Grinding your own meat for burgers

Which burger mixture is the most effective? I tried a passel of them for a story in July 2008. Here's how I did it and what I learned:


PUTTING BURGERS THROUGH THEIR PACES
To come up with a great beef burger, I did some work.

Most experts agree a great burger needs fat, a ratio of 80 percent lean to 20 percent fat. Much leaner and you'll get sawdust on a bun. No wonder supermarket meat cases are full of 80/20 ground beef.

But experts agree that pre-ground beef isn't the way to go. You don't know much about the meat, even if it's labeled by cut such as chuck. And you have to cook pre-ground beef thoroughly to rid it of any possible bacterial contamination.

Grinding meat yourself isn't as hard as it sounds. I have a meat grinder that attaches to my KitchenAid mixer, but most people don't have them. So, for this project, I used the food processor. The trick is to make sure everything is very clean and the meat is cold. Cut it away from the bone and trim cartilage if necessary, but leave fat. Cut the meat into large chunks, 3 to 4 inches square, and process it using pulses of 1 to 2 seconds.

Don't process the mixture into paste. Within a few pulses, you'll get a fluffy, ground mixture.

Next, I looked into what meat to grind. Chuck gets the most votes, although sirloin has fans. I was also intrigued by suggestions of adding a little short rib meat. I love short ribs for their succulence and beefy flavor.

Next: What to add to the meat. I found reports by Vogue writer Jeffrey Steingarten and food scientist Harold McGee on adding moisture to burgers, either water or cream.

Cream rang a bell. Sure enough, I found a once-classic recipe by the late James Beard that mixes ground beef with a little cream and grated onion. Grating onion releases juices, adding moisture, and gives a hint of onion flavor without overwhelming the meat.

Cream makes sense. It adds richness and moisture, but it also binds the beef. Burgers made from home-ground beef can fall apart on the grill. After trying both water and cream, cream was the clear winner.

I set up mixtures of meats chuck and sirloin alone, plus various combinations of chuck, sirloin and short rib, all with and without cream and grated onion. Then I tasted all of them along with pre-ground chuck from the supermarket.

The meats I ground myself were superior, with beefier flavor and more depth. The pre-ground beef tasted flatter and fattier. Sirloin didn't look promising, with a pasty consistency, but it had a good "hamburgery" flavor.

But the best were burgers made with chuck and short rib, with or without sirloin, and a little cream and onion. They were tender and juicy, with a rich, beefy flavor.

So, if you want a great burger, you need to grind a little chuck. And don't skip the cream.

James Beard Awards weekend: The Fab 4

The annual James Beard Foundation Awards weekend is over, with the usual and the unusual. (The usual: Anthony Bourdain's snippy tweets criticizing things he wasn't there to see.)

I'd rather remember the highlights:

First, that picture at the top. In honor of the 25th anniversary, the foundation released a cookbook, "The Best of the Best," featuring the outstanding chef winners over 25 years. To celebrate, there was a small cocktail party Sunday night at the Beard House on West 12th Street. The guest list was small - the house is so tiny, you have to take a deep breath to turn around - but it was select. Standing out on the second floor landing, I snapped a picture of a remarkable foursome: Thomas Keller, Alfred Portale, Patrick O'Connell and Jeremiah Tower, with foundation president Susan Ungaro (right).

Next, Charlotte sightings: Chef Joe Bonaparte of the Art Institute's International Culinary Program was hanging out late Sunday night at the Chef's Night Out event at the Chelsea Market. And in the sequin-to-satin sardine-tight crowd at the chef stations after the awards gala, I shuffled past Mark Allison, dean of culinary affairs, and Patricia Del Bello, both of Johnson & Wales University Charlotte.

The best Southern hugging and eating: Since the Beard Awards presentation goes on for hours while you wait to get something to eat, members of the Southern Foodways Alliance have a tradition of gathering at Alex Guarneschelli's restaurant Butter to eat and drink as much as possible to sustain us through the long night. It's such a good time that chef Bill Smith of Crook's Corner, who wasn't even going to the awards, still flew up to New York for the weekend just to enjoy the lunch.

Carolinas nominees were in short supply this year. But Hugh Acheson of 5 & 10 in Athens and Linton Hopkins of Restaurant Eugene in Atlanta scored a shared win: There was a tie for Best Chef Southeast. Andrea Reusing of Lantern in Chapel Hill, last year's winner, was cooking at the gala, and Ashley Christensen of Poole's Dinner/Beasleys/Chuck's in Raleigh was around at a bunch of events, even pulling the pork shoulders at a Derby Party in Park Slope given by Kat Kinsman of CNN and Eatocracy.com.

Female winners were not in short supply, I'm happy to say. Maricel Presilla of the delightful restaurant Cucharamama in Hoboken, N.J., won Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic; Christini Tosi of Momofuku Milk Bar won Rising Star Chef (particularly nice to see a pastry chef get treated like a "real" chef) and Mindy Segal of Mindy's HotChocolate in Chicago won for pastry chef.

And yes, after a four-day weekend of chef events, awards shows and food, this is my new slogan (right). Maybe I'll make it my new Twitter profile picture.


Get the full list of winners of all the awards, including the Book, Broadcast and Journalism awards given Friday, at www.jamesbeard.org.

And in disclosure: After serving as a member and then chair of the James Beard book awards, I was asked to stay on to chair the JBF Leadership Awards, announced in the fall, which honor food sustainability and food policy. As a chair, I'm also a member of the awards committee that oversees all the awards events.

Next up: Reporting from New York and Beard Awards

I've got my portable fork packed and ready for an eater's trip to New York. Raleigh food writer Andrea Weigl and I will be at the James Beard Foundation festivities this weekend, along with anything else we find that's interesting in the food world.

If you want to follow us on Twitter, we'll use the hashtab #NCtoNYC for general food adventures, both together and separately. On Twitter, I'm @kathleenpurvis and she's @andreaweigl. During James Beard events, particularly the Book, Broadcast and Journalism Awards on Friday night and the big gala Sunday night, we'll use the hashtag #jbfa.

If you'd like to follow the official Beard Foundation Twitter feed during the awards on Monday night at Lincoln Center, check out these directions. They'll stream it live on jamesbeard.org.

This week in Food

While I sort through this pile of notes and photos from New York for future blog posts (food truck festival! Soulful skate francese! corn pudding with bottarga!), take a look at today's food coverage at www.charlotteobserver.com/food:

• We've got advice and lists for people starting new kitchens (or people who want tips for their old ones).


• We have three prizes for the best answers to the question "Which six people (living or not) would be around the table at your perfect dinner party?" Send your answer to me at kpurvis@charlotteobserver.com for a chance to win. Deadline is end of the day Friday. I'll share answers and announce winners right here next week.


• I've got details of three N.C. culinary stars who did great at last weekend's James Beard Awards in New York.


• Catherine Rabb has advice for people who want to go into the wine business.

Live from New York

I'm heading up to New York on Thursday for the James Beard Foundation awards weekend. That includes the media awards (cookbooks, journalism, TV and radio) on Friday night, then the gala on Monday night at Avery Fischer Hall at Lincoln Center.

If you're interested, my colleague Andrea Weigl and I both will be tweeting through the weekend. I'm @kathleenpurvis, she's @andreaweigl. I'll try to remember my hash tags: #nypurvis for general New York eating and watching, #jbf for the awards.

And if you'd like to watch, the James Beard Foundation will offer live-streaming for the first time on Monday night. It starts at 6 p.m. Monday, at http://www.jamesbeard.org/awardslive/. It's great people-watching. I'll report in next week with plenty of tidbits.

New York eating: Double the Beard Awards

After 10 years of going to the annual James Beard Foundation Awards in New York, I'm getting a little jaded. "Yeah, OK, that's Tom Colicchio. Wake me up when Daniel Boulud STOPS dancing on the tables."

But this year's awards outdid themselves in fun potential. This was the first year the book awards were moved out of the overlong and overcrowded Monday night gala. They were added to the media awards on Sunday night, joining the journalism and broadcast awards and making that event a little more crowded and a little overlong, but a lot more fun.

Someone recently said the media awards were "the high school prom of the food world," compared to the gala being "the Oscars of the food world." Now the Oscars has a Golden Globes the night before. Kelly Choi of "Top Chef Masters" and Andrew Zimmern of "Bizarre Foods" were the hosts, and the sit-down dinner featured four courses of spot-on food, from Greg Hirigoyen's perfect first course of poached asparagus spears to Suzanne Goin's short ribs, with flavors that included mint leaves. Who thinks of mint with short ribs? But that's a chef for you, and it really worked.

Monday night was the awards gala at Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall. Removing the book awards from the presentation made it, oh, maybe 5 minutes shorter. (They used "Star Wars" music as the theme all night, but after 3 hours and 15 minutes, it's hard not to sound like Chewbacca yawning.) Among the highlights, Sean Brock of McCrady's in Charleston won Best Chef Southeast and thanked, among other things, "The South, bourbon and my wife." Tom Colicchio won the big one, Outstanding Chef, and noted "I share a birthday with Julia Child and a hairstyle with James Beard," then went on to salute the incredible contribution immigrants have always made in the American food world. Funny and classy.

Twitter was a new wrinkle this year, a popular way to pass the time. At one point, I discovered that @hollymoore had tweeted this: "Following @ruthbourdain and @kathleenpurvis JBFA tweets is like channel-flipping between Jersey Shore and Lehrer Report." (In the word of Ruth Reichl, whose twee Tweets are parodied by the cheeky and fictious Ruth Bourdain, "Amused.")

The biggest crowd ever hit the food serving stations all at once. Following my usual pattern (eat, shuffle, eat, shuffle), I managed some highlights: Foie gras-filled prunes at D'Artagnan; tender Pear and Fresh Pecorino Ravioli by Fortunato Nicotra of Felidia; Champagne-Poached Prawns With Spicy Cucumber Salad and Green Curry-Coconut Sauce by Mark Franz of Farralon; and Tostidas de Tinga by Priscila Satkoff, Salpicon, an acolyte of Rick Bayless. My very favorite: James Kent of Eleven Madison Park filled lids of caviar tins with a layer of Scottish Salmon Tartare topped with a creamy smoked mousse topped with yuzu and bright pink trout roe.

Balancing-act food seems to be replacing tall food. Kevin Binkley of Binkley's served little cups of hot bacon soup with a tiny spoon of chopped raw scallop balanced on top and a tiny oyster cracker "glued" to the lip. You stirred the scallop into the hot soup and then spooned or drank it up.

And my personal favorite, pictured above, was by Curtis Duffy of Avenues at the Peninsula in Chicago, who trained with Grant Achatz at Alinea: The bottom of the clear cup held king crab chunks in a cucumber consomme. The top of the cup was covered with a clear sugar disc decorated with dabs of floral cream and lemon balm. You broke through the sugar with a spoon and let it all fall together. It looked magical, like a tiny terrarium, and tasted amazing - spicy, cool, sweet and refreshing, all at the same time. Sort of like the Beard Awards this year, actually.