Shirtless Chef – You’re sick, Jessy! Sick, sick, sick!

Local fitness enthusiast Jason Murphy remakes favorite meals of his youth into healthy dishes. See the full list of his recipes at www.mysaline.com/shirtless.

You’re sick, Jessy! Sick, sick, sick!

I hate the sound of the a/c running in my house. In my mind, the air ducts are attached directly to my bank account. Every time the a/c kicks on, I picture some Scrooge McDuck situation where dollar bills are being vacuumed out of a vault and flying out of my air vents directly to the electric company. As the house starts to heat up, I start thinking of ways to not use the oven or stovetop as much as possible when food prepping dinners for the week. A great way to do that is to fire up the trusty old grill and cook outdoors.

There’s nothing better than a burger cooked over hot coals. Well, let me rephrase that…there’s nothing better than a burger made with high quality grass fed sirloin cooked correctly over hot coals. We’ve all had our fair share of grilled mystery meat burgers with the charred black outside texture like it was dropped in reactor number 4 at Chernobyl, while still somehow being raw in the center. The cheap hamburger meat is often so filled with gristle and bone fragments that even the dog has second thoughts about begging for table scraps.

It took me years and years to get my grilling kung fu as righteous as it is today. I produced as many undercooked or burnt to a crisp burgers as anyone out there. Hopefully, this article will help any of those stuck in that cycle get your grilling mojo to where you will actually get approval from not only the family dog, but actual humans that you may know as well. Cows…probably not. This runs through my head every single time I grill:

The first step to creating a great burger is the fuel to cook it. I’m sure many of you have some high dollar fancy propane grill with more dials and knobs than the International Space Station, and more power to you. I’m an analog grilling guy, and the simple cheap fireball style grill I’ve had for almost 30 years is all that’s needed or required. The key is the charcoal.

If you use the same old pressed chemical charcoal briquettes and lighter fluid from childhood, then your burgers will taste like you dropped it in the puddle of gas you spilled while filling up the lawn mower. Please please please do not spend money on high quality grass fed beef only to desecrate it with briquettes. That stuff is made with compressed sawdust, which includes resinous soft woods and composite woods. That alone is enough to make a bitter taste on your food, but then it’s bound with chemicals and even coal dust to compress it into shape. You might as well cook your burgers over a tire fire. Then add having to use lighter fluid to get the fire going, and you have what amounts to a chemical spill in your backyard. Do not bring that foul tasting concoction to your plate.

Instead, use all natural hardwood charcoal, which is only made from natural hardwood like Maple, Mesquite, Hickory, or Oak. It looks like real pieces of wood, which it is, and that is a good thing. This stuff will light easier with a BBQ chimney, it will burn hotter than the chemical briquettes, which is perfect for burger patties, and your food will have a natural subtle smokey flavor of the wood type you choose instead of tasting like you just licked the gas pump handle after filling up with 87 octane.

Lighting this stuff is simple. Spray some paper with a little non-stick and stuff in the bottom of a bbq chimney, then fill it up with at least a lb of natural hardwood charcoal. Light the paper on fire and let it do its thing. 15 minutes later, your chimney will look like the business end of an F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter plane set at full afterburner, and you will be ready to grill. Just make sure you have a heavy duty grilling mitt to dump the contents out, because this stuff burns hot, over 1000 degrees. Bare hands and 1000 degrees do not get along well at all.

For the burgers themselves, nothing beats buying a grass fed sirloin steak and grinding your own meat with a food processor. I covered that in a previous article if you want to go back and look at the process. If you do buy the meat pre-ground, make sure it’s grass-fed and an 80/20 mix of sirloin if at all possible. I’ve covered the health benefits of grass fed beef several times, but the taste…that old cheap gristle filled hamburger of your youth just can not compare to what you will get with grass fed sirloin. Get outside, give the a/c a helping hand, and delight in the taste of the best burger of your life, cows not included.

Best Burger ingredients:

All natural hardwood charcoal

16 oz grass fed ground sirloin

1 tsp each sea salt, black pepper, onion powder, garlic powder

3 cloves garlic, minced

1 tbsp Worchestire Sauce

Instructions:

Mix the ground beef with the spices and Worchestire Sauce, and form into 8 patties weighing 4 oz each:

Prepare the charcoal as described above in the chimney. After 15 minutes, carefully pour the coals into your grill, leaving a cool zone with about 1/2 of the grill with no coals at all under it. Place the burgers over the portion of the grill over the coals:

Grill for around 5 minutes. If there are flame flare-ups, briefly move the patties in the path of the flame to the cool zone, and then back once the flame dies down. After 5 minutes, flip and cook for another 5 minutes. During this time, you can also place the cover on the grill with the vents open to really get that smokey flavor in the burgers:

Once the burgers are cooked through, you can move them all to the cool side with the cover on to enhance the smoke flavor for a few more minutes. Place in a dish and cover with foil to keep warm until ready to serve: