Memorial Day Cookout

We had a few friends over for a Memorial Day cookout, and I decided that it might be fun to do hamburgers. Now, there are at least two reasons why I almost never cook hamburgers. First, I don't trust ground meat from the grocery store, even from Whole Foods. I have read that, in the typical package of supermarket hamburger, it is possible to detect the DNA of dozens of animals. Pretty scary. Second, I really dislike purchased hamburger buns. So I decided to address both issues in my hamburgers.

A friend gave me a copy of the cookbook from the Zuni Cafe in San Francisco several years ago, and one of the recipes that it includes is for the famous Zuni Cafe hamburger. It involves using whole chuck, which is cut into chunks and salted the day before, and then ground fresh on the day it is cooked. The method is pretty simple, even if it is a little time-consuming. My main concern was that the meat was a little too lean; I had bought grass-fed beef, so it was not very marbled. To raise the fat content a bit I ground some bacon in with the meat. It ended up being pretty juicy, and I did not detect any pronounced bacon flavor. I thought the meat might have been a little under seasoned, but otherwise it was tasty.

To go along with the burgers I made the hamburger buns from the Martha Stewart Living Cookbook. They were much better than the typical supermarket bun, and I was surprised at how quickly they went together. I was going to make her spicy ketchup, too, but I think that I will wait for tomato season. Instead, I made the gorgeous pink pickled onions in the photograph, which are also from the Zuni Cafe Cookbook. I honestly think that these onions were my favorite part of the meal, and I am glad that we only ate one of the two pints, so I'll have some to eat with sandwiches.

While I was finishing the prep we drank Leland Palmer cocktails, which are featured in the new issue of Bon Appetit (http://www.bonappetit.com/recipes/2010/06/the_leland_palmer). This is essentially a blend of iced tea and lemonade that is spiked with gin and limoncello. Very refreshing.

For dessert I made vanilla and strawberry ice creams, which we had with some very fudgy brownies. I was thinking of a Neapolitan-style sundae where the brownie stands in for the chocolate ice cream. When I was growing up we always had homemade ice cream for summer holidays. My family had one of the old-fashioned hand-crank White Mountain ice cream churns. It seemed like we had to turn that crank forever! It is a lot easier now just to pour the custard into the cylinder and flip the switch, but I sometimes miss the elbow grease method. The anticipation was almost as much fun as finally digging into a big bowl of pillowy frozen goodness.