The inevitability of the hamburger

The hamburger makes an ideal sausage, he said, because the meat flavor isn’t diluted by the curing salts used in hot dogs, and beef is more tender than pork because it has lower levels of myosin, the protein found in muscles. But there’s still enough myosin so that when the proteins are heated, they bond to create a gel that holds the patty together without the need for a casing.

The result is a cooked meat that’s less rubbery than other sausages and has a fresh-cooked taste that can’t be matched by cold cuts or reheated meats. It succulently exploits the Maillard reaction, named after a 20th-century Frenchman who explained the chemistry of browning meat and other foods.

When the beef patty hits the hot grill, the water at the lower surface quickly boils away, producing a very thin, dry crust, actually a transparent gel, called the desiccation zone. Immediately above is the Maillard zone, where heat causes reactions among sugars and proteins that turn the meat brown, yielding molecules with an intrinsically appealing flavor — at least to most humans.

That's Nathan Myhrvold breaking down the unique appeal of hamburgers. Josh Ozersky, the author of The Hamburger: A History, traces the genesis of the modern hamburger to White Castle and a man named Walter Anderson. Who knew?

Ozersky says Anderson's critical breakthroughs were "to use a specialized bun (instead of bread slices), to cook the meat on a very hot grill (500 degrees Fahrenheit), and to press down on the patty with a customized spatula made of high-strength steel."

Myhrvold has his own take on the hamburger in his 50+ lb. cooking tome Modernist Cuisine, and it involves sous vide and liquid nitrogen. Anything involving liquid nitrogen is impractical for the home cook, but a simple way to improve your home burger is to buy or make hamburgers with a higher fat content. The low-fat craze in America has too many people buying lean patties that taste like dried, salted shoe leather when grilled.

The ideal end state of the perfect burger doesn't seem in dispute: the center should be medium-rare, evenly pink like a ribeye steak from edge to edge, and and the outside should be seared or charred to add the magic Maillard magic. Leave out the liquid nitrogen and perhaps the basic technique of sous vide with a finishing sear on a cast iron skillet may work. I'll have to try that. Lots of discussion of hamburger secrets here.

While I'm not a hamburger fanatic, I've had more than my share over the years, from In N Out and McDonald's on up to the $32 D B Burger at Daniel Boulud's DB Bistro with its truffles and foie gras. I dig the Double Shack at Shake Shack in New York City, and just as I left LA I heard from many friends that the best burger in LA could be found at The Tripel.

Says Ozersky:

There is an inevitability to the hamburger. It is the most concentrated and convenient way a person can cheaply eat everything that people like about beef.

Achatz on Thai food

I'm learning so much about layering flavor. Normally, when you cook in the French palate, you have salt, fat, usually some form of acid—citrus, wine. Herbs, spices, but that's pretty much it. One thing that blew me away was the nam prik pow, the chile shallot relish we're making. You're going to get the snap of the chile right off the bat, but the finish is so layered: heavily caramelized garlic, the fish sauce, the acid punch. Not knowing all that much about Thai cooking before, I'm discovering a different way of building flavors.

There's always something really up front— raw garlic, raw chilies, these flavors are the first step, they push into your nose, you get them immediately. Then there's something mid-palate, then something stewed out and cooked down that gives you a long finish. It's fascinating.

That's Grant Achatz on Thai food, which is the focus of the new menu at Next Restaurant. The way he discusses flavors is the way oenophiles discuss wine, as a sequence of tastes, with a beginning, middle, and end. In his words I hear echoes of filmmaking with the emphasis on montage (the sequence of shots or tastes), and of course mise-en-place has always been a term spanning both fields, as the arrangement of ingredients for a dish around the chef's station in the kitchen, the arrangement of ingredients on a plate, or visual elements in a single frame of film.

This reflexive analysis or deconstruction of how cooking works is what I think of when I think of modernist cooking, paralleling the same self-aware meta nature of modern writing and film.

Winehouse

In soul music, sexuality should never be self-evident. Stank, a term which loosely defines the oomf a singer puts into a phrase, is at its purest when it comes from an outsider, who, for whatever reason, wants, nay, needs, to assert herself onto the audience. Pretty girls have a particularly tough time with stank — as much as Beyoncé snarls and groans and humps the stage, it's tough to believe that Queen B. has ever been anything but the Queen. The evidence of her hotness engulfs the timbre of her insistence. But because Amy Winehouse was odd-looking, because she dressed like a scarecrow at a Hot Topic sample sale, the assertion of her sexuality had to be grounded elsewhere.

That's Jay Caspian King remembering Amy Winehouse.

There was no doubting her street cred when it came to the hard living she sang about. Blowing up with a song titled Rehab before she went to rehab. The irony of the lastname Winehouse. The police reports and occasional meltdowns at concerts which had people fearing for her death before it even happened. It's tragic that the ultimate confirmation of the authenticity of her, everything about her, was a premature death.

The body shot knockout

But more than anything else, a punch like that puts a terrible picture in your head: You can see this black, spreading stain just under your skin, all of your body's essentials bleeding out and filling spaces where they don't have any business. A punch to the head can make you feel dizzy or woozy or sleepy, but it doesn't hurt, exactly. A punch like that one, like the one Hopkins slipped into De La Hoya, makes you feel as though you're about to die.

Chris Jones in Grantland on the art of the body shot knockout.

Gilligan

In TV writing it's called a "Gilligan" when a character is like, "There's no way I would ever do [X] thing," and then it cuts to a shot of them doing it.

Molly Lambert and Chuck Klosterman discuss the upcoming and final season of Entourage. My favorite paragraph, from Klosterman, delves into the fundamental appeal of TV:

I think people are constantly trying to understand their own life and constantly trying to find meaning within that reality; this is an extremely difficult process, mostly because we're all shackled by a fixed perspective. We can only experience life through our own eyes and our own memory. But TV is not like this. When we watch TV, we are watching (a depiction of) life from a detached, outside perspective, and we're able to understand multiple experiences simultaneously: We can see Turtle's life as Turtle sees it, but we can also see how people view Turtle and how accurate Turtle's personal worldview is, and everything else that's happening in Turtle's world that Turtle is oblivious to. We are also watching something that was written with a definite beginning, an action-heavy middle, and a definite end (so a clear metaphorical meaning can always be deduced). It's almost like watching escapist TV is a way to unconsciously simulate our own hopeless attempts at understanding ourselves, except with all the answers outlined at the back of the textbook. The static predictability of Entourage suggests that it's somehow possible to understand actual life, and this feels good to people.