specialty. There, it's usually served in a stew or soup. At Hopscotch, Sendai salt cures it for 24 hours, then braises it slow and low for three to four hours before being sliced and griddled to order. The time spent curing and braising the tongue explains its melty texture and the wonderful intensity of this flavor. Anyway. My tongue rhapsodies aside, the sweet, crisp vegetables of the fresh and pickled variety provide a welcome fresh contrast to the richness of the tongue and beef combination. Sesame aioli lends a nutty richness, as well. You can add cheese for $1 and bacon for $2—I went with a sharp cheddar add-on for my second go-around, and, to my great surprise, found it entirely unnecessary. The tongue and aioli provide all the salt and richness

Categories: Hot off the Grill, Miscellany, OtherTags: @Popeyes, Fast food, Fried Chicken, Popeye's Louisiana KitchenMrs. Burgerdogboy do love her Popeye’e, especially a side of red beans, and I’m always happy to oblige her, as she’s taught me the whole “happy wife, happy life” thing, and it’s 100% on target. So whenever I roll past a Popeye’s, or am pointed in that direction by my better two-thirds, off I go,(Read more...)

Categories: Ham & Bacon, Hot off the Grill, Miscellany, SandwichesTags: Chicago, SandwichThere are what – 40,000 Subway sandwich places in the world.  The franchised brand name one, not including other chains, Quiznos, Jimmy Joe Bob’s or whatever that one is.   Yet “independents” keep springing up and competing. Like Uncle Sammy’s Sandwich Classics, in Chicago.  Uncle Sammy’s is in Lincoln Park, the first neighborhood I ever lived(Read more...)