Smash Burgers with Special Sauce

Look, I mean no offense to Shake Shack or Five Guys or Whatever-Other-Burger. If anything, I mean more offense to restaurants who are charging $30+ dollars for a wagyu burger that, as jeremy scheck pointed out this week, is antithetical to the point of marbled meat in the first place. Actually one of my fondest memories as a kid was going to Washington Capitals (hockey, fyi) games in downtown DC. My family would always pregame by getting Shake Shack. My order was a single shack burger with fries and a black & white shake. My brother would always get a hot dog (he was a hot dog kid, oof). One time, unfortunately, I brought the shake back into my dad’s car and he went over a speed bump and the shake exploded onto me. That may have been the last time we got Shake Shack together now that I think about it.

All the fondest memories of a smash burger and yet I have never bothered to make one at home. We’ve always been more of a traditional, hockey-puck-esque burger family. Most of the time served too rare for my liking. I think my gripe with smash burgers at home is that you can’t grill them; you need a flat top. And I am not about to start searing smash burgers in my poorly-ventilated apartment kitchen. Last week I had the revelation that I could use my HexClad pizza steel as a flat top , set it on the grill at high heat, and sear patties without a problem. So that was the plan.

Since I no longer have a job, I also made the fries and buns from scratch. And to round out the meal, a cucumber-dill salad with pickled red onions and a killer caramel cone icebox cake. Fun fact, my favorite ice cream flavor is Ben & Jerry’s Americone Dream. And while I was running over the Williamsburg Bridge (where most good ideas come from) I thought of the idea to try to turn it into an icebox cake. Icebox cakes are essentially 90% whipped cream and like 10% thin wafer cookies you buy from the grocery store. So an ideal dessert you could say. By layering Trader Joes butter waffle cookies, drizzles of homemade caramel sauce and chocolate magic shell, and plenty of just-sweet-enough whipped cream, you get a no-bake dessert with nearly no hassle.

For the fries I followed a mix between Recipe Tin Eats’ and Bright Moment Co’s respective recipes. They turned out amazing but were SO time-consuming. Honestly I don’t think it was worth it. They were great up until 1 hour post-frying, but by the time we were eating, the fries turned stale and lack-luster.

The joy of smash burgers is that they only take a few minutes to grill. I had pre-heated my pizza steel for 10 minutes on medium-high. So once the patties were on, they were nearly coming off. My friends were caught off-guard with how fast the meal moved at that point. There was no dinner, and then there was. We had a special guest, too. A golden doodle named Sochi that my friends were dog-sitting. He got a fry or two.

For the joy of American food,

Ryan