stlbites.com – st. louis food blog of bill burge

Lunch Dilemma?

Feb 12, 2010 cooking

You’re working from home and it’s lunch time.  Your wife thawed hamburger that needs to be used, but you can’t find a bun.  But, ah, there’s some red wattle applewood-smoked ham.  You can make a sandwich.  But there’s not enough ham for a sandwich.  What do you do?

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Tags: hamburger, lunch, red wattle, The Church of Burger

WHERE IS THE REAL BEST BURGER IN STL???????????

Jan 26, 2010 St. Louis, foodster, general food, missouri, restaurants

On any food-related message board, in any given city, at any given time, the debate of “who has the best hamburger?” always arises.  That’s because American’s love hamburgers—to the tune of 14 billion burgers consumed per year!

Many of you have been debating this very question over the last few years, but the debate took on a new fervor last year when Mayer Slay’s staff posed the question on mayorslay.com at approximately the same time Alex Csank brought it up once again on the stlbites.com forum.  Still, there was no unanimous winner.  The question remained unanswered.  To truly answer the question it was clear some capable man or woman would have to step up and consume all these burgers because you can’t say the Newstead burger is better than the O’Connell’s burger if you’ve never had the O’Connell’s burger.

And that’s where Andrew Mark Veety comes in. He has risen to the challenge and, in twelve months time, you will have your answer.  Sort of.

Taking votes to establish St. Louisian’s top picks via twitter and his website, Veety has tabulated the data and narrowed things down to the top 12 contenders.  In reverse order, one Sunday a month, he’ll be consuming each of the burgers to lay the question to rest in what has been dubbed, The Church of Burgers.  

First up: Contender #1.

Full Disclosure: I’d never met Veety in person until he invited along a small entourage of St. Louis Foodsters to partake in the consumption of contender #1.  Via the power of the internet he always seemed like a cool guy and I jumped at the chance to put down my  keyboard and cell phone and have some bonified social interaction.  I’m happy to report he is, in fact, a cool guy and as hilarious as I figured he’d be based upon his online persona.  Plus, I obviously like hamBURGErs.

Tags: Andrew Mark Veety, hamburger, hamburgers, J. Pollack Photography, St. Louis

On Point on Hamburgers

Mar 27, 2008 general food

I had a bit of a driveway moment last night as On Point did an hour long history of the hamburger.

It was mostly because the main guest, Josh Ozersky, the “online food editor for New York Magazine and author of the new book The Hamburger: A History“ was an easy guy to listen to because he approached the subject like you or I would as just some dude that dug a good burger and decided to write about them as apposed to some snobbed up food historian that was trying to over-class a food that is simply soul satisfyingly good when at it’s best.

From his personal choice for the inventor of the hamburger (which is not the 1904 World’s Fair story) to the iconic status surrounding the burger in America they covered quite a bit of ground.  They even included the original Big Mac commercial.

He had some serious Jeopardy-style hamburger knowledge and it seems like his book at only 160 pages would be a quick and interesting read if you were so inclined.

I’m not sure if there’s a podcast but you can stream the show on the On Point website here.

Tags: hamburger, hamburgers, josh ozersky, NPR, On Point

I’ll call your canned hamburger…

Feb 3, 2008 general food

and raise you canned bacon.

Having seen the canned hamburger over on Gut Check I was left wanting to get a look at what it would look like cracked fresh from the can instead of all gussied up with lettuce, tomato, onion, and cheese.

Having now seen canned bacon fresh from a can, I am terrified of what that might look like and have promptly discarded the thought from my mind.

while Anthony Bourdain said, “if you want to make people happy, give them bacon,” I really don’t think this is what he had in mind.

This will make no one happy, and the most frightening thing isn’t even that someone unwound a can of 20 year old canned bacon–it’s that they opened it to attempt to develop it all over again so they can prop it up next to their other hot sellers: Red Feather Canned Australian Cheddar Cheese and Red Feather New Zealand Canned Creamery Butter.

But then again, now that we have a source for canned hamburger, canned bacon, and canned cheese; and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen canned onions before; and there’s certainly canned tomato; all we need now is some canned lettuce and we can make an entirely can-sourced bacon cheeseburger.

Hooray!

Go check out the pictures if you dare.

Celebrity Canned Bacon Memorial Page [Canned-Bacon.com via Dethroner]

Tags: anthony bourdain, bacon, canned bacon, dethroner, gut check, hamburger, WTF? is right!