While earning my considerable barbecue ‘chops’ over the past 20 years there’s one thing I’ve learned; when it comes to hamburgers, simple is always best. Some people like to add chopped onion, or garlic, a dash Worcester sauce, fresh chilli’s or breadcrumbs to their ground beef before cooking, and if you asked 20 chefs, you’d get 20 different opinions and variations, all of them claiming theirs to be the best recipe around.
Simplicity is also a philosophy shared by McDonalds who, as you can see in this video use only 100% beef in their patties. They seem to be doing ok with it too as they sell an estimated 550 million of them every year in the United States alone.
What’s in a name?
There’s one thing that has always puzzled me though, why are ‘beef’ burgers, called hamburgers? I thought this might be the appropriate time to find out and after a long piece of investigative journalism that involved looking through several wikipedia pages I’m pleased to announce that, er… nobody really knows for sure. There are at least a dozen different people who all claim to have invented it first and varying ideas on where the name originally came from.
We do know however that Frankfurters are named after Frankfurt, and Wieners are named after Vienna (Wien in Germany), so my theory is that Hamburgers were probably invented by the Hamburg tourism commission in a fit of jealousy to put them on the global food map. Yep, I think that should do it.
Now, where did I put the charcoal?
This video is sponsored by McDonalds, but all thoughts (and burgers) are my own.