Ugh. What? Oh. You’re here. Good. Alright, guess I gotta… …Fuck. Okay. Food. Yes. Now writing time. Time to write about food. It is time to make our brain make sentences, so we can write about food. And maybe not refer to myself in the plural. Ugh. I would say “let me get some coffee” to sort this out, but I don’t drink coffee, so it would just be for a some kind of comedic bit. Like, I’d destroy the mug and say “yeah, that feels better”, or spit it out and say I asked for TOFFEE, or thrown it into my face or something. I’m Jon O’Guin, I’m clearly barely up for this, here’s a link if you’re not up for it either, and the rest of us will flail around as I talk about a stupidly simple meat dish.

The Source of my Woes

If you’re wondering why I’m…(gestures to self) …like this, it’s because, A: as I told you on Thursday, last week SUCKED (specifically Wednesday and Thursday, really) and part of why I was so upset was that this weekend was supposed to be a nice time for me: this past weekend was a meet-up planned with some old friends for MONTHS, that I had been taking extra effort to quarantine for in order to do it safely, and everything was going wrong. This Paragraph, by the way, is a condensation of like, half of Thursday’s post, which is why writing posts in the depths of despair at two in the morning is a bad idea. Much better to write them at…midnight, while acting hung-over.

No, I said “acting hung-over”, not “Acting in the Hangover”.

Oh yeah, that opening bit is just a bit. I’m surprisingly TIRED right now, but I am by no means hung-over. I haven’t even had a drink today…for definitions of “today”. (As I write this, I HAVE had like, 2 drinks within 24 hours, but only BARELY.) It’s just a little more humorous a lead-in than me complaining that I’m sweepy, and da post is weally hawd. (Man, it is HARD to write “mocking baby voice” out phonetically) Anywho, frustrated couple days, cost me a fair bit of sleep, went to the meet-up with my friends, didn’t sleep a lot THERE either, thanks to a combination of hanging out into the late night talking…and being used to much darker sleeping conditions, so I actually woke up hours earlier on this trip than I do most mornings. (I AM a little uncomfortable, but that’s also not surprising: this trip was the longest I’d ever driven in one go before, AND about 23 hours ago I totally missed a step on a wooden deck in the darkness and laid myself OUT: calf, thigh, hip, arm  SLAPPED into the wood like a toppled phone book, apparently flexing my wrist in a way that TERRIFIED the only witness, which has left me sore in a couple places, but unbroken.)

Still, really great trip, loved seeing all my friends, and since just DRIVING to and from the thing ate up 11 hours of my weekend, I did NOT have a lot of time to A: come up with another interesting creation or compelling narrative, or B: research this recipe all that deeply. ON the plus side, it turns out that it wouldn’t have mattered, because there’s nothing to really research!

Behold mine field of texts.

When I call this dish “Hoisin Lamb Burgers”, you gotta understand that I am telling you a healthy portion of what’s going on here. This isn’t like, fucking, Janssons frestelse from Sweden, where the name means “Jansson’s Temptation”, and now you have to wonder who the hell Jansson is, and what tempts him. (In order: Maybe an opera singer/movie reference/cultural allusion, and apparently potato and pickled fish casseroles.)  Nope, these are burgers made with Lamb meat, hoisin sauce, five-spice powder and salt, topped with some pickled veggies. That’s it.

And when you try to dig in, you slap into something of a wall. The single most interesting and integral piece of the recipe…is a fucking dead end. Hoisin sauce, the sauce the dish is named after, has no widely known explanations for its name or history, at least in Western sources. The NAME “hoisin” means “seafood”, so the best guess people have is either A: it’s “seafood” sauce the same way that A1 is “steak” sauce, named not for what it is made from, but what it is served on, or B: perhaps it originally used various seafood elements (ie, shrimp paste or shells, crab meat, just whatever kind of scraps you had) for the salty components of the dish…and now that we know how to do that without seafood, it doesn’t. Or maybe it was both. Wait. Do you even know what Hoisin is?

The secret sauce.

I know I’ve explained it before, but in case you missed those, hoisin is a Chinese (more specifically, probably Cantonese) sauce that I have personally always explained as being “China’s version of Barbecue sauce”: it’s a thick sauce that you typically see glazed on meats, or served as a dipping sauce. It is smoky, salty, sometimes a little spicy, and sweet. The biggest difference between hoisin and American barbecue in terms of flavor is that a lot of hoisin sauces use fennel/anise, or are seasoned with Five-Spice Powder…which contains anise. So there’s a kind of sweet licorice element to the sauce that is often quite bold, and a little shocking on first taste, since anise is not a super common seasoning in American cuisine, and especially not American barbecue. (Note that, like barbecue sauce, there’s no ONE accepted method for making hoisin, so while MANY versions use fennel/anise, there are also many that don’t.)

Other than that, there’s really nothing to discuss other than…lamb, I guess? And I don’t really have a ton to say about Lamb. It’s kind of weird that Americans don’t eat Mutton, I guess, and Lamb/Sheep meat is more environmentally friendly than beef, while still being a red meat. But it’s not a LOT better: pork and Chicken are both better proteins for the environment, (pigs are amazing composters, for instance, making it much easier for farms to be zero-waste, and chickens don’t really produce methane, and also eat scraps like pigs) as is, of course, tofu…though that can get a little wobbly depending on what you care about, and where it’s produced. Like, tofu made from Brazilian soybeans led to enough Amazon deforestation that it’s actually twice as bad for the environment as most chicken…as long as that chicken wasn’t fed with animal feed made from the same soybeans, since, you know, that’s a bit of a recursion loop)

Is the chicken fed to a logger in the Amazon?

I will note that Mongolia apparently eats an INSANE amount of lamb, and that Lamb dishes are thus connected to Chinese cuisine through cultural transmission/appropriation. Indeed, one Chinese lamb recipe I’ve considered making for a while, chaun’r, a type of lamb kabob, is a classic food from the Uighurs, the northeastern Chinese Muslim community that’s been in the news a lot recently because of the whole “China’s treatment of them is pretty rough, stepping worryingly close to the definition of genocide.” And any time your defense is “this isn’t legally genocide”…you gotta know you’re in a rough spot.

Alright, my headache has dissipated (because I passed out, and let Morning Jon deal with the issue) so let’s get cooking.

Mix and Match

This recipe comes from America’s Test Kitchen BURGERS book, one of those “books that is really just a big magazine” publications, and they call these “Hoisin Glazed Lamb Burgers”, which I…well, they’re not wrong, but I feel they’re being a little too specific. Yes, the burgers are glazed with hoisin. They also have hoisin worked into the meat itself. So why add the extra word? (Probably because “X-Glazed” naturally sounds more decadent, so a poll of people found that it was a little more appealing if labeled that way.)

Anywho, the first step is, of course, to cut your veggies.

The most crucial part of lamb burgers is, of course, the carrot.

As I told you, without some pickled vegetables, this would be  like, a 5 ingredient recipe. The pickling recipe DOUBLES that number, with a whole 5 more. To make the pickles, you’re cutting matchsticks of carrots, meaning you’re cutting them into slices, and then the slices into long, thin ‘sticks’, some thin slices of cucumber, and some sliced scallion. Toss them in some rice vinegar mixed with salt, and let them sit for 15 minutes to an hour.

Mine pushed out toward 50 minutes.

About half an hour later, you can start making the actual burgers: mix together the lamb meat with some five-spice powder,  and hoisin. It’ll get a little sticky, but nothing too bad. Form the meat into 4 patties, each about ¾” thick, and give them a little dent on top. The dent helps them look a little more normal when they cook: as meat cooks, it tightens. Since this happens faster on the edges, where the meat is more exposed to the heat, this leads to patties “puffing up” a little in the middle, since it hasn’t cooked as much, so it’s not as tight. This can leave your burger patties weirdly ball-shaped, especially with thicker patties. Putting a dent in the middle helps correct that, since the middle is now at a lower starting point, meaning it “puffs” to flat.

Looks a little like the whites in our Cloud Eggs.

Sprinkle with salt, and cook the burgers on the first side, then flip, cook the second side, remove from the heat, and brush the top with some hoisin. You COULD, in theory, brush the hoisin on while the burgers are cooking…but the high sugar content of hoisin means it can burn fairly easily in high heat, so to minimize the risk of that, it’s applied after the grilling, to flavor and coat the meat as it rests. If you think you’re a bad-ass, or maybe want to add a little more smoke/char flavor to your burger, you could brush it on after the first flip, or with a minute or two left in cooking.

And despite my indentation, my patties still look pretty ball-ish.

Pop the rested patties on buns, top with the pickled veg, and serve.

Simple, but dynamic.

The result is in a weird place of “amazingly unremarkable” and “remarkably unimposing”: As Nate notes, while you might expect this burger to be intensely flavored with hoisin, it isn’t. There is a hoisin flavor, but it’s relatively subdued and harmonious with the rest of the meat. It might even be hard for someone who didn’t know it was there to pick out/identify. The recipe DOES say to serve with additional hoisin, so if you WANT more intense hoisin flavor, you can dish it up yourself, but the base recipe is just a relatively simple recipe that’s not a huge flavor bomb, but is a nice variation from a standard burger. Personally, as a man who likes big flavors, I found it slightly wanting, though of the various kinds of burgers I have made in the last month or two, I think these are the best beef patties I made in that time. So I say if it sounds interesting, give it a shot!

THURSDAY: UGH. IT’S NOT RELEVANT TO TODAY’S POST, BUT MAYBE A DISCUSSION OF SOY SAUCES? OR MAYBE I’LL SEE SOMETHING I CARE ABOUT IN THE NEXT DAY OR TWO. RIGHT NOW, I’M STILL A LITTLE TIRED AND BEAT-UP. I SERIOUSLY DEBATED TAKING TODAY OFF.

MONDAY: WHY IS THIS MONTH STILL HAPPENING? I HAVE SOME IDEAS, BUT I DON’T KNOW WHICH I’LL DO. WE MIGHT MAKE A VIETNAMESE PORK BURGER, AN INDIAN TURKEY BURGER, A DIFFERENT KIND OF VIETNAMESE BEEF BURGER, I DON’T KNOW YET.

Recipe

Hoisin Lamb Burgers

Makes 4 burgers

Ingredients

                Pickled Veggie Topping

3 tbsp rice vinegar

¼ tsp table salt

¼ English cucumber, cut into thin slices

1 small carrot, cut into 2” matchsticks

2 scallions, sliced thing on a bias

                The Burgers

1.5 pounds ground lamb

2 tbsp + 2 tbsp hoisin sauce, plus more for serving

1 tsp five spice powder

½ tsp table salt

1 tsp vegetable oil

Buns

Preparation

1. For the veggies: whisk the salt into the vinegar until dissolved. Add cucumber and carrot, toss, and refrigerate 15-60 minutes. (No more than 60 minutes, or the vegetables will start to turn gray and limp). When ready to serve, drain and stir in scallions.

2. Mix together lamb, first 2 tbsp of hoisin, and five-spice powder gently, using your hands. Once well-combined, form into 4 equal patties, roughly ¾” thick. Make an indent in each patty with your thumb. Sprinkle with salt.

3. Heat oil in a non-stick skillet over medium heat until just smoking. Add patties, and cook untouched for 2-4 minutes, until well browned. Flip, reduce heat, and cook another 3 to 5 minutes, until done to your liking. Move to a platter to rest for 5 minutes, and brush with remaining 2 tbsp of hoisin.

4. Assemble buns, burgers, and veggies, with additional hoisin if desired, and consume.