Keep It Juicy

I grew up immersed in the most boring food environment you can imagine.

At least, that’s how it felt.

It was a compromise, to be sure. My Italian mom, who insisted on making her pasta sauce from scratch, who every year spoiled us all by crafting the most amazing lasagna for the family get-together, who seriously did her best to provide balanced and nutritious meals on a tight budget, nevertheless was cooking for my Polish dad.

Don’t get me wrong, Polish cuisine has some real winners; just don’t ask me to spell them unaided. Some of my favorite food memories include fresh-made pierogies (nailed it!) from the deli in a dozen flavors. What are pierogies? Pretty much dough stuffed with potatoes. I know.

That was the exception, though, not the rule.

Most of my growing-up years were sustained by dinners including one each of a very limited, bland, and boring, selection of meats, starches, and vegetables, each in their separate, non-casserole places. They could technically touch each other once on the plate (I think), but they most definitely had to be prepared uncombined, pure, and untainted by food from each of the other categories. When food wasn’t bland and boring, it was just revolting – I’m talking about you, liver!

But summertime was accompanied by a massive gamechanger, the beloved cookout!

Beloved by everyone, that is, but me.

You see, my mom, in her deep commitment to the health and safety of the family unit, was determined not to risk our lives by exposing us to dangerously undercooked meats.

Chicken?

Well done.

Burgers?

Well done!

Anything from a pig?

EXTRA WELL DONE!

I don’t mean to make light of the very real dangers of food poisoning. I have been the victim of this plague a few times in my life. Once I was so sick after a company dinner at an upscale restaurant, I could only be driven to stir from my sweaty fetal position by the blind panic of another imminent attempt to empty my certainly already empty stomach. Lying there, throat raw, I feared I was literally going to die. After a few hours of that, I wanted to.

Anyway, my family never could understand my lack of enthusiasm for the cookout.

Then, one day, as tends to happen, the cycle began to repeat.

I grew up. Got married. Had a son.

… and was asked to grill burgers.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have to work through some baggage. I wasn’t much of a cook back then and had no real concept of how long to cook a meat, or how hot. The internet was not quite so ubiquitous, so it was something of a novel idea to search “how to grill hamburgers.”

But what I found changed everything.

Apparently, people ate beef cooked medium, medium-rare, and even rare all the time and didn’t die.

Who knew!

Fat is flavor, I read. In fact, all those scary juices dripping from the patties sizzling on the hot grill were mostly delicious, delicious fat burning away, leaving a sad, lifeless ruin behind to be grudgingly, boringly gnawed by another generation of unenthusiastic cookout attendees.

But no more.

I learned two techniques that forever changed the gustatory, summer scene: herbed butter, and the touch test.

With a bit of forethought, chopped, fresh herbs could be blended into butter and left to chill overnight. That butter would then be sliced and lovingly enrobed within the very heart of the raw beef patty. As the beef’s natural juices dripped tragically away, lost to the angry coals below, said butter would keep the patty moist, vibrant, and joyful until the desired degree of non-well-doneness was achieved.

The second technique took some practice to master. Turns out, it’s pretty difficult to know just how cooked a hamburger patty is just by looking at it – but you can tell by the feel! Yes, a gentle press of the finger on top of the patty enables the vigilant griller, just for a moment, to become one with the soul of the patty and understand it to its very core.

It really is a thing of beauty.

These days, while I’m still not so much of a cook, I’ve definitely expanded the grilling options to make the family cookout an affair to be relished. Grilled honeyed pineapple or bananas, or apples with cinnamon never fail to spice things up.

But the real star is still, and ever, the juicy hamburger.