Knock-Off F.O. Burgers
If you live in Los Angeles, you know about Father’s Office hamburgers, which were served out of an eensy-weensy bar on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica, where you had to fight for a table and got the stink-eye from the waitress if you dared ask for mayo, but the burgers, which centered around gruyere cheese and the most ridiculously, amazingly, awesomely seasoned hamburger meat, are simply the best you’ve ever tasted in your whole life. No kidding. Now F.O.‘s opened a second outpost in Culver City at the old Helm’s Bakery, and the burgers are good, but there’s something about that grill over on Montana…
Anyway. We were playing around with a little soy/ginger/teriyaki sauce combo, mixing it with the meat with a few sesame seeds and Eureka! Hot off the grill, with your eyes closed, this burger’s a close second to F.O. Santa Monica, only we lost the gruyere and serve it with salad instead of sweet potato fries.
You can mix up your own organic soy/ginger/teriyaki sauce. For every three pounds of organic ground beef*, add about one-third cup sauce and the same amount of dried breadcrumbs (the sauce makes it a very wet mix and the crumbs sort of soak it up and hold it all together). Mush it all around in a bowl with your ever-so-clean fingers, pack into loose balls and squash into patties. Throw them on the grill and let them cook while you toss together a salad. Presto, dinner!
*Here’s why you want to buy organic beef: No antibiotics, growth hormones or animal byproducts are fed to the cows, meaning no chance of that pesky Mad Cow disease. Cows are outside, moving around, instead of stuffed together cheek-to-jowl emitting methane (kind of like what happens to the folks at the old F.O. on Montana). You can read more from the Organic Trade Association here. Now don’t those organic burgers sound a whole lot more appetizing?
