It's been a while since I devoted an entire post to one cooking project, but I figure this one might justify a stand-alone entry. I was perusing recipes the other day when Dan, watching over my shoulder, mentioned that he doesn't really like "things that look like burgers but aren't burgers." (
This was the recipe in question.) Which was, uh, interesting! Since I do that kind of a lot. But this seemed like reasonable input from the man who ate
raw kale salad without blinking, so I thought I'd make him as real a burger as I could come up with:
In-N-Out's Double-Double Animal Style, via Serious Eats.
Now, we do not have In-N-Out Burger here in Austin. The first time I heard of it was in law school, when people who had lived in California spoke of it in hushed and reverent tones. I was intrigued! We spotted one during a 2006 trip to San Francisco, but it was closed.
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I have an impressive collection of pictures of myself looking sad in front of closed buildings eateries. |
My first and only In-N-Out burger was in Vegas in 2008. Exciting! Of course, it was at about 3 am, and followed our patronizing (heavily patronizing)
this vodka bar. But I recall it being
very good. I (fortunately) couldn't find a picture of that particular meal, but I did find this, from the same trip.
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| Sorry Honey, it just delights me so. |
Anyway, I figured if the good people at Serious Eats went to all the trouble to put together an authentic replica of this storied burger, I should stick as close to the recipe as possible. This meant suppressing a lot of second-nature healthifying instincts. I bought real mayonnaise! I bought hamburger buns that have never even been in the same room as a whole grain. I bought 80/20 chuck, the regular all-American corn-and-antiobiotics kind. But then I ran into some trouble. I couldn't buy a whole head of iceberg lettuce when I only needed two pieces of it. And despite a long internal struggle in the dairy section, I found it physically impossible to put American cheese in my cart.
But I suffer from a particular strain of minutiae-oriented obsessiveness and was tormented by my corner-cutting until I made ANOTHER TRIP TO THE STORE just for iceberg lettuce and American cheese. I sincerely hope to never have a more pitiful grocery run. (Also, when Dan saw the American cheese he made a face and requested cheddar on his.)
At LONG LAST, it was time. I threw myself wholly into the greasy fatty grease-fat of the thing and produced a decent facsimile of a famous burger.
And then I panicked and served it with steamed broccoli.
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| Anna salutes my effort. |
