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