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United States, North Carolina, Carrboro, English, Paul, Male, 56-60, All Music, All Food.

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Tuesday, June 15, 2004

The Perfect Burger   How boring. How denigrating to call yourself a foodie and even care about it. Yet when I first read the recipe for Craig Claiborne’s Ultimate Hamburger in The Tabasco™ Cookbook a few years ago, I had to try it. I read all the ingredients and kneaded them into the raw burger – parsley, Tabasco, and Worcestershire, basically. Then I read the rest of the recipe and learned that the sauces (with some melted butter) were meant to dress the burger just before serving.   But being a sausage-maker and a big meatloaf fan, I really like kneading other ingredients into raw meat. The quest took an interesting turn a few weeks ago when I made some “hamburger steaks” with bison meat. Like venison, it’s pretty dry. Liz refuses to eat undercooked bacon, so I cut some up into 1/8” morsels and fried it ever so lightly. About 4 strips. Then I lightly sautéed a coarsely chopped onion in the bacon fat and kneaded all that into the meat. Liz hates hamburgers, the very idea of them, but she liked these. The leftover raw burger aged nicely in the fridge and was even better fried up the next day.   So now my “Perfect Burger” is a hybrid between the Buffalo Burger and Craig Claiborne’s famous recipe. The patties are salted and peppered on both sides and sprayed with olive oil before frying. Just before they’re done, I baste the top with Worcestershire and let that soak in a bit. Then, it gets flipped and the opposite side gets dressed with Tabasco for a soak. Then a couple short-term flips to blend the sauces a little. Pop it on a butter-toasted bun and it’s a real treat all by itself.   Oh, I forgot to mention - these are best cooked slowly, no searing, about "3" all the way on my electric range. 7:59:00 PM    comment []

Here is an example of the power of Adobe Audition 1.5. I’m just playing around with it to get into all its nooks and crannies, learning to create and manipulate loops, etc, hoping to find a way to export a usable surround sound file for a homebrew DVD, etc. For laughs, and because Mark is a friend, I was messing with a digitized track from Mark Hoback’s vinyl album entitled Call Me.   One cool thing Audition lets you do is to boost the volume of the vocals, so I did that – just to see what it would sound like. Well, it sounded pretty cool until this section where boosting the vocal track brought out some feedback – you know, that squawking, annoying, high-pitched noise you get when the microphone is too close to the speaker. I have no idea if this ~3000Hz sound was embedded in the original track or whether it was simply an artifact caused by boosting he vocal track 10dB.   Who cares? I switched to the spectrum view and zoomed in until I could clearly see the white-hot narrow band of feedback. Then I cut it out. It occupied the rectangular area, now purplish, shown in this screen capture. Presto! – It’s gone.   7:05:41 PM    comment []