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I Hate Long-Ass Recipes: The Smash Burger
🕑 Added 2024-03-28 19:19:53 +0000 UTCKenji López-Alt's smash burger recipe on Serious Eats is four written pages long. It is six hundred words longer than the Declaration of Independence (1,959 to 1,320), and has fourteen photographs (including a helpful one of the outside of a building where hamburgers are cooked). The entire webpage clocks in at 3.3MB, which means that transmitting it produces a larger carbon footprint than actually cooking the burger.
In addition to copious information about the science and lore of this style of hamburger, it covers a recent bicycle repair that his wife needed, sanitation challenges faced by early Parisian civil engineers, and a lengthy recounting of his favorite day ever (it involved both a watercolor lesson and a man complimenting his hat).
May "For sale: baby shoes, never worn" be our guide when writing recipes.
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MY SMASH BURGER RECIPE
Look at my picture. You can reverse-engineer this, because you are quite intelligent.
OKAY, FINE
Two-ounce ball of beef. Screaming hot pan. Squash hard under parchment until wider than bun. Scrape loose when edges darken, flip, cheese, serve.
(Word count: 23)
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EPILOGUE
I will admit that I have had a sore throat since Monday, and being listlessly homebound makes me very, very cranky. I want to dig my new rain garden and listen to podcasts at the gym and work on the upcoming novel, not complain about recipes like some barnacle on the ass of the Internet.
But if you are interested in more of these condensed recipes, sans-vitriol*, I have been hard at work on a dead-easy hummus, and we could start there. Fresh hummus from the food processor is an entirely more magical animal than the refrigerated store-bought stuff, has more fiber, costs like a buck-fifty to make...and you will never find a sentence that florid, irrelevant, and selfishly long in the final writeup.
* or with, your choice
Comments
Stavro
He is a delight! His burrito video hooked me originally: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osv72OeCpR0
J.
We had calamondin trees when I was a kid. Hummus made with their juice was an early experience with the harmony of the five basic flavors.
Chris Onstad
Yeah dogg, it’s all food for somebody / thing. Not sure what’s below Todd in the food chain. Weird holes in the lawn?
Chris Onstad
Oddly, his page doesn’t have a scroll bar, so you never know you’re only like 5% done
Chris Onstad
I was expecting a wildly different-looking chef than what I saw just now
Chris Onstad
! That is some bananas-level shit, friend (I like the idea of getting subversive with the juice)
Chris Onstad
The very first (pre-css) Achewood template was, I believe, smaller than one TCP packet.
Alex Moscovitch
The five dollar chili recipe is the base for my chili. The first cookbook gave me the courage to try shit out - the line about no food truly going to waste in a world with Todd helped reprogram the “but the starving African babies” food waste guilt from old times
Ste & Danni JM
You can tell someone used to be a soldier from the haunted pause before they turn a blind corner. Similarly you can tell someone was an early 2000s webcomic artist from his belief that 3.3 MB is entirely too much data for one web page.
J.
Substitute calamondin juice in hummus. (Edited for brevity.)
Stavro
I am all about the home made hummus life. I loosely follow Internet Shaquille's recipe, as he is the foodtuber best at brevity of them all.
blair
The motto of the parent blog, idlewords.com is "Brevity is for the weak" and he means it, but he's good enough that I don't mind. "Argentina on Two Steaks a Day" is a standout among standouts.
Chris Onstad
I'm going to have to divide that up into a few different sittings, given how long it is, but I do enjoy it so far. Thanks.
Chris Onstad
Well, a vote of one is good enough for me. Keep your arms and head inside the ride people
Chris Onstad
I found the only cough drop on earth that has no sugar and it is like from the bottom shelf of a small store at a lake that only serves Belgian people one month a year. ($8/lozenge)
Chris Onstad
HOW DID YOU POSSIBLY FUCK UP MY COOKIES THE DIRECTIONS ARE PERFECT [Pat told me to tell you this]
Chris Onstad
Dang Endgamer, that is some cho-cahoots (cho-hoots). Try the powdered Allulose on Amazon, I'm seeing 3lb for $24. It's derived from corn which is a bit of an embattled commodity these few years so it's crazy expensive, but well worth it if you like sweets but don't want sugar in your diet. But I'm impressed you tried that recipe as it's a bit specialized/niche. Oh and with the liquid form it's also not going to be as stable as when you use the crystalline form because the crystals help aerate/lift during the whipping stage.
C C
Damn, you are cooking! I love to hear about people cooking who don't record it or post it or whatever.
blair
You've reninded me of this history of web bloat by Maciej Ceglowski, who you'd probably approve of: https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
Shawn Warren
You better believe I want the hummus recipe.
Julie (HiDeeHoGal)
Tasty looking burgie. Agreed about homemade hummus - I like mine very lemony and that's hard to find in tubs at the store. If I can't find 'jump to recipe' in 5 seconds, I move on. Hope the throat clears up.
EndgamerAzari
The usefulness of my feedback is hampered somewhat by the fact that I am absolute dogwater in the kitchen, but here goes: the chocolate mousse is incredible, though I can only find liquid allulose locally and that makes it a little runny, so I may have to tweak the ratios next time. "Ray Steaks" were my first attempt at both cast iron and pan sauces, and I made the brined tenderloin and caramelized onions on New Year's Day. The Food-Be-Tastey sauce came out decent, as did the flavor burgers. The only one I really botched was the 12-Step Cookies, though they were still edible--which I'm sure would fill Pat with a mixture of self-righteous indignation and smug scorn.
Chris Onstad
"Martha, would you please cheese the dinner, I have to [finish grading these papers, etc]."
Chris Onstad
I wish YouTube had a 4X speed setting
Fartlord90210
I wouldn’t survive a video recipe, text sites are enraging enough
Andrzej
my new #1 conversation priority is to use cheese as a verb
Chris Onstad
Dear god, which ones? Any feedback?
Chris Onstad
have you ever tried to find a video recipe for like fried rice and it's twenty-three minutes long; this could be a fuck you Friday for sure
EndgamerAzari
I've probably cooked more recipes out of the Achewood cookbooks than from any other single source, so I look forward to more of this.
Fartlord90210
Kenji Lopez-Alt could be an alternate universe Achewood character
