View attachment 28427
BBQ'd hamburgers with homemade bun.
It's been a couple years since I had last BBQd. But this is a holiday week in Japan, and I wanted to do something different for our lunch yesterday. It was nice to fire up the charcoal Weber again after so long.
Here in Japan, it's very hard to find hamburger buns sold anywhere, so you either go without or have to make them yourself. What you see in the photo is our homemade bun, complete with sesame seeds on top.
The meat was a mix of regular Japanese "ground beef" (which actually has a lot of pork in it) and the real stuff. When shopping, I found one pack of the pork-mixed-beef and one pack of real ground beef (a deeper red color). I mixed the two packs together, and the meat came out nice. The extra fat actually helps keep the meat juicy. it was grilled 5 minutes per side.
Naturally, I formed all the patties round by hand. I made them perfectly flat on top and bottom, just like a good hamburger patty should be made. I always make them larger than the bun size because they will shrink as you cook them, especially as the fat burns down.
I also put all the spices on the top of the burger before grilling. Makes my job easier and the taste is still good. I used salt, pepper, a sprinkle of cajun spices, and a sprinkle of something called Spice21, which has all of the following inside:
- Black pepper
- White pepper
- Mustard
- Dried celery
- Oregano
- Paprika
- Ginger
- Dried basil
- Fennel
- Allspice
- Dried chili pepper
- Savory
- Marjoram
- Rosemary
- Laurel (bay leaf)
- Mace
- Turmeric
- Coriander
- Cumin
- Clove
- Cardamom
In the past, I used to get family in the USA to send me a bottle of Mesquite seasoning, since that too is not sold in Japan. Alas, I didn't have any of that this time. If you do, use it. It makes the meat even more fantastic. But even without that, the above proved to be a very tasty mix of spices.
I also used Worcestershire sauce in the past on the meat too, but alas, that too is very hard to come by in Japan. However, I was able to find a bottle of A1 (not common, but can be found online), and I sprinkled a little of that on each patty after using the spices, and rubbed that around to make sure the spices would be locked into the meat by that.
I then stacked the patties on a plate with a sheet of Saran Wrap separating each (so spices on the patty below wouldn't touch the patty stacked above). I put them back in the refrigerator until it was time to cook them on the BBQ.
After grilling, we added a slice of cheese, sliced tomato, lettuce, a sprinkling of Jack Daniel's BBQ sauce (which we actually CAN buy in Japan, at least online), and added the grilled onions I cook on the BBQ.
Burgers are always fantastic and often better overall that steak or any other meat we end up cooking along with the burgers. I cook the burgers first, while the BBQ heat is at its peak, and I use the dome cover during cooking, of course.
We also cook a large sweet potato with the meat each time we BBQ, and that is wrapped in 2 layers of aluminum foil. I sit that on the side of the grill where the grill handle is located because there's a bit less direct heat there. It stays on the grill until the last bit of meat is cooked, which usually means more than 50 minutes of total cooking time. It always ends up perfectly soft and ready to eat.
One unique thing about cooking burgers is that if you have guest over in Japan, they are rather surprised. That's because NOBODY here (other than myself and perhaps a few other Americans out there somewhere) cook burgers. Most people here just do their grilling the traditional Japanese way, which is basically Yakiniku. Yakiniku involves using very thin slices of meat that cook fast, most often eaten outside while you are cooking. American style BBQing involves cooking the meat, then taking it inside the house to eat. That's why our cuts of meat are thicker and take longer to cook.
Yakiniku style is all fine and well, but even after 31+ years of living in Japan, I prefer the American way better when I BBQ. And many Japanese people who try the goodies I BBQ often feel that way too, even if they would never try their hand at it themselves. Most Japanese BBQs don't have a lid, although it is possible to get a Weber here now. Back when I got my Weber, I had to have family ship it to me from the US! Thank goodness we had low cost Ocean Shipping from USPS back then, as Air Shipping would be crazy expensive. I'm also thankful that briquettes are now sold on Amazon Japan.
