Why hello there, and welcome to Kitchen Catastrophes’ ongoing series, the Culinary Compendium of Cooking Cant. Today’s feature, to prepare you for July, and based off some ideas from Monday’s post, is a discussion and overview of various Burger Sauces.

As a quick note: many businesses have slightly different variations, and many copy-cat recipes, which they will typically deny are accurate. This is for a very simple reason: legally, you can’t copyright the idea of a recipe. So IF someone made a perfect version, of, say, Burger King’s Zesty Onion Ring sauce, Burger King couldn’t really DO anything about it. (Well, they COULD sue and try to drag the case out long enough to force the copy-cat to run out of cash, but once they eventually got to trial, it’d be pretty easy for the copy-cat to win) And this is also a reason/incentive for large corporations to “rig” their recipes: using or creating slight variations of normal ingredients to put in their recipe, so you can never be QUITE 100% ‘right’. Like, one of the things I brushed over two months ago while talking about Coca-Cola is that there is ONE company in America that is allowed to import coca leaf to distill for Coke’s flavor base. That’s it. You can’t fully replicate Coke’s flavor in America without either illegally importing coca leaves, or bribing ONE company to give you the juice.

Yes, O.T. Genasis, it is “loco” that if you love “the coco”, you gotta “fuck tha po po”.
Side note, I DEFINITELY thought this was some other famous Trap artist’s song.

As such, while I’ll be giving some rough copy-cat recipes for some of these, understand that they’re not going to taste 100% accurate, because you are not a multi-million dollar corporation, able to use specific, tailored versions of common products. (Which is its own conversation: like, there are DOZENS of varieties of Dijon mustard. Telling me “2 tbsp Dijon” leaves a lot of room for flavor differences. But that’s kind of the issue will recipes in general.) Cool? Cool.  

Let’s get the basics out of the way:  

Burger Sauce

1. (n) – Technically, any sauce or condiment placed on a burger, or a sauce or condiment MADE out of burger, such as meat sauce.

2. (n) – (NOT being a pendant) An often proprietary sauce placed on a burger by a restaurant or chef, typically but not always made from a mixture of other burger condiments such as KETCHUP, MAYONNAISE, MUSTARD, RELISH, etc.

Ketchup

1. (n) A term used for any number of sauces relying on integrating fruits or vegetables with a base of vinegar and spices, tracing its lineage back to thick Malaysian kecap, a type of fermented sauces including kecap ikan (fish sauce), kecap manis (thick, sweetened soy sauce) and more.  Varieties include Mushroom Ketchup in England, Banana Ketchup in the Phillipines, Curry Ketchup in Germany, and many others.

No lie, I was going to do a weirder one here, but then I got delayed, had a couple drinks at dinner, and ran out of motivation to hunt down a picture.
On the plus side, it was a cool meet-up, since last week on the Patreon we covered our Universal Yums box from The Phillipines.

2. (n) When presented without qualifier, almost always refers to TOMATO ketchup, a sweet and tangy sauce VERY popular in American fast food, made from tomato paste or puree, sugar, vinegar, etc.

3. (n) what your dad continually mistook Ash Ketchum’s name to be, which, as you grow older, was definitely intentional to watch you get angry about his mistakes.

Mayonnaise

1. (n) a French sauce consisting of beaten eggs, olive oil, and either vinegar or lemon juice. Slightly tart, but mostly creamy, the sauce is a common dressing in sandwiches and burgers, both for adding additional richness, AND creating an oil barrier on bread so it doesn’t absorb the liquid of fillings and become soggy. Can be flavored in a wide variety of ways by beating other sauces, spices, herbs, or seasonings into it, such as Peppercorn Mayo, Miso Mayo, Gochujang Mayo, Lemon-Herb Mayo, etc etc.

2. (n) not an instrument

Mustard

1. (n) an often spicy sauce consisting of pulverized mustard seeds, other seasonings, and vinegar or wine combined into a paste. Used to cut the richness of the burger. Varies in intensity, and can be similarly modified.

2. (n) an offensive term for lovers of Must, a type of unrefined grape juice.

Relish

1. (n) great delight or appreciation, connotatively smug.

“Uh oh, Jon’s at “Meme” drunk.”

2. (n) a topping made of minced pickled vegetables, traditionally cucumbers, with brines of varying flavor profiles. (Dill, Sweet, Sweet-Hot, etc)

With the fundamentals down, let’s get a little more advanced

Aioli

1. (n) Technically a mayonnaise-LIKE condiment made of emulsifying olive oil and garlic paste from the Northwest Mediterranean, including Spain, Southern France, and Italy. Often now made with lemon juice, and potentially egg yolks, making it essentially a garlic mayonnaise. There’s a lot of regional distinction and arguments. Often used in America to refer to ANY mayonnaise that includes Garlic, or any flavored mayonnaise you want to make sound fancier. (“A Tomato-Vinegar Aioli” sounds much better than ‘Ketchup mixed with Mayonnaise’)

Barbecue Sauce

1. (n) You know what the fuck barbecue sauce is. And if you don’t…it’s way to complicated to unpack now. Check one of our other discussions of barbecue and sauces.

2. (n) – Brought up here because it is often used in Burger sauce preparation, to add a spice-dense element.

Big Mac Sauce

1. (n) A gross thing to call any liquid that is NOT on, or prepared to be served on, a burger.

This is the cleanest picture of “Big Mac” that wasn’t just a picture of burger.

2. (n) a sauce created by McDonald’s for their Big Mac burger. While there is a a great deal of contention about what, exactly goes in it, with many claiming it’s Just THOUSAND ISLAND DRESSING, most ‘experts’ agree that’s unlikely, with the sauce likely forgoing ketchup, or tomato-based products at all, in its construction. Many claim the recipe is mixture of roughly 1 cup mayonnaise, 1-2 tbsp yellow mustard, 1-2 tbsp sweet (or dill) pickle relish, 1 tsp vinegar, and somewhere between ¼ to 1 tsp each paprika, garlic powder, and onion powder.

This is a great example of what I mean by it’s hard to pin down the EXACT recipe: the general ratios and ingredients are roughly understood, but the exact proportions are hard to pin down, often related to differing brands/less fresh ingredients, etc. See DICK’S SAUCE for an interesting parallel.

Chick-Fil-A Sauce

1. (n) Apparently a kind of Honey Mustard? I actually have never been near a Chick-Fil-A when hungry, so I have no idea. Luckily, someone shared a copycat recipe this morning…Aw fuck, I closed that tab. (Spends 20 minutes trying to google the tweet/ digging through his computer history) HERE WE GO. Interesting. Chick-Fil-A asserts that their sauce is a mixture of “Honey Mustard, Barbecue, and Ranch”, but neither this recipe nor any of the others I’ve found used ranch. I guess the main reason for it is lemon juice and mayonnaise, not the herbs. Which…none of the pictures I’ve seen have visible herbs, kind of casting doubt on the Ranch assertion.  Anywho, the recipe I’ve found is ¼ cup mayo, 2 tbsp honey, 1 tbsp yellow mustard, 2 tsp Dijon mustard, 2 tsp lemon juice, and 2 tbsp barbecue sauce.

Comeback Sauce

1. (n) a Southern variant on BURGER SAUCE, consisting at its core of Mayonnaise and Chili Sauce (or the ingredients of chili sauce, ie, chili powder/minced chilies, vinegar, sugar, etc) Most notable for having a greater reliance on spice, often including hot sauce, Worcestershire, smoked paprika, etc.

Dick’s Sauce

1. (n) an even worse name for any non-burger-related liquid

2. (n) The proprietary sauce of Dick’s Drive-in, a Seattle institution for quick, cheap and simple burgers, Dick’s has a interesting point here because technically, they don’t HAVE a “sauce” they put on their burgers. What they DO have is a sauce for their fries that consists of Mayonnaise mixed with their pickle relish…both of which go on several burgers, so people THINK they have a “special sauce”. What makes it even more interesting is…that’s it: it’s just mayonnaise and relish. The TRICK is that the pickles they use for the relish come from out of state, and are prepared using turmeric, which slightly colors the mayonnaise when the two are mixed. A GREAT example of “the idea is simple, it’s the specifics that are hard to pin down.” (1/4 cup mayo, 2 tbsp sweet relish with turmeric)

Donkey Sauce

1. (n) Guy Fieri’s infamous burger sauce, which he has since revealed is…aioli. Specifically, a mixture of mayonnaise, garlic, mustard (used in flavored mayos/aiolis for emulsion and flavor), a dash of Worcestershire, and some salt and pepper.

What makes THIS one cool is you can see the instinct trending a different way: As I said in Aioli, the word is often used to make ‘flavored mayo’ look fancier. Here, we see the same concept, but shifted to “X Sauce”, in order to make it seem more dynamic: it deliberately tracks UNDER the fanciness of aioli, while still getting the branding and mystery that you lose with “garlic mayo”.  Make it yourself with 1 cup mayo, ¼ cup roasted garlic, 1 tsp yellow mustard, 4 dashes Worcestershire, ¼ tsp salt, and 4 pinches black pepper.

It looks pretty fancy, IMO.

Fry Sauce

1. (n) a mixture of Ketchup and Mayonnaise, very popular in Utah, where it was first commercially produced.  Sometimes put on burgers, but most often used as a fry condiment.

In-N-Out Sauce

1. (n) a sauce used by popular West Coast chain In-N-Out. Consists of ½ cup mayonnaise, 3 tbsp ketchup, 2 tbsp sweet pickle relish, 1 tsp sugar, and 1 tsp white vinegar. As you can see, pretty analogous to THOUSAND ISLAND, BIG MAC, and SHAKE SHACK, which really goes to show the utility and variance you can have even while playing with very similar ingredients.

Russian Dressing

1. (n) What you see if you break into the back rooms of the Bolshoi Ballet

Oops, so sorry. Thought this was the bathroom.

2. (n) a sauce or dressing essentially consisting of “seasoned Fry Sauce”, often including horseradish, diced pimento, chives, spices, or mustard.

Shake Shack Sauce

1. (n) as IN-N-OUT SAUCE, but an East Coast chain, and consisting of ½ cup mayo, 1 tbsp ketchup, 1 tbsp yellow mustard, 1.5 tbsp minced kosher dill pickle (or dill pickle brine for smoother sauce), ¼ tsp garlic powder, ¼ tsp paprika, and 1 pinch cayenne.

Thousand Island Dressing

1. (n) a Salad dressing potentially from the Thousand Islands region of the Northeastern US/Southeastern Canada, with a murky history and origin. The conventional narrative is that the manager of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York visited the Thousand Islands region (indeed, he built a castle in the area and lived there for a time), discovered the recipe from a local, and had it served at the hotel, gaining international recognition and acclaim.
   
   This record is impossible to verify, and indeed, the recipe holds a confused place in American history, with differing accounts jumbling different locations and recipes. (One early recipe proposes that it is RUSSIAN DRESSING mixed with Cream) If you’re unaware of what, exactly it is, it is a mixture of KETCHUP, MUSTARD, MAYONNAISE, as well as finely chopped vegetables and vinegar. Also known as RELISH. And yes, that IS functionally the same description of a typical BURGER SAUCE we provided earlier, and Thousand Island Dressing (whether store-bought, home-made, or tinkered with) is often what a company uses for its Burger Sauce. You could argue that BIG MAC, IN-N-OUT, and SHAKE SHAKE’s sauces are all simply variants on this base.

This is the confusing, frustrating, and somewhat liberating heart of the burger sauce conversation: most of them are just subtle variations on the same idea. This one has mustard, this one doesn’t. This one uses sweet pickles, this one dill. It’s the same idea, rendered to individual tastes. It’s a jumbled up mess, but it still tastes pretty good.

MONDAY: JON FRIES WINGS AND CARAMELIZES FISH. THINGS GET WEIRD.

THURSDAY: NO IDEA YET.