French Fridays with Dorie - Café Salle Pleyel Hamburger

Oh dear, you can tell we like our meat well done around here. Very well done :-). In fact, a beautiful, juicy burger lies somewhere underneath that charred-looking patty you see in the photo above. In this week's French Fridays with Dorie, we were supposed to replicate that famous hamburger served at the Café Salle Pleyel in Paris. Although, after I cooked mine, I doubt if the Café Salle Pleyel would want anything to do with it! 

Now, if you're thinking a hamburger is a rather unlikely French offering, wait till you see what ingredients make up these meaty babies - fresh tarragon, cornichons, parsley, sundried tomatoes (wave goodbye to ketchup) and the leanest cut of beef you can find. Or in my case, lots of purple basil, green olives, tons of garlic (well, it is a French burger) and a concentrated tomato paste. Oh well, at least I stuck with the parsley and meat cut as per the original recipe... 

Onion marmalade ingredients

What's great about this recipe is that Dorie also supplied the instructions for an onion marmalade that served as a condiment to the burger. To achieve this marmalade, I boiled down some chopped onions with butter and freshly ground coriander seeds. This combination of ingredients gave the marmalade a distinctive flavor that's bittersweet (onion) as well as a mix between lemon and sage (coriander). It's hard for me to explain the exact  taste, but I'm guessing you guys who made this know what I'm babbling about, right?

 There's something therapeutical about this meat-slapping process...haha. Naughty.

While I prepped the burgers, I also baked some larger-than-usual bread rolls using the same organic malted grain flour I baked my dragon tail baguettes with. They were delish! Everything was timed perfectly...the buns were still very warm and the (very well done) burgers were piping hot when I served these up to the familia. Of course I kept my portion for a quick photoshoot, hoping it would still remain warm when I took my first bite into it (it still was). We don't eat too much red meat in this house, but this burger might make an appearance again soon. Next time, I'll cook it on the grill and see if that makes much of a difference to the overall taste.

Other Doristas will be manhandling their meat in their own special way, so if you're curious to see how their burgers turned out, click here to find out.

On a final note, and nothing whatsoever to do with this burger, I wanted to share with you the idea of using technology to perform magic (below). A geeky magician, what more can you ask for? This video made me smile in wonderment.

Have a lovely weekend, and for those who are/will be affected by Hurricane Irene, keep yourselves safe!