Pencil & Spoon - Braised burger and onions
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Ilose hours of my week reading burger blogs, perving over buns, mustard andjuicy, pink meat. I thought I knew about the burger, but that was until I wentto dinner at Mishkin’s, a kind-of Jewish deli in Covent Garden.
Themenu understates it, but then it’s the kind of place you expect understatement:3oz steamed beef patty with onions and Swiss cheese. £5. I ordered it,obviously. It came alone in the middle of a small white plate. It looked a bitsorry for itself; it’s only just bigger than slider-size, but it also looked beautiful:the onions were falling out, mixing with the melting cheese; the bun lookedfull of juice, shiny or wet; the beef was a little meatball-like hunk (check out this photo). And itwas delicious. So delicious I wanted to try and recreate it.
Thisis the first time I’ve left a restaurant and tried to work out how a dish wasmade so that I could recreate it. For me, the flavour in this was from the intenselysavoury and sweet onions, their juices getting everywhere, loading the bun andthe meat with their rich depth. I had to nail that part.
SoI made braised onions. Lots of white onions, sliced really fat, softened inbutter with sugar, thyme, salt and pepper, beef stock on top, left to cook foran hour, then cooled until needed. Then the burger: just beef mince andseasoning, seared on the outside and then braised in the onions, lid still onthe pan (I did this for 10 minutes but next time I’d go for much longer to getit even juicier, I’d also have more onions so the beef is fully immersed). Somegruyere cheese piled on top of the meat a few minutes from the end, while Ileft it to rest. Loaded on top of a bun, onion juice everywhere, cheese meltingall over.
Thisis not a clean burger to eat. This is the sort of burger you eat alone whereyou swear and sweat and cheer because it’s so disgustingly good. The rich,savouriness of the onion is incredible and cooking the beef in the stock sucksup that flavour. It wasn’t as good as the Mishkin’s beef patty, and it probably wasn't how they made it, as this photo shows, but that justmakes me want to go back there and order another.
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