Good Burgers but only for Those Who Wear Spandex

So my eggs fried in bacon grease are okay. But a delicious hamburger sandwich is poison. In fact, it now seems an untimely death lurks in every morsel of red meat.

There are inane warnings on everything, so it’s only proper to warn that my recipe for a righteous burger could be hazardous to your health. So here it is. The Los Angeles Times reported any amount of red meat – that is any amount – increases the chance of early death. (Full Text)

“Any red meat you eat contributes to the risk,” said An Pan, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and lead author of the study, published online Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

According to the study, one three ounce serving a meat a day resulted in an increased mortality rate of 13% over a twenty year period. The study tracked the meat eating habits of 37,698 men and 83,644 women over a twenty year period.

I have no idea how this cohort was assembled, but it somehow doesn’t seem to represent an accurate cross section of the U.S. adult population. And I’m not sure that it asked all the relevant necessary questions either. Did it ask respondents, for example, how often they wore garish spandex shorts with matching gaudy spandex tee-shirts, or even if they owned spandex shorts? Probably no.

If it had, it would have likely found that spandex short wearers, in general, live longer than most of us regardless of how much red meat they eat. Spandex wearers are almost religious about physical fitness. The shorts have nothing to do with it. Exercise does.

After decades of vilification, lard has become a good food. (Full Text) It used to be I could eat my bacon (in moderation) if I discarded the bacon grease. Now I can cook with the grease (lard) but must throw out the bacon.  

Life insurance actuaries ask how much we weigh & how tall we are, how much we drink, whether we smoke and if we fly airplanes. They do not ask how often we eat burgers. (On issues of longevity, I’ll take the actuaries over Harvard Public Health researchers every time.)

Now after this proper warning on the potential deadly qualities of hamburgers, here’s how to make a good one. For these you will need:

Gaudy spandex shorts with matching tops

1 Pound of Ground Chuck

4 Bakery Hard Rolls sliced in half. (Sheboygan hard rolls are perfect, but alas I believe they are part of Wisconsin’s food culture, so any good hard roll will have to do.)

1 Thinly sliced Tomato

1 Thinly sliced red Onion

4 Slices of sharp cheddar cheese

Salt & Pepper

4 Tablespoons of Butter

Ketchup and Mustard (optional)

Put on spandex shorts (very important). Then, to form the burgers divide the ground beef into four sections and gently form each into a ball. Gentle is the operative word here. If the beef is overworked it will be tough. Between two pieces of waxed paper squash to beef balls into patties. These should be of a slightly larger diameter than the rolls. Salt and pepper both sides of the beef patties.

Preheat and oven to 200⁰ and fire up the grill.

Grill the burgers to medium or for about 3 minutes per side over a medium hot fire. (If necessary squelch any flames with beer – this recipe is from Milwaukee after all.)

Set the burgers off the fire on a warm part of the grill. Then lightly toast hard rolls halves on the grill.

Generously butter the hard rolls. Top the bottoms with a burger and a slice of cheese and place in a warm oven until the cheese begins to melt. Top as desired with ketchup and mustard. Follow with thinly sliced onion and tomato. Top it with the top half of the roll. While still wearing spandex (and be sure to have any dinner guests properly suited up), enjoy a burger the way God meant them to be.

P.S. If you do not have spandex shorts, have a chocolate bar for dessert instead (Full Text).