Week 4: Buffalo Burgers

This week I asked my sister what I should cook and the word buffalo rolled off her lips, and I love buffalo. If there's a buffalo burger on a restaurant menu, I will almost always order it. I immediately wanted myself a buffalo burger, so I decided to make one.

I looked around on where else, but FoodNetwork.com, my quick access to a plethora of good recipes. There were a small number of recipes (only 17 recipes, compared to beef burgers which netted a total of 299 recipes). I went against my first impulse to cook Bobby Flay's version to try something a little more basic than his 99 step process which involved making a slaw and mango ketchup. Also, it called for rye bread, which I am not a huge fan of. The next recipe I came across was by a man named George Duran who I had not actually heard of. I decided to take a gamble and bet on his version of the Buffalo Burger.

As my sister was on her way to Whole Foods, I read off the ingredients list, which combines both buffalo meat with a small portion of regular ground chuck (beef), onions, sun-dried tomato paste, and something curiously called Liquid Smoke. As I learned this week, Liquid smoke is an ingredient which is created through the process of trapping smoke from wood chips into water. In this process, carcinogens are removed which makes it a safer alternative to actually smoking the meat, and faster too. Despite my sister's insistence that whole foods would not have it, she did return with a small bottle of the potent smoke water concoction. She did however return with a bottle of sun-dried tomatoes and not the paste, which was unobtainable. I chopped them finely and added them to the mixture. In hindsight, I should have placed them in a food processor instead, thus creating the paste. This was a process which did not occur to me until after I had cooked the burgers.

The buffalo meat surpassed my expectations. I could just tell, while working with it, that the burgers were going to taste extraordinary. Buffalo meat compared to the traditionally used beef, is much leaner having up to 90% less fat, but doesn't lose a bit of flavor. If anything, buffalo is more flavorful. One possible explanation is that buffalo cannot be domesticated like cows can. According to Buffalo Hills Bison, "Bison are handled as little as possible. They spend their lives on grass, much as they always have. They are not subjected to questionable drugs, chemicals or hormones." With raising cows, they are sometimes kept boxed up and fed formula feed and pumped full of steroids.

While cooking the burgers (which came out to 5 large burgers instead of 4 like the recipe said) I noticed the meat sweat a little. With such little fat in the buffalo meat, it must have been the added ground chuck which carried a higher fat content. This helped in keeping the burgers juicy when eating. I served it up with some whole wheat buns, thinly sliced red onion, cheddar cheese and a brown mustard, avocado, and two strips of bacon. It's not a burger until you add your favorite toppings.

The burgers were excellent, savory, and satisfying. The addition of the liquid smoke added a kind of wholesome flavor which tied all the ingredients in the burger together. This turned out to be a great burger, and it was fun learning about some of the unique ingredients.