The Young&Foodish year ended on a high note, with my signing on with Phaidon, the prestigious publisher of books by Massimo Bottura, Ferran Adrià and René Redzepi, to compile a guide to the world’s best pizzerias.

This happy development should not come as too much of surprise if you’ve been following my posts here or on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. 2 of my top 5 posts of 2014 were about pizza. In the past year I posted 5 videos about Neapolitan pizza on my YouTube channel.

This preoccupation with pizza did not come at the expense of my burger obsession. Burgers, like pizza, claimed two slots among my top 5 posts of the year. Since early October I’ve working on a major Young&Foodish event for early 2015 that’s to be all about burgers – real burgers. The Real Burger Challenge launches in London on January 18th.

Best wishes to you for a Happy New Year and a deliciously foodish 2015.

Top Young&Foodish Posts of 2014

5. Why Pizza in Naples has to be Soft

Naples shared its love of pizza and dry pasta with the world many years ago but something got lost in translation. Rather than eat pasta al dente and pizza soft, in the Neapolitan way, foreigners learned to do the opposite.

Non-Italians at last discovered the pleasures of al dente pasta in the late 20th Century. But only recently have hardcore devotees in the pizza diaspora acquired a soft spot for pizza with a light, pliable crust.

In my video above the master pizzaiolo Enzo Coccia of Pizzaria La Notizia explains why Neapolitan pizza must be so soft and light.

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4. Meet the Burgers #LBBfinal

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3. Pizza Pilgrims Think out of Box & Into Pan

“I have something for you,” said Londoner James Elliot, one of the Pizza Pilgrims behind the pizza van and insanely popular pizzeria of that name. “I’d like to you take it home and test it.”

I assumed the white pizza box Elliot handed me contained a pizza, albeit a rather heavy one. But when I opened the lid I saw a chemistry set where the pizza ought to have been. Plastic containers containing various elements were slotted into the round openings in a square sheet of green cardboard.
I slid the box over to Elliot for an explanation of its contents. The printed text under the lid contained the step-by-step instructions (see their recipe) for the Pizza Pilgrims Neapolitan Frying Pan Pizza.

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2. My Salad Cream Days in the UK

Assimilating the young and foodish me into British life has proven more frustrating than expected. I assumed it would be easy for me to adapt to the London foodscape, given I was educated in New Yorkese, a language with vast similarities to English, and was already acquainted with orange marmalade.

Turns out there was more to mastering the British food curriculum than distinguishing crisps from chips, aubergines from eggplants, tomatoes from tomatoes. 10 years into my London education I discovered I hadn’t even heard of, much less tried, a beloved British condiment, Heinz Salad Cream.

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1. Bleecker Street Triumphs with Blood & Guts at London Burger Bash Final

photo by Ian Sargent

Zan Kaufman of Bleecker St Burger won the Final of the London Burger Bash on April 5th at Borough Market with a combination of blood and guts.

The blood refers not to the oozy redness of her aged beef patties, cooked south of medium rare, but to the dried blood in the Clonakilty beef black pudding she added to her #LBBfinal entry – the Bleecker Black.

The guts alludes not to any beef innards in that Irish black pudding, however essential they may be, but rather to the audacity of using an ingredient that could repulse a thick slice of the voting pool.

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It is perhaps unfair of me to fault Mother Flipper for slightly overcooking their burgers, missing by less than a minute the liftoff from the flat-top griddle to juicy medium rare. This has happened twice, first in February at its original home ground at Brockley Market in Southeast London and again yesterday at its Eat Street debut behind Kings Cross Station.

In the US you wouldn’t expect short order cooks at diners, truck stops and burger stands to make the distinction between pale and deep pink, especially burgers below the 5-ounce and 4-dollar barriers. So why hold their UK counterparts to a higher standard?

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I could answer my own question by noting that Mother Flipper asks £5 for its cheeseburger, roughly 8 dollars. But prices for satisfactory beef and authentic plastic cheese are higher here. Good cheap burgers (with this notable exception) don’t really exist in London. Comparing US and UK burgers according to price is problematic.

To learn the reason why I make such a big deal about seven small degrees, estimating internal meat temperatures from 55-degree (Celsius) for medium-rare to 62-degrees for medium, you have to inspect the pavement.

I tried two Mother Flipper cheeseburgers yesterday. The first, cooked a notch above medium though I asked for medium-rare, was nicely constructed with beautiful ketchup/mustard art on the bun, very tasty and, importantly, a safe object to hold in my hands. No leaks. I didn’t embarrass myself. But the second, cooked as ordered, was a thing of danger and looming dry cleaning bills, bleeding beefy juices from every pore of its patty.  Unable to wait to find a place to sit I devoured it walking away from the stall, leaving a trail of grease and mourning every lost drip.

At the age of 14 I was already a liberal New Yorker precociously attuned to injustices in the world around me. It’s a shame, I recall telling my father, that the American big band vocalist Jo Stafford (above right) did not have the flawless curves of Hollywood actress Ava Gardner (about left) nor Ava, Jo’s sultry voice. My father laughed, then, recognising a life’s lesson moment, turned sympathetic.

“Sorry, kiddo,” he said.”You can’t have it all.”

I had similar thoughts this past Wednesday, lunching solo at the Covent Garden location of the fine London steakhouse Hawksmoor. It’s a shame, I thought, the Hawksmoor burger (below left) did  not have the flawless curves of the Bar Boulud burger (below right) nor Bar Boulud, the Hawksmoor burger’s sultry high notes.

  


The upright burger at the London location of Bar Boulud looks like it could topple at any moment, yet it’s an idle threat: The thick patty sits snugly beneath a thick layer of toppings inside the domed bun. It’s as if the bottom of the bun has a contoured seat, like an Eames chair. A marvel of burger construction, the Boulud burger’s thoroughly pink meat is contained in a charred shell of caramelised beef. It eats beautifully. Regrettably it’s almost too safe, too secure. There’s no danger, no explosion of flavours & juices, no OTT factor.

The Hawksmoor burger patty sticks out the sides of its bun on an untidy raft of lettuce interruptus. Bad tailoring. Messy and squashed, the patty’s fatty juices grease your hands and breach the bottom of its bun even before you’ve taken your first bite. But, oh my, what a first bite! Danger. Implosion. It’s all there. But just as I can imagine my father relishing this burger I can also hear him shifting into life’s lesson mode: “Hey, Hawksmoor, tuck in your shirt.”

At the restaurant where I apprenticed in France I was taught to press the fleshy part of my relaxed palm, just beside my thumb, and look for the same soft texture in my steaks. It takes some practice.

The poke test is ineffective for burgers. Mince (ground meat) does not firm up in the same way. To check a burger for doneness you can instead try gauging its doneness according to the darkening colours and drying topography of the burger’s exterior as it cooks or, for greater confidence and precision, use a meat thermometer.

rare

medium-rare

medium

med-well

well done

Looking at them now these almost look more like Mark Rothko paintings than hamburgers.

Because thick hamburger patties don’t toughen much as they cook, grill cooks cannot apply the finger test to check for doneness as they can with steaks. Most err on the long side, which is why burger lovers from LA to London have grown accustomed to getting medium-rare when they order rare, medium when they order medium-rare and so on. 

The burger I was served at The Counter was that rarity, a rare that’s actually rare (see photo above). They know what rare is and, judging by the waitress’ question, they also know most of us are no longer so sure. I emailed The Counter to find out if the waitress was acting on her own and got this response from Mike Miklos, the Director of Education and Team Development: 

The server probably could have phrased her question better, but what she was trying to say was that “you’re really going to get a rare burger”…Many times our customers order a “medium” thinking it will have no pink, when it arrives they think it’s raw. Since everyone has their own perception of what “medium” or “rare” is we try not to even use those terms and [instead] describe the amount of redness.