Howdy friends and neighbors!

Welcome back to Sunday Gravy.

Let’s go ahead and address the obvious first. Yes, Romonobyl did this first.

I will be the first to admit that his post absolutely inspired me to buy a meat grinder attachment for my badass Kitchenaid 600 Professional.

I think that should be viewed as flattery to Mr. Nobyl. Another thing that his post brought to me was straight up inspiration. I have given a burger recipe in the past and I admit that it is for quick and easy grilling. That’s a pretty fucking special German potato salad recipe in there as well. As many of you know I can get super detailed and almost fucking scientific with some of these recipes. I intentionally look for challenges in the kitchen and lately I have gotten pretty goddamn fearless regarding cooking.

I asked myself, rather than creating some super elaborate meal with exotic ingredients and cooking challenges, what if we took the simple day-to-day items and leveled them right the fuck up?

Romonobyl indeed inspired me to grind my own hamburger meat but why stop there? What if we could take each component of something and build it from the ground up?

What if we decided we wanted to achieve immortality and create the “Godburger?”

Why stop with just grinding our own burger meat? What if we wanted to bake the buns too? Can we do that? Is this insanity? Why the fuck am I asking so many questions?

Why the fuck not?

Retro story time!

What? This is where my inspiration came from. Really!

When growing up my family used to visit my mother’s parents quite a bit. A lot! Like every two fucking weeks. It was an 85 mile trip one-way through some goddamn barren ass wasteland to get there and as a youngster I was stricken with the affliction of getting “car sick.”

Yes. I was “one of them.”

Christ, I annoyed the shit out of my dad. I even had my very own “puking tree.” It was basically the only tree for miles in any direction and one time I was car sick and dad pulled over by the tree for me to spew away. Of course, almost every trip after that just the thought of that damn tree approaching was enough for my warped goddamn mind to start thinking about it and sure as fucking fuck I would cause myself to be sick.

I was a fucked up little kid.

It usually only happened once per trip and not even EVERY trip but it sucked.

When we reached our destination I would be fine. We would visit with my cousins from my mother’s sister’s family and then all of us would visit my grandmother and grandfather “MeMe and Pa.”

MeMe was a baker. An incredible practically world class baker. Holy hell I remember walking in the house when she was cooking and the smells were just unreal. She baked fruit pies with the lattice tops, she baked cakes and dinner rolls but what I remember most was her baking homemade buns. Fuck me sideways those things were fucking amazing. She would bake this monstrous slab of ham, you know with the Coke syrup and the pineapple slices and the maraschino cherries skewered by cloves. All she needed to do was bake the big ass ham and bake those homemade buns and I was happier than a pig in shit.

Jesus fuck that shit was delicious!

Periodically throughout life I would ask one of my brothers “Remember MeMe’s homemade buns?” This always produced a Pavlovian response to all within listening radius. All of these years have passed and yet I never tried to make my own buns.

What the fuck is wrong with me?

Remembering that most of our local bread is shit, especially hot dog and hamburger buns, seriously what the fuck is up with that? These store bought buns bring nothing to the party. The only thing you can say about them is they keep your hands clean because they are nothing but processed white flour crap.

Buoyed by my recent success with the homemade French bread, I decided to attempt to make my own buns to accompany my freshly ground meat. A quick note, I ALMOST made my own ketchup for this meal but the recipes I read created at a minimum about a quart of ketchup and I just ain’t into ketchup that much. That will have to be another day.

Inspired? Intrigued? Want to give this fucker a try?

Let’s do it!

The Godburger!

We’re going to do the bread first since it has a couple of rises and it takes an hour or two for each rise.

Timeline-wise we are going to grind the meat during the second rise of the buns. I thought it would be easier to complete each recipe rather than doing this chronologically.

Homemade buns!

Original recipe idea via

3/4 cup of warm water exactly 110 degrees

1 packet of instant yeast

1 teaspoon of sugar for proofing the yeast

1 beaten egg

2 tablespoons of room temperature butter – plus more butter for basting

3 1/2 cups of all purpose flour

1/4 cup of sugar

1 teaspoon of salt.

First thing we are going to do is proof the yeast. You should remember this from the linked French Bread/Banh Mi post.

Using a thermometer get the warm water to 110 degrees. Place the water in a bowl along with the sugar and mix. Next add in the yeast and get that yeast all lively and shit.

The trick with the 110 degree water, the sugar and the yeast is a key component of any bread recipe and doing this step properly leads to much better results with the bread.

Let the yeast proof for ten minutes.

Using a large bowl, like the bowl of my stand mixer, add in the rest of the ingredients.

Yep, the flour, egg, sugar, butter and salt. Add in the proofed yeast, get out the paddle attachment of the mixer and give this a quick spin. Just a minute or two to get a quick mix.

This should look pretty familiar if you did read the French bread instructions. That’s right, next get the bread hook attachment and place on the mixer. Set a kitchen timer to 10 minutes, turn the mixer on the lowest speed setting and walk the fuck away to let the mixer do all the goddamn work.

I’m still amazed by this step. I still hover around the mixer while it does the kneading thing for me and I’m not sure why. I MUST SEE THIS SORCERY UP CLOSE!

Then we grab a large bowl, grease up the inside of the bowl then add the ball-o-dough and turn it over to make sure it’s properly lubed.

Cover with a kitchen towel and place in a warm area of the kitchen to rise. We want this to double in size. When I made these it was one of those glorious “June Gloom” days on the Coast. There were heat advisories all over the inland areas with some places hitting over 110 degrees but we had a seriously deep “marine layer” that kept it an overcast and glorious 71 degrees by the water. I actually had to heat my oven to 300 just to warm the kitchen up enough for the dough to rise.

#beach dwellers problems

Let the dough double in size, about on hour or two then gently punch it down and divide into 8 pieces. Since this was my first go at this there was a distinct lack of uniformity related to the bun size. I don’t have a kitchen scale (yet) so I just divided the dough in half and then each half into fourths to produce 8 balls of dough. Using your hands roll the dough into a nice round shape, gently press down on the top of each ball to flatten slightly and place on a greased baking sheet to – yep – rise again until doubled in size. About another hour of rise time.

Here’s pre-proof:

And here’s post-proof:

Melt a couple of teaspoons of butter and gently brush the tops of the proofed buns.

Preheat the oven to 375.

Bake the buns for about 15-18 minutes. I set the kitchen timer to 17 and let them cook. The recipes calls for a final basting of butter AFTER the buns have cooked but that could be optional. I did baste with butter when they cooked but it wasn’t an absolute necessity. After cooking for the allotted time just take a look at what we have.

Flawless Victory! I will get to the food description porn later but this was fucking perfection. Nailed it!

What to put on these glorious buns?

Hamburger meat!

The ratio I came up with is basically 3 parts chuck roast to 1 part sirloin but I noticed it was a little too lean so I came up with a quick ad lib by adding… Pork fat!

That’s a little over 2 pounds of chuck roast, about 2/3 of a pound of bottom round sirloin and a package of salt pork. I was thinking about adding in some bacon for both flavor and fat but the bacon at the store was too fucking lean!

When did this happen?

No worries, since the salt pork has plenty of fat for all of your fat adding needs!

Cube up the chuck roast removing any gristle lines if you encounter them.

Do the same thing with the sirloin and cut up some lardons of the salt pork. Place the cut up meat into a bowl and mix them together. We want to grind all three types of meat at the same time to create a nice meat mixture.

Get out your brand spanking new meat grinder attachment and attach it to the stand mixer. Be sure to unplug the mixer when changing attachments. Safety first kids! I’m going to let Romonobyl’s post walk you through the grinding, packaging, storing techniques since he did it first and definitely better. Let’s just say I got my grind on!

After grinding for a few minutes I noticed that the process was a little slow. This was a little disquieting since I want to start doing this on the regular. It was then I noticed that I was running the mixer on the lowest speed.

Dumbass!

Crank the mixer speed up to about the 4th setting and let it rip. It took just a couple of minutes after I figured out the completely obvious. After grinding we had a lovely bowl of freshly ground meat.

Some brainstorming happened at this point. I had all three of my brothers on hand for this meal and I asked “What about a binding agent?” Since I usually use a splash of milk and some crumbled up corn or tortilla chips to help the burgers stay together. Yes, that is my own idea, most normal people use eggs and breadcrumbs but I like the little “masa” touch from the tortilla chips. The group decision was to let the meat stand on it’s own merits.

I simply formed the meat into patties.

Then I fired up my charcoal grill. I will let Mr. Nobyl extol the many virtues of the propane grill but I’m an old school “fire up the charcoal” guy who loves the added flavor that charcoal gives to meat. Particularly a grilled burger. Let’s get these on the grill.

See the little indents in the center of the burgers? I used my thumb to press the center down slightly so it wouldn’t puff up in the middle of the burgers.

That’s the shit right there. Use caution here. Due to the extra fat content of the burgers, these WILL flare up like a motherfucker so stay close by and put on the charcoal lid if needed to stop the flare ups. After a couple of minutes turn the burgers over and season with salt and pepper. This was the only time seasonings were added to the burgers. Slap on your choice of cheese(s). For beta test #1 of this I used plain old American cheese.

Since no binding agent was added to the hamburger meat these were a little brittle on the edges. Yes, I will use a binding agent next time. They still held together just fine when adding copious amounts of cheese to hold them together.

When finished cooking, slice the buns gently in half using a bread knife, add a hamburger patty, then your favorite condiments and serve.

Behold!

Jesus! It’s… It’s… It’s beautiful!

I know I say this a lot but click on this image and give it an enlarge (works on mobile too!)

That is a sexy motherfucker! I simply added a little brown mustard and a small dollop of ketchup to try these au naturale.

Look! Here’s another angle!

Look at the structural integrity of that bun! It’s fucking perfect!

For my second burger I added a little swipe of mayo on the bottom bun, put the burger on and covered with some mushrooms and onions that had been sauteed in butter and garlic.

Finally, one last look at the burger “money shot.”

Look at the juices! And notice how the bun holds together flawlessly. These buns damn near made me cry from nostalgia. They were fucking ridiculously delicious. The little bit of butter, a slightly sweet finish but the yeasty fresh baked goodness was fantastic. These will drive you fucking crazy with the smell when they are baking.

I ain’t exactly the religious type – shocking I know – but I like to think that somewhere MeMe was watching and she saw how I was able to make this almost exact replica of her homemade buns.

I’m gonna make these buns again and again. I’m gonna put pulled pork on them, I’m gonna make them into hot dog buns, I’m gonna make a goddamn tune melt out of one, I’m going to slow roast some beef and make a French Dip out of one. These will be duplicated.

As I was finishing up the grilling my son-in-law stopped by for a surprise visit to hang out with the brothers and I. He had a burger and brother DJ Taj said “These are supposed to be the best burgers in the world.” Little bastard is always busting my balls. He then asked son-in-law “So is that the best burger you ever had?”

Son-in-law said “I think it is.”

I think so too.

The only change will be to add the aforementioned binding agent next time. There may be no going back to store bought hamburger or buns ever again.

We’ve evolved!

Thanks as always for reading.

Much love to you good folks.

PEACE!