The L.A. Times’ Battle of the Burgers: We picked our five favorites
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After a week of testing, tasting and testing again, here are our favorite five burgers from the L.A. Times’ first ever Battle of the Burgers:
The German Cuban burger by Robert Burmeister of Staten Island, N.Y. (For you social media types, he’s on Twitter @sichefrob.)
The red, white and blueberry burger by Brooks Walker of Folsom and the food blog Cakewalker. (He’s on Twitter @cakewalkr.)
The Southwest turkey burger by George Levinthal of Goleta.
The Italian caprese sliders by Susan Salerno of Henderson, Nev., and the food blog Simply Cooking 101. (She’s on Twitter @simplycook101.)
And the Mexican cemita burger by Harold Cohen of Hollywood, Fla.
In all, we received nearly 90 recipes from readers and burgermeisters nationwide. From there, we asked you to vote on your favorites. Once we had the top 20 vote getters, Times Test Kitchen Manager Noelle Carter and her fleet of kitchen interns went to work. (They’re showing off their handiwork in the photo above.)
Now, you may be wondering: OK, where are the burger recipes? Well, the testing is just the beginning. Recipes need to be written to adhere to L.A. Times recipe format, then they need to be edited for clarity and copy edited, and then there’s another round of burger preparation for the photo studio....
In other words, we’re not done.
Originally, we were planning to post the recipes online June 29 and in print June 30, just in time for your Fourth of July barbecue planning. But because of overwhelming demand, we’re rushing to get the recipes posted even sooner. We’ll aim to post a recipe a day next week. If all goes well, you should have all the top recipes by this time next Friday.
Thank you to all who entered, and congratulations to our Top 5 burgermeisters. Please let us know what you thought of the Battle of the Burgers, and whether you see any room for improvement. One suggestion that cropped up online was to limit the submissions to Southern California residents. We considered it, but because we have so many readers nationwide (and in Northern California, like Brooks Walker!), we decided in the end to open it to one and all.
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--Rene Lynch
Twitter / renelynch
