Shop Boy’s Journey of Culinary Expansion: Bender’s Beef Burgers

I love burgers.

I mean, I REALLY love burgers.

There is just something fantastic about picking up a burger with your hands and eating it while juices from the meat and the sauce mingle together and drip off to form a glorious pool on your plate for dipping chips into…as you have to have chips with burgers.

When I make burgers at home, I normally just throw together some ingredients we have in the pantry and they always turn out pretty amazingly, if I do say so myself.

In the spirit of the column however, I decided it was time to try and follow a burger recipe and see if it was any better. For the experiment I decided it was best to use Ben O’Donoghue’s Beef Burgers (aka Bender’s Beef Burgers) from his book At Home with Ben.

My burgers only require me to make the patties everything else is either salad ingredients (which, clearly, are impossible to make) or buns and sauces which I generally can’t be bothered to make myself as I usually drink beer while cooking burgers and well beer makes me less inspired to go culinary crazy.

Ben’s burgers…not me, Ben O’Donoghue, require you to make the patties, a béarnaise sauce, a tomato relish and give you an option of making brioche buns or buying your own.

Wanting to have a glass of wine (I figured these burgers were a little bit classier and I should step it up from the beer), I opted out of the bun making but decided to try my hand at the béarnaise and the relish.

I started by preparing my patties. I literally just chucked all the ingredients into a bowl, mixed them and I was done.

This is simple, I thought; however I knew it would get worse.

I got to work on the relish. I fried off the spices, sweated the onions and then added the tomatoes, sugar and vinegar before simmering it down until it resembled chutney.

Again…it was simple.

Not ready to face the béarnaise yet, I opted to prepare the buns, get the plates ready and pretty much do any other menial task required to serve our dinner.

Having run out of jobs I could avoid the sauce no longer.

I meekly separated the eggs and placed the yolks into a dish with the vinegar. I whisked it furiously over a saucepan of boiling water and like the recipe told me, it thickened into a light, fluffy sauce. I seasoned, added the herbs and was done.

In disbelief, I was done…and again, it was simple.

On a post-béarnaise high I got to work frying the patties.

Ten minutes later, I assembled the burger with the relish, some mustard and the béarnaise and sat down to eat, satisfied that I was now a condiment king.

The burgers were delicious.

Overcome by burger joy, I started to feel like an inferior burger maker so I asked my partner for the verdict.

“Are they better than mine?”

“No. They are different. Yours are gigantic…and have lots of salad. This has lots of sauce. They are both good…you can’t compare them but, they are too different.”

I don’t know if that was a delicate way of putting my burgers down…or telling me I stuffed up one of the sauces. Either way, I will definitely make these burgers again and I will also make my freehand burgers too.

What can I say? I love my burgers.