It Was My Brother's Idea

There is a merguez lamb burger on the board this week. It is one of the best dishes I ever put on a menu, and I want to tell you where it came from, because the honest version is better than the one where I take the credit.

My brother Dave and I opened a small Mediterranean wine bar in Laguna Beach called ZÉYTOON, with a rooftop you could see the ocean from. Hummus, baba ghanoush, muhammara, octopus, shawarma. We made all our own spice blends, because that is the part nobody notices and everybody tastes.

And we thought it would be fun to put a burger on it. Not a regular burger. A merguez lamb burger.

Here is the thing worth knowing whether you ever make this or not.

Lamb is lean. If you buy ground lamb, form it into a patty and cook it, you get a dry puck. Not a little dry. Dry enough that you decide you do not like lamb burgers, which is the wrong conclusion.

The fix is fat. Seventy-five percent lamb to twenty-five percent fat is what we landed on for this burger, and it is what makes it work. At the restaurant we used wagyu fat because we could. At home, any fat works. Ask the butcher counter to grind lamb with twenty-five percent fat, or buy ground lamb and cut it with a little ground chuck yourself.

That is the difference between a lamb burger people talk about and one they politely finish.

What carries over to your kitchen is the principle, not the number. Lean meat needs fat to stay juicy. Different grinds want different amounts, and finding the right one is its own work. But it starts with not thinking of fat as the thing you trim out.

We built it with a tzatziki that has French feta folded into it, and a harissa aioli. Heirloom tomato, red onion sliced thin, wild arugula for the peppery bite. A good bun, toasted.

Two sauces sounds like a lot until you see what they are doing. The aioli goes on the bun and brings the heat. The tzatziki goes on the hot patty and cools it, and it breaks and runs down the side while you eat it. One is doing heat, one is doing cool. Take either one away and it is a different, lesser sandwich.

That is what we mean when we say layers of flavor. Not more ingredients. Ingredients that each have a job.

And this is the kind of dinner where somebody at the table takes a bite, looks at you and says, "You made this?" That is a pretty good feeling. You do not have to work in a restaurant to have people remember something you cooked.

We talked that burger through together, and Dave drove it. He was the one building the layers, conceptualizing it, pushing it where it went. I thought that was pretty awesome then and I still do.

A food writer came in and wrote about it, and after that it became the thing people came for. First-timers would tell us they had never had anything like it. It is still the dish people bring up when I run into them, years later.

Dave and I have worked together for most of our professional lives. We both cooked for Bruno Barbieri in Italy, at different restaurants, at different times. We were at Roy's in Newport together. Napa Rose together. At THE RANCH I was in the kitchen and he was the pastry chef. Today he is my chef de cuisine at The Beach Club.

We are both classically trained, so everything we cook comes back to the same things: culture, seasonality, technique, layers of flavor.

And we have been lucky in a way most cooks are not. In all those restaurants we got to cook our food, not the house's food, because we were the ones opening the houses. You build the restaurant, you build the team, and the food that comes out of it is actually yours.

We can talk about food anywhere, any time, and be exactly as excited as the last time. Most of it without saying much at all. One of us starts a sentence and the other one is already three steps down the road with it.

Dave is an award-winning chef and he is just as good at savory as he is at sweet. Almost nobody is. Most of us pick a side.

He is most famous for a popcorn ice cream that puts you in a movie theater. You close your eyes and you are there, eating popcorn, except you are eating ice cream. He also does a pecan pie and a Milky Way with a twist that I am not going to try to explain.

Look at those two dishes next to each other. A popcorn ice cream and a fine dining burger. They are the same idea. Take the thing everybody already knows and loves, and do it properly.

That is the whole argument behind SEASON, and I did not invent it. It is just how the two of us were taught to cook.

One more thing about that burger, and it is the reason it belongs on the board now and not in July.

That heirloom tomato is doing as much work as either sauce, and you can still get a real one. People write tomatoes off the moment the calendar turns, and every October I watch good cooks reach for a mealy hothouse tomato because they assume it is over. In Southern California it is not over yet. The heirlooms are still going and they will be for a few more weeks. Use them while they are here.

The persimmons just showed up, which is why there is a persimmon salad on the plant-based side. Buy Fuyu, the squat flat-bottomed one you eat firm like an apple. The pointed one is Hachiya, and it is inedible until it is nearly liquid inside. Somebody does this every year, bites into a Hachiya, and swears off persimmons for life.

If you read this letter every Monday and find yourself looking for the good tomato, learning the difference between two persimmons or caring about the fat in a burger, you're one of us. We are just a group of cooks trying to pay a little more attention and make dinner a little better.

The burger is Friday. Make it this week. Get the ratio right and you will understand why we are still talking about it.

Before I go, hit reply and tell me: what actually happens in your kitchen at 5:30? I really do read the replies, and they help me understand what would make this letter more useful to you.

I am just lucky he is the other half of my brain.

Michael

Chef Michael Rossi

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The point is not to cook all ten.

The point is to know what fits your week before 5:30 gets there.

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P.S. If this made your week a little easier, forward it to one person who's staring down the same 5:30 question. That's the whole way SEASON grows, one cook telling another. Send them here: tonightsseason.com/dinner