JP Eats Food Blog. Welcome to my food (and wine) blog. I am very lucky to enjoy good food and wine pretty frequently. I also spend a good deal of time learning and experimenting with both. The point of this blog is to share some of that with you as well as help me remember foods, wines, and little bits and pieces of information I pick up along the way. I rarely take pictures in nice restaurants, so most of what you see here comes from my kitchen, my friends' kitchens, or various casual and local hot spots. You can hit the archive, or never miss a post with rss.
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Double SmokeShack burger from Shake Shack Madison Square Park. This is one of the better “specials” Shake Shack has offered… applewood smoked bacon and a cherry pepper relish are added to the regular Shack Burger with great results. It’s spicier than I expected, which was a very pleasant surprise. If you’ve never been to the Shack, don’t go and get this. But, if you go all the time and want a change or a tasty, spicy, smoky burger, go for it while it lasts!
A nice hefty 50/50 short rib/ brisket burger and a perfect batch of oven fries. I kept the burger relatively simple—10 ounces of fresh ground beef, local ketchup, a thick slice of aged cheddar, heirloom tomato, and baby lettuce.
This batch of oven fries following Cooks Illustrated’s recipe came out really well, although they don’t always. This recipe is highly dependent on the quality of the potato, your oven, and flipping and rotating the fries at very precise moments which seem to have little to do with the times listed in the recipe and everything to do with how quickly and (un)evenly the potatoes feel like browning. At their best, as shown here, these fries are deep golden brown, crispy on the outside, creamy on the inside, and not at all greasy.
I’ll also add a small note on the ketchup, First Field from New Jersey, which I discovered earlier in the day at New Amsterdam Market. This is delicious ketchup—a bit chunky and tasting of fresh harvested and roasted tomatoes. It’s on sale all summer and into early fall until supplies run out.
I heard there were some decent burgers to be found in Seattle, but we decided to make our own. We started out with a burger sampler from Bryan Flannery, which he describes as containing:
If that sounds somewhat absurd to you, you’re not alone. But it’s not. Or maybe it is, but in the best possible way. At any rate, we made a bunch of different kinds of burgers as we ate our way through the different blends. I don’t think I can say we had a favorite blend. We made all of the burgers using a basic high-heat pan-cooking method to get a really good crust.
One favorite was a basic burger with chopped roasted New Mexico Hatch chiles, above.
Another was our take on a blue cheese stuffed burger. Stuffed burgers never cook right, so instead we made two patties with blue cheese in the middle. This also maximized the crust-to-meat ratio making for a really good burger.
Shake Shack Battery Park City served it’s first burgers yesterday. I’m pretty excited to have Shake Shack close enough that I can get a burger home and eat it while it’s still hot. My first burger wasn’t quite as good as those from the original location… but it was close so I’ll give it time. The fries were better for some reason. Washing it down with a Port Brewing Anniversary Ale that I managed to find a couple of weeks ago was just an added bonus.
Memorial Day dinner. A hefty 50/50 short rib-brisket burger, classic potato salad, and greenmarket vegetables tossed in olive oil. And an all-American old vine Zinfandel from Carlisle Winery.
Shitake-gruyere burger. This was just a really good burger… I used a 50/50 blend of Washugyu short ribs and flap meat from Japan Premium Beef that I ground just seconds before throwing them into a hot cast iron skillet. The burger blend was pretty fatty so the patties shrunk down a lot but all that fat in the pan helped to quickly form a perfect crust without cooking the middle past rare. I topped them with gruyere and sauteed shitake mushrooms and served them on brioche from Amy’s.
Zuni Café on Market in San Francisco is a great spot for upscale casual lunch. For some reason, I’ve really been feeling the burgers on this trip, but this is a bit different. Grass-fed beef cooked medium rare with good cheddar and fresh pickles on rosemary focaccia with a side of really good shoestring potatoes. Before the burger were really fresh, perfectly shucked California oysters. Highly recommended.
Double cheeseburger and fries from Taylor’s Automatic Refresher. Sorry, Gott’s Roadside? Not a fan of the name change, but the burger is great (and the fries even better). The double is way to big for average humans though!
In-n-Out! Double double, cheeseburger, and well done fries. I hope people don’t get bored of me posting In-n-Out photos because I don’t want to stop! It’s usually the first place I go whenever I return to Cali so it’s taken on additional psychological value.
The Breslin Lamb Burger—for real, not my version. Now you see why there are no previous pics of this on here; it’s so dark in the restaurant that the only source of light for iPhone photography is this mini-lantern from the table (I don’t use flash in restaurants). That and after waiting for 1.5 hours for a table, it’s just too hard not to devour the burger the instant it’s set down in front of you. How was it? The wait at The Breslin is annoying, but the bar is great and the burger so good I’m willing to put up with it.
