Burgers are good, aren’t they? You know, good like lolly cake and a day at the beach body-surfing and then a barbecue and a few cold beers, and good like watching the ABs kick the fat bottomed Wallabies. In the old days hamburgers were just burgers. A meat(-ish) pattie, tomato, lettuce, onion and some sort of sauce to stop you getting hiccups.
But burgers, like almost everything else, have gone hipster and woke and millennial. You go to a burger place now and instead of that one simple burger, there are many and that means having to make a decision and so I ran a competition to decide which is my favourite eN-Zed burger. It’s an opinion thing like which is the best ice cream flavour (it’s boysenberry), who was the best-ever first-five (it’s Mehrts) and which is the best ute (duh). So, the 10 contestants in the ‘The’ eN-Zed Burger Competition are:
Contestant #1: The Don’t-Mess-With-Success Burger. A burger pattie made from some sort of collection of meat, you know, a bit of this and bit of that, don’t ask, don’t tell. Fried onions, a fried egg, a slice of beetroot. Watties sauce. This is a good burger; a very good burger. Tried and true, loved by the masses especially at backyard barbecues and pubs, but we can do better, fellow eN-Zedders. We climbed Everest, we won the America’s Cup, we won the Willy-Webb-Ellis three times. We’re eN-Zedders’; we can go much higher in our quest for ‘the’ eN-Zed burger.
Contestant #2: The Sunday Roast Burger. Three slices of roast lamb topped with mint sauce, slices of roast potato, a thinnish piece of roasted pumpkin and a roasted slice/slab of beetroot. I know, it’s not a burger-pattie but it’s very eN-Zed, right? You’re drooling like a Pavlova dog too. I know burgers go with beer, but as this is the Sunday Roast Burger, a glass of Cab. Merlot will be better.
Contestant #3: The Angus Burger. Have you ever stood face to face with an Angus bull – with a big fence separating the faces, obviously. Scary, eh? Daunting. The Angus Burger embodies this. A big, really big, fatty, juicy, tasty Angus-beef pattie. Did I mention the beef pattie is big? And thick! Caramelised onions, lots of crumbled blue cheese, tomato and lettuce. Scary and possibly deadly. I once met a kid whose parents called him Angus. They owned an Angus beef farm and he wasn’t happy to be named after the stock, but I asked him how he’d have felt if his parents owned a sheep farm with Corriedales or Romneys. Or if they’d owned an apple orchard. Imagine going through your teenage years being called Granny Smith. Or a pig farm. But I digress.
Contestant # 4 The saveloy burger. No really, this is serious. I’m not sure whether the savs should be sliced lengthways or across, into little circles, piled up with binding gobs of Watties. Or maybe don’t cut the sav at all. Grill the sav over a fire at the beach. This one might be adored by a few and not by the masses. It may be too niche, but it scores very highly on the eN-Zeddy scale.
Contestant #5: The whitebait fritter burger – no really, it IS a thing; a very good thing too and I have to say, in the interests of openness, this is a personal favourite. Toasted buns of course. If you’ve been whitebaiting on a cold, rainy Waiau River (the Tuatapere Waiau River, I mean) morning, you’ll understand the need for toasted buns. Then construct the burger from the fat bum, er from the bottom up… firstly, a thin layer of mashed avocado with salt & pepper and some lime juice (posh, eh?), then a big broad whitebait fritter, then a lightly fried slice of onion then another whitebait fritter, then a very thin slice of tomato, then a third whitebait fritter, and finally a crispy, breaky leaf of iceberg lettuce. A thing of delicate beauty.
To be continued (tomorrow).
eN-Zed 