Death by Cheeseburger V – The Jon in Albany Burger

Back in April of last year, I tagged along with Daniel B. of FUSSYlittleBLOG fame on the Tour de Soft Serve. I had a great time, but I previously wrote about it in my Soft Serve Sucks post, so I won’t rehash the event here.

Jon in Albany also joined in on the fun, and I had the pleasure of meeting him, and during one stop on the tour, I had a fairly long conversation with him. We talked about a lot of different things, mostly food obviously, but he also mentioned that his family has a farm where they raise cows, and they occasionally slaughter one and split up the meat among the family. He mentioned he gets quite a bit of ground beef from it. The subject of my love of burgers must’ve come up, because he promised he’d give me some of his ground beef.

A couple of weeks ago, he made good on that promise and gave me 3 pounds of ground beef over lunch at Sovrana. At the time I jokingly said I’d do a blog post about it. But the more I thought about it, I decided it would be fun. Especially since I’ve done many posts on burgers I’ve eaten in and around Albany, but I’ve not yet chronicled the way I make burgers at home. And this seemed to be the perfect opportunity to do that.

At first I toyed with the idea of doing a pizza themed burger. If you’ve ever visited Jon’s blog, you’ll know that making pizza is a big hobby of his. But after thinking it through, I decided that if I was going to do a post on it, I wanted to make a burger that highlighted the beef, and didn’t want to do something with lots of toppings that would steal it’s thunder.

I kept it simple, as I usually do when making burgers at home.

I cut off a hunk of beef from one of the tubes Jon gave me and it weighed about 9 ounces. That was just about perfect. When I make burgers at home, I always do two patties of 4 ounces each. Anything more than 8 ounces is just too much beef in my opinion.

I then added two slices of Land o’ Lakes American cheese, and assembled it all together, adding only a fresh, ice cold, leaf of romaine lettuce.

Thanks so much Jon. I really appreciate you being kind enough to allow me to enjoy some of your stash. But now you have a problem, because I’m going to be bugging you for more in the future.