A bison burger stuffed with gorgonzola
cheese and sundried tomatoes. Photo
courtesy WMMB.

Yet despite the low fat level, the taste is sumptuous. We’ve grown to prefer bison to beef.

Because bison has so little fat, it can’t be cooked to medium or well done. But lovers of medium rare will delight in the flavor.

For our Top Pick Of The Week, we tried bison burgers from Allen Brothers and High Plains Bison, two purveyors of premium meat. Don’t look for bargain-basement bison meat. As with beef, you get what you pay for.

Much as we enjoy olives, we’d never thought of adding them to oil and vinegar to create a rich dressing.

If you’re firing up the grill for Memorial Day, try this recipe:

Ingredients

Preparation
1. Prepare a grill for medium-high heat cooking.
2. In a blender or food processor, combine olives, vinegar, pepper, water, 1 tablespoon of the oil and 1/4 teaspoon of the salt. Blend until smooth and set aside.
3. Place zucchini in a large bowl and toss with lemon juice, garlic, remaining 2 tablespoons oil and 1/4 teaspoon salt. Grill until well marked and tender, 3 to 4 minutes per side.
4. Layer zucchini on a platter, drizzling each layer with some vinaigrette and sprinkling with some tomato. Serve hot, warm or room temperature.

To use the olive vinaigrette as a salad dressing, dilute it with more oil and vinegar, to taste.

Find more of our favorite vegetable recipes.
  

Brothers BBQ sauces: layers of flavor.
Photo by Sue Ding | THE NIBBLE.

Among all the products people send “over the transom” for us to try, the largest category by far is barbecue sauce.

We often say that, if aliens invaded THE NIBBLE offices, they’d think that earthlings lived on barbecue sauce.

Much of what we’re sent is very simple and sweet: ketchup or tomato paste with added sugar, brown sugar, and/or high fructose corn syrup, plus onion powder, Worcestershire and/or hot sauce. The number one ingredient on the label is often one of the sweeteners listed above, if that gives you an idea of the taste.

We call these products “meat sugar.” While we like tomato-based sauces, we really don’t like sugar sauce on our meat.

Only one barbecue sauce has ever been memorable enough to make Top Pick Of The Week, and we happen to sell it in The Nibble Gourmet Market: Grandville’s BBQ Jam (it’s as thick as jam). Treat yourself to a bottle or two—it’s a great Father’s Day gift.

Every so often, a product comes along and stands out from the rest. In the past, we’ve written them up as a group:

 
You may have noticed that we didn’t do a “Best” review in 2009. What happened? Not enough contenders for an article.

But we do have a nominee for 2011: King Brothers.

In 1986, the King Brothers—George, Barry and Darryl—plus Daddy King had a friendly family barbecue cook-off. The winner continued to make his sauce for his family and friends.

The fan base grew, and wanted more barbecue sauce than King could supply. Friends said that they would gladly buy it. One sauce-addicted friend referred to the sauce as “The GOLD,” which became the name of the first sauce produced under the label Brothers Sauces.

“The GOLD” was followed by “The HEAT,” a wing sauce, and Spicy Brown Mustard “GOLD.” Whether on beef, chicken, pork or seafood (some people use it as salad dressing, too), the multi-layered tastes shine through. Sweet and tangy flavors join the rich tomato base to create a noteworthy suite of sauces.

You can purchase Brothers Sauces from the company website.

The brothers also make Granny Georgia’s Brown Suga Dessert Sauce. It’s a bit sweet for us, but our neighbor, to whom we gave the jar, was thrilled.

If Dad likes milk chocolate, pass out the Seegars—creamy milk chocolate cigars from See’s Chocolate.

Wrapped in brown foil and nestled inside a clear gift box, the “Seegars” have a traditional cigar band printed with an “S,” for See’s. You can find them at See’s candy shops and online at Sees.com. The three cigars weigh in at 3.19 ounces, and the box is $7.00.

See’s chocolates are certified kosher by KSA.

If Dad is a chocolate connoisseur, he’d prefer the chocolate cigars from Burdick Chocolate (shown in photo).

The cigars, delightful party favors, are $3.50 each; or six in a wooden “cigar box” for $28.00, at BurdickChocolate.com.

[1] One of our favorite burgers, from Built Burger.

[2] Another fave: a bacon cheeseburger with onion rings (photo © Smokey Bones).

National Hamburger Month is May, but that’s not all. National/International Hamburger Day is May 28th, National Burger Day is the Thursday before Labor Day and National Cheeseburger Day is September 18th. How about some hamburger history?

Americans love burgers, consuming nearly 50 billion burgers each year. If you do the math, there are approximately 325,000,000 people in the U.S., which means that the average American consumes 154 burgers a year, or 3 burgers per week.

How did this all begin?
 
 
THE FIRST BURGERS

According to a 2022 post in Quora, the famous Roman cookbook De re De Re Coquinaria ((On the Subject of Cooking), known as the first extant cookbook and published in the 4th or 5th century C.E., there was a burger-type patty in ancient Rome.

The recipe is called Isicia Omentata, and consists of minced meat, pepper, wine, and pine nuts, served with Romans’ favorite condiment, a fermented fish sauce called garum. “All ingredients should be mixed together and shaped into a patty,” says the recipe [source].

When we first wrote this article in 2011, the earliest known hamburger aficionados were the Russian Tartars, nomadic groups who joined Genghis Khan’s army in the early 13th century.

They shredded the tougher cuts of beef and ate them without cooking, an early version of the dish we call Steak Tartare (although it should be Steak Tatare—they were Tatars, not Tartars). They introduced the dish to Germany before the 14th century.

We can thank German immigrants for bringing over what became the quintessential American food: the hamburger, or burger for short. (They brought the the frankfurter, too.)

The Germans added spices, and the dish, served both cooked and raw, became popular among people of limited means.

In Hamburg, it became known as “Hamburg steak.” When it arrived in the U.S. during the 1880s wave of German immigration, it became a “hamburger steak” and finally, a “hamburger.”

The original recipe—chopped beef mixed with onions and pepper—appeared on American menus as far back as 1836.

However, the term “hamburger steak” first appeared in print in a Washington State newspaper in 1889.

The hamburger also traveled to England, where Dr. J. H. Salisbury, a hearty beef eater, championed the shredding of all foods to improve digestibility (see Salisbury steak).

As with the frankfurter—a sausage in a roll—, it took good old American ingenuity to wrap the bread around a beef patty.

The date of the burger-in-a-roll (the difference between rolls and buns) is not known for certain, although by the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, the hamburger was already a sandwich.

Louis’ Lunch in New Haven claims to have served up the original burger in the U.S. in 1900, putting a beef patty, tomato, onion, and cheese between two slices of toasted white bread—no ketchup or mustard. They still serve it the same way.

Several other American towns lay claim to this watershed in American cuisine. One of them is Seymour, Wisconsin, which claims that in 1885, one Charlie Nagreen was having trouble selling his meatballs at the Seymour Fair—it was hard for people to eat them as they walked around. So Nagreen flattened the ball of meat and placed the patty between two pieces of bread.

That same year, the Menches brothers, who sold sausage patty sandwiches, ran out of pork at the Erie County Fair in Hamburg, New York. Their butcher suggested that they use beef, and they christened the product the Hamburg sandwich.