Today we have for you:
Make better burgers
Good morning. I’ve been putting in the miles this summer, driving north and south, east and west, 400 miles to pine trees, Ellsworth Schist and the nice folks at Left Bank Books in Belfast, Maine, and more than that to northern Ohio (shouts to Kim’s Grocery!). Most recently, I laid down an easy 100 to Tivoli, N.Y. and the excellence of an Italian sub at Club Sandwich on Broadway. I see the road before me and think about food as I drive. Most often, recently, that’s meant burger reverie. You can, of course, get great hamburgers on the road. Try the Red Rooster on Route 22 in Brewster, N.Y., or the Fat Boy on Bath Road in Brunswick, Maine. But behind the wheel, I dream most often of being home in front of the grill, cooking patties for my family and myself, in advance of a nap in an Adirondack chair, free of deadlines and appointments. Kenji López-Alt has been of great assistance in this regard. He’s put together a terrific new Cooking 101 guide to cooking burgers, and accompanied it with recipes that deliver blue-ribbon results.
I like his instructions for a smash burger (above), worth doubling up if you’re hungry. (I cook that one on a griddle on my grill, though you could certainly use a cast-iron pan in the kitchen.) Also, his diner-style burger to recall the crusty, beef-forward one served at J.G. Melon in Manhattan, and his backyard burger, dimpled at the center, thick and tender, with a smoky char. I serve each of these beneath cloaks of cheese, on toasted potato buns, with a swipe of mayonnaise (Duke’s or bust!) and a couple of bread-and-butter-pickle chips and Melissa Clark’s lemon potato salad with mint on the side. I hope you’ll join me in making one or more of these this weekend. Featured Recipe Smash BurgersI’ll cook BBQ chicken, too, because it’s July, and that’s called for in the July weekend playbook. If it’s raining, I’ll make the dish inside in the oven, using Ali Slagle’s supersmart recipe, which asks you to roast the chicken on top of barbecue sauce, so that it combines with the rendered fat of the thighs to make a luscious kind of gravy. Macaroni salad goes nicely with that, and corn on the cob. Alternatively, or additionally, I’ve been thrilling lately to this recipe for silken tofu with a spicy soy dressing, cool and refreshing. Also to this juicy BLT sandwich, these cold noodles with tomatoes, this smashed zucchini number, with chickpeas and peanuts. And for dessert? The stone fruit at the market has been bonkers these last few days, so maybe caramelized peaches with rum and cream. Or a nectarine tart? This minty fruit salad, after a burger feast, would refresh like an ice plunge after a sauna — I’m in. There are thousands more recipes to cook this weekend awaiting you at New York Times Cooking. You need a subscription to read them, of course. Subscriptions are what make this whole operation possible. Please, if you haven’t taken one out yet, would you consider subscribing today? Thanks. Do reach out for help if you have an issue with our technology or your account. We’re at cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you. Or you can write to me if you’d like to say something kind, or cutting, about our work: hellosam@nytimes.com. I can’t respond to every letter. But I read each one I get. Now, it’s nothing whatsoever to do with frangipane or gelato, but I loved Alexandra Jacobs’s appraisal, in The New York Times Book Review, of Hannah Pittard’s new novel, “If You Love It, Let It Kill You.” It is, in Alexandra’s words, “a rollicking, free-associative and almost claustrophobically insiderish novel most honest in its naked craving for validation and a place in an increasingly unstable canon.” Here’s Benjamin Swett in The New York Review of Books on the life and death of a tree in New York City. (It’s facing different challenges, but I worry about the ash in front of my house.) “The Waterfront,” on Netflix, is a Temu “Bloodline,” but I still watch it for the boats and docks. Finally, here’s new Alex G, “Beam Me Up,” music for burgermaking. I’ll see you on Sunday. |
