It's always convenient when two different holidays that are related happen in the same month. Of course, I'm not sure why these two holiday months aren't later in the summer.
Maybe it's a Memorial Day thing. May marks both National Barbecue Month and National Hamburger Month. Mahalo has a great page with various links to bbq how-tos, bbq recipes, and where to find the best bbq in the country. As for hamburgers, Food & Wine has a recipe for an All-Time Favorite Hamburger. And here's a bunch of recipes from the Southern Food section of About.com.
There's also a new book and documentary out called Hamburger America that examines some of the great burger places in the U.S.
Do you like hard plastic on your hamburgers? I'm a mustard guy myself, so I wouldn't want these.
Price Chopper is recalling packages of hamburgers and ground meat because they might contain small pieces of plastic. The meat being recalled is in various forms, so take note: four packs and eight packs of 80% lean ground chuck, 85% lean ground round patties, and four packs of 90% lean ground sirloin. The packages have a date of May 13 on them.
Don't you hate it when you're sitting down in a Jack In the Box with a Sourdough Jack, large bacon cheese potato wedges and a Diet Coke and suddenly you get this urge to, oh, I don't know? -- check out who's left messages on your wall on Facebook -- and you can't get online?
Don't you hate that?
Not to worry anymore, as is it is seems that Jack in the Box actually offers free wi fi in their restaurants. All you have to do is look for a giant TV screen, snatch the five-digit code off the screen, and get online. It's not a rumor, because the wi-fi is actually available according to Knowzy, but Jack In the Box has not officially confirmed.
Thinking about the coming recession? Wondering where on your already tight budget you can make some cuts?
Don't worry. Fast food is here to save the wallet!
Apparently, fast-food chains have already felt the pinch of recessions fears with slacking sales, and in anticipation of what might become a full-blown hit, have begun offering value items on their menus. Wendy's introduced the double cheeseburger "Stack Attack" on its 99-cent value menu, Burger King's usually $2 Double Cheeseburger is half price for $1 now, and even non-burger fast food restaurants like Tao Bell are in the discount game with 99 cent gorditas.
I'm just waiting for In N Out to offer a $1 Double Double. Animal-style, of course.
So this is the Super Bowl. You don't need to spend all those unearned bets on Wagyu or Kobe or whatever fancy beef for burgers, and you definitely don't have to go and make full-size burgers, either. First of all, a full-size burger suffers the same syndrome as Buffalo wings. They are messy, and if you and your guests eat burgers the way me and my guests eat burgers -- rare -- they'll be dripping bloody greasy juice everywhere. Secondly, with all that food being served all afternoon (or evening), a small taste of a great burger in the form of a slider is better than trying to force down an entire burger. It lets people taste everything else on the table.
Speaking of fast food, we feel the need to take this moment and talk about burgers, and not just burgers, but a new burger that will be showing up on the Wendy's menu next year. It's the Philly Style Hoagie Burger, created by Ian Van Camp when Wendy's put out a challenge to the people to create a burger this past Spring.
Now, we're going to try to judge, but really, whom are we kidding? We're Slashfoodies and we're a little bit opinionated about food, particularly when it comes to piling salami and ham onto existing two -- not one, but two -- burger patties. Really? Really?
Now, we aren't saying that Ian's creation is a bad one. In fact, we are quite tempted to go out in the December weather, fire up our grills, and make this burger ourselves for our next Holiday BBQ, but really? Was salami and ham the most creative burger that we could come up with when there are far more interesting things to put on a burger like deep fried onion rings or in the burger to global-flavor-ify it like soy sauce? Of course not! There had to have been hundreds of thousands of entries, so does that mean the voting public chose the Philly Style Hoagie Burger?
The real question is, are salami and ham ingredients in a Philly Style Hoagie Burger?!?!
We are perplexed, but will re-visit when we see the burger on the menus.
I am not sure how legitimate any "Best [insert food or restaurant here]" list is, but according to 13 cities across the US on Citysearch, Hardee's was voted as #1 for fast food. I can offer no real opinion here, since I haven't seen a Hardee's since I lived in Cincinnati (or was it Detroit?), so if you love it, can you tell us why?
Hardee's Monster Thickburger pictured above, was also voted #1 in five cities. If it's based on sheer size alone, I can see why, but really? Does Hardee's really beat out In N Out? What about Fatburger? Or perhaps I'm just too narrowly West-coast focused.
Five Guys Famous Burgers and Fries, a D.C.-based chain that has garnered rave reviews up and down the East Coast recently entered the New York metro area. I visited their Queens location and, despite Five Guy's obsession with cooking all their meat well done, I found the burger quite good.
The Guys recently opened a shop in Hackensack, N.J. Now here's where it starts to get interesting. Überblogger Jason Perlow reports that Burger Boys, an independent joint, has also set up shop in nearby Fairview. They copied Five Guys' menu format. No big deal, right? But that's just the tip of intellectual property rights infringement iceberg. Rather than give these con artists any free advertising, I chose a pic of the Five Guys ordering area from Perlow's site. The shots he took of Burger Boys are pretty shocking.
How shocking you ask? Let's put it this way. Burger Boys didn't stop at copying the Five Guys' menu. They also lovingly reproduced the Guys' interior design, presentation of the food in brown paper bags and its insistence on cooking everything well done. I almost forgot, the Boys dress their staff in red T-shirts and hats, just like the Guys. I'd love to think that this is merely some confluence of East Coast burger synergy, but clearly it's a simple case of out-and-out theft of the Five Guys' concept.
I am going to hold off until the next paragraph my feelings about what qualifies as a "burger" so that we can all just gaze upon the gloriousness that is this Chicken "Burger" (the quotation marks are mine) as posted on food blog, Glorious Food and Wine. I like that it's a very up close and personal shot of the burger, but you know that the eater wasn't dining alone because of the burger in the background. I am always a fan of light-on-light, like the bun and the burger on a white plate against a white background.
Aside from an occasional Egg McMuffin hangover cure from McDonald's, or perhaps a very rare moment of utter stress-peration (stressed-out desperation) that drives me to Jack in the Box for two tacos for ninety-nine cents, I don't pay much attention to fast food chains.
Yikes! Take a look at Wendy's Baconator - the name alone "Bacon Terminator?" - is meant to strike fear into the hearts of every cardiologist, and from the picture, why wouldn't it? It has two burgers, two slices of cheese, and six, yes six, slices of bacon.
The scariest part of the Baconator, however, is not the burger itself. It's the commercial. It's just so wrong.
Here at Slashfood burgers have been on our foodar since May. Heck, now that we're into summer they're on everybody's mind, including the good citizens of Akron, Ohio, who hosted the National Hamburger Festival this past weekend.
The hefty hamburger above was cooked up this weekend, but not in Akron. Weighing in at 10 pounds, Big Bad Bubba's Double Wide hails from Huntington, W. Va. Specifically Hillbilly Hotdogs, which last year created a 5-pound burger known as, you guessed it, Big Bad Bubba's Single Wide.
This weekend HH added the BBDW to its menu. This massive sandwich may sport a 6.5-pound patty, but it's still less than one-sixth the weight of the largest burger I've ever heard of. Either way, I'd love to see Kobayashi take one down, if only so he could declare himself a big bad bubba, even if he is only half-wide.
It comes from Charlie Gipe, the executive chef at Hershey's and sounds like maybe a pop food version of mole sauce. You use four cups of Hershey's chocolate syrup, which sounds like a lot, but there is also four whole lemons and vinegar so I'm sure that balances the flavor. Full recipe after the jump.
Before anyone ever heard of Harold, much less Kumar, before the invention of the Crave campaign, before the word Slyder was trademarked I was a teenage White Castle worker. On this last day of National Hamburger Month I'd like to share my memories of working at America's oldest hamburger chain, as well as my thoughts on its present state of affairs.
I started working at White Castle during my senior year in high school. I'd eaten their burgers with my folks as a kid and had enjoyed their "restorative" effects after drinking with my buddies. We used to call the tasty little suckers "White Crapples." When one opened in my neighborhood, I figured what the hell, and applied for a job. After management determined I had a pulse and some level of manual dexterity, however minimal, I was hired.
Back then the uniform was slightly different than it is today. I remember wearing a brown shirt and a baseball cap. All burger cooking was done in clear view. To the left of the register, customers watched their square patties being steam-grilled. I still remember the time a Little League team ordered 100 burgers. Instead of letting the line back up, we opened another station and got to work.
Once after blowing a joint with my co-worker Max, the burgers on my flat top started burning. As I stared into space, he sounded the alarm by screaming, "Bang your head" at me. He averted disaster by ladling onion water onto my griddle. Back then there was no shortage of onion water, since we used dehydrated onions. Small dust clouds would form as we poured dried diced onion into stainless buckets before adding water.
Do you like hard plastic on your hamburgers? I'm a mustard guy myself, so I wouldn't want these.
Don't you hate it when you're sitting down in a Jack In the Box with a Sourdough Jack, large bacon cheese potato wedges and a Diet Coke and suddenly you get this urge to, oh, I don't know? -- check out who's left messages on your wall on Facebook -- and you can't get online?
Five Guys Famous Burgers and Fries
If you haven't started your cookout yet, maybe this is something you'd like to try: 
Here's an interesting idea: 
Before anyone ever heard of Harold, much less Kumar, before the invention of the Crave campaign, before the word Slyder was trademarked I was a teenage White Castle worker. On this last day of National Hamburger Month I'd like to share my memories of working at America's oldest hamburger chain, as well as my thoughts on its present state of affairs.
May is National BBQ Month and National Hamburger Month
Cupcakes, not for dessert (unless beef is your idea of a treat)
Because eating French Fries in the car is so tough
