#friedchillies

June 7, 2014

Lunch: Mustafa Jones hamburgers, I Eat Burgers food festival. (Photos taken from FriedChillies and SeriousEats)

Dinner: R's family dinner, an assortment of roast beef, cheese, and roasted vegetables. 

Mageiros, according to food writer Michael Pollan, is the word the ancient greeks used to describe cooks, butchers, and priests. To the modern ear, of course, the word sounds literally magical. 

Though it is debatable that mageiros and magic are related -- "mageiros" is related to the ancient greek word for knife, "máchaira" -- no one doubts the spell that chefs and cooks have over the masses, even until today. No more is this evident than in food festivals like I Eat Burgers, where burger-grillers enchant crowds long enough to withstand the blazing heat, overcrowded tables, and endless queues.

"We're drawn to the rhythms and textures of the work cooks do," writes Pollan in Cooked, "which seems so much more direct and satisfying than the more abstract tasks most of us perform in jobs these days. Cooks get to put their hands on real stuff... they get to work with fire,  and water, earth and air -- mastering them! -- to perform their tasty alchemy."

That alchemy Pollan writes about is no more clearly demonstrated on open-flame grills, where we get to see meat literally transformed from a red, inedible mass into a smoky, chargrill-crusty patty of deliciousness that's sandwiched between two toasted bread buns.

It's magic in front of our very eyes. 

Hamburg Mysteries

The history of the hamburger, so legend has it, originated from Genghis Khan's relentless conquering quests during the 13th century. In order to sustain themselves over long distances, the nomadic Mongol hordes would place a few pieces of meat fillets under their saddles, so that it would tenderised and cooked from the heat and movement of the animal. 

This crude form of the minced-meat patty was then exported into Europe when his grandson Kublai Khan invaded Russia, at which point the "Steak Tartare" was apparently born*. From there, the mince patty was exported to the German port town of Hamburg, which was then a key trading post in the Hanseatic route as far back as the 13th century. Centuries later, between 1850 and 1930, over five million Europeans sailed from Hamburg to North America, bringing with them their culinary knowledge. 

Food history, like Pollan's etymological link of magic and cooking, is unfortunately often more romantic than it is true. "Linking the minced meat patty to Genghis Khan ignores the fact that chopped meat was already a feature of various European cuisines," wrote Heston Blumenthal in his book In Search of Perfection. "What is generally accepted is that Hamburg had, by the late-eighteenth century, become identified with a style of preparing meat," he wrote, adding on that in 1747, English cookbook writer Hannah Glasse referred to a 'Hamburg sausages' in The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy. 

When did the hamburger become... THE HAMBURGER?

A single point of origin of the hamburger we know today is equally difficult to track down. One story has it that in 1885, 15-year-old Charlie Nagreen invented the burger at the Outagamie County fair in Seymour, Wisconsin. Having seen the mess that fair-goers made while bringing food around the grounds, the story goes, he flattened his meatballs and placed them between two pieces of bread. 

Another account places its origins at the same year, but in Hamburg, New York, where Frank and Charles Menches ran out of pork patties and made beef ones instead. 

Whichever your preferred origin story is, the basic structure of the hamburger we know today hasn't differed much: one mince meat patty, sandwiched between two pieces of bread. Charlie's story, however, holds a particular interest for me in the way he cooks his patties: by flattening it down from a meatball. 

The first time I witnessed burgers being cooked this way was at MyBurgerLab, the popular gourmet burger place that kickstarted the recent burger revolution in the Klang Valley. There, raw patties, rather than being shaped flat, start off as a loosely packed meatball -- an essential first step in making the perfect burger -- as Smash Burger founder Tom Ryan explained in a Sporkful podcast episode. 

"It's true that you should never press a burger in the process of it cooking," he says, "but what we do is smash it on the grill for the first 10 seconds, and it never gets smashed again."

The pressure created on the bottom of that patty, he adds, creates a hard caramelised shell. "On a hot grill, all those hot juices have to go some place, but because it's so loosely textured, they cook up the burger through the tiny cavities formed by the loosely textured meat."

Then comes the step that makes the burger patty become a "water balloon of beef flavour," that explodes in your mouth the moment you bite in: 

"When the juices reaches to the top, the seasoning is dissolved, and is drawn back into the burger; it actually bastes itself in its own juice. When you turn it over, that shell formed at the bottom becomes a cap, resulting in the juices recirculating within the patty." 

The caramelisation process Ryan talks about is known as the "Maillard Reaction", a complex chemical process that happens protein-rich foods are heated. 

The term may sound fairly new in this age of Heston Blumenthal-inspired cookshows, but it isn't. The term was coined in 1912 after a French doctor Louis-Camille Maillard, who discovered that when amino acids are heated in the company of sugar, large protein structures break into smaller compounds which react with others, recombining into new configurations. These new molecules are what gives cooked food -- including roasted coffee, the crust of bread, beer, soya sauce, and fried meats -- its characteristic colour and smell.