Loren Bouchard - The Bobs Burgers Burger Book: Real Recipes for Joke Burgers

THE BOBS BURGERS BURGER BOOK

By Loren Bouchard
and the writers of Bobs Burgers

Recipes by Cole Bowden

Illustrations by Bento Box Entertainment

Design by Lynne Yeamans/Lync

Cover design by Lynne Yeamans

2016 20th Television

Published by Kingswell, an imprint of Buena Vista Books, Inc.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.

All third-party trademarks and brands mentioned in this cookbook are property of their respective owners. They are used for identification purposes only, and do not imply endorsement.

For information address Kingswell, 1200 Grand Central Avenue, Glendale, California 91201.

First Hardcover Edition, March 2016

First Kingswell Edition, February 2021

ISBN 978-1-368-07428-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015946975

FAC-034274-20353

When we decided there would be a Burger of the Day chalkboard behind the counter in Bobs Burgers, mostly what we wanted you to think was Poor Bobits just so easy for his rascally nine year old daughter to climb up there and change the burger name to something undesirable. That was how The Child Molester (comes with candy) made it into our pilot episode. (And by the way, were not, like, proud of that joke. Thats not the joke burger that you put on a T-shirt.) But we moved away from the burger-as-prank pretty quickly after that. And it had nothing to do with the fact that it would double the number of burger puns wed have to write every episode. Nothing.

Rather than a running joke about the easy erasability of chalk, the Burger of the Day board came to be sort of a smudgy little window into Bob himselfBob, the restless creator of new tastes and bad puns. Every single day, we imagine, this ambitious grill cook tasks himself with the creation of a new burger special and a silly name for it. Occasionally clever, more often sweaty, and typically related to whats happening in his life at that time, the names Bob gives his Burgers of the Day are supposed to feel not just like a free joke glimpsed in the background of an animated show but alsoand this is going to sound grandiose and gross, sorryan expression of the internal life of the character (there, I said it) and also offer a hint that this greasy little mom and pop shop might be more gastronomically adventurous than it would otherwise appear to be. That Bob is something of a sweaty, greasy ground beef auteur, laboring over his grill like a wild-haired artist, questing after burger perfection, that despite his tragically struggling business, his burgers are supposed to be really good.

But are they? I mean, would they be, if they were real? Theyre jokespuns dreamt up by writers on a deadline. If you actually made themforget goodwould they even be edible? We reject the ones that sound like theyre all joke and no burger, like The Americas Toast Wanted Burger (comes on a toasted bun) or the ones that sound good but whose names are too mean or too risquthe Child Molester asidelike The Young, Dumb, and Full of Plum Burger. So, in other words, we sort of make an effort to create palatable burgers with our somewhat palatable puns. But all we can do, really, is hope that theyd taste good if they existed in real life.

But then there came a bloga beautiful fan burger blog called The Bobs Burger Experiment. This brave soul, a young man named Cole Bowden, was making each and every burger that appeared on our shows chalkboard and he was writing about it. It was as if we had dreamt him upconjured him from the wilds of the blogosphere in order to legitimize usto add a dash of respectability to our made-up food.

For those of us who worked on the show and followed him, Coles culinary ambition was thrilling, and his chutzpah and hard work was and is inspiring to say the least, but when you read his recipes it becomes clear that primarily what he brings to the table is imagination. Cole approaches each Burger of the Day as an intrepid interpreter, like a jazz musician improvising around a tune. Hes a culinary Miles Davis, if Miles Davis also had a blog.

Could he have, in a fit of exuberance, combined flavors that might usually be left on opposite sides of the plate? Of course. And he makes no claim otherwise. He is a passionate amateur, a pioneer, testing his theories and reporting on the results. So, for the purposes of making the best possible cookbook, we invited two working chefsAliza Miner in Los Angeles, and Paul OConnell in Bostonto read Coles recipes and consult. These two experienced cooks took on the role of culinary big sister and brother, poking, prodding, and giving noogies to Coles recipes in the interest of bringing them to their full potential.

We want you to make these burgers. We want you to adjust and play with these burgers. We want you to befriend these burgers and then build a life with them. There are many people, including professionals who should know better, who will tell you that all burgers should be classic. But these classicists are dangerously conservative. Pay them no mind! How would we have found even the simple cheeseburger, or the bacon burger, if it werent for people fooling around with toppings? How about ketchup, or lettuce, or tomato? Or buns?

Restaurants can ban ketchup if thats how they want to present their food (Sidebar: isnt ketchup delicious? Its the best, right?), but thats not Bobs Burgers. And thats not this book. Our approach is, in fact, the opposite. We want you to put all kinds of crap on your burger. We want you to approach burgers the way that Cole does and how we imagine that Bob does, which is in the spirit of brave, even fool-hardy experimentation, because only by this process will our science advance. And maybe someday, well all wonder why we didnt always eat Free to Brie You and Me burgers or Home for the Challah-Days burgers. Classics, well call them. But you made them here first.

Anyone can throw a bunch of ground beef on a grill and call it a burger. But does that make it a good burger? Does throwing a habit on a dog make it a good nun? No. Follow these steps for the meat-based burger recipes in this book and youll be on the path to burger perfection, which we call burg-fection.

First, start with cold, high quality, freshly ground choice grade chuck, and use a kitchen scale to measure it out. If you dont have a kitchen scale, congratulations, youre a normal person. If you have a 1-lb package then its easy: divide into 4 equal portions and youve got quarter-pound burgers. Want a big, honkin 1/3-lb patty? Well, that sounds big. Are you sure? Okay. Divide your package in thirds. Did you buy more than a pound of ground beef? Then you know what? Just tear off a ball about the size of your fist.