Welcome to Bobby Flay Everyday!

I am not an expert. I have never even taken a class. I have no formal training - but I love to grill. I love the food off the grill and I just like the idea, the fun and the relaxation of grilling. So naturally Bobby Flay is a hero. I have his books, I watch his shows and I try out his recipes. So my idea is to grill one of Bobby's grilling recommendations everyday and see how it goes. Bobby Flay Everyday!

The idea to grill and blog is not original. Julie Powell wrote a blog that became a book and then a movie when she cooked all 524 recipes from Julia Child's cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking. But this is not French Cooking - this is backyard, after work, tailgate, American male grilling. I grill outside in a man-cave in every kind of weather. There is no "grilling season" for me - its everyday, year-round. We will skip around through Bobby's books and TV shows and grill what we like. But grilling is more than food, its an experience - so we will also report on what music we listened to or what ball game was on while we were grilling. We will keep track of what we were drinking during the grilling and later with the food. I'll try to figure what went wrong when we fall short of Bobby's perfection and pass on any tips I know about or discover along the way. Maybe it will give others some ideas as well.

The photo is of me and two of my brother-in-laws roasting the Thanksgiving turkey on the grill last year. That's me on the far right. In real life I am a college professor and pilot. I have written 12 books, but they were all about flying - here we write about grilling. We write about Bobby Flay Everyday!

Sunday, April 4, 2010

Blue Cheese Burger

Direct from Bobby Flay's Grill It! (page 50) this is a Blue Cheese Sirloin Burger! You can get more fancy on the grill, but you can't get much better than a burger from the grill. I used the Bobby Flay burger technique for the perfect burger - No fillers. Nothing is mixed into the meat. No tomatoes. No bread crumbs, no onion, nothing. When you do that eventually (according to Bobby) "you are just making meat loaf." Instead you get some quality ground beef, in this case ground sirloin, and add only canola oil, kosher salt and ground pepper to the outside of the burger patty. Make a crater in one side of the patty. This is Bobby's technique for preventing the burger to bulge in the middle. As we have said several times here at Bobby Flay Everyday, there is actually no problem with a bulging burger - its just the juices inside - but some people cannot resist the temptation to press the burger bulge down flat with a spatula. If you do that all those great juices just go to waste and you end up with a dry burger. That is why under no circumstances do you press down on a burger - its just not done. In this case, the burger was topped with blue cheese that I sliced off a wedge and melted over the burger. Terrific! We also prepared a cobb salad since it also has blue cheese. This was a great, light, early spring meal off the grill. 


The final four is set. Duke and Butler. Butler is a great story - small school (4,200 students), playing for the championship in their hometown, a coach that looks like a grad assistant - but I will still pull for Duke. I don't really understand why Duke is the school that everyone loves to hate. Yes, in order to attend Duke you must either have a better than 75% 3-point jumpshot or a trust fund. But Coach K always puts a team on the court that plays with great fundamentals, stays out of jail, and more often than not graduates. I can't hate a team that works hard, takes a charge, runs actual plays on the court and has a coach that wants to be there. Coach K could have been an NBA coach years ago (remember when we was courted by the Lakers! That would have been a match made in hell). Coach K make more than $4 million a year, but he didn't start that way. He started like the Butler coach (his name is Brad Stevens by the way) at a school that nobody thought of as a basketball school, and worked his way up. If Butler's coach, stays at Butler after the championship game, then I will be his biggest fan and hope he can do there what Coach K has done at Duke.


It will be a great finish and a great story no matter which team wins. Its not like that every year, so we celebrate on the grill. Blue Cheese is not actually blue - but  blue is the team color of both Butler and Duke - maybe we call these Championship Blue Cheese Burgers!
Paul
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