Kuma's Corner

If you're as much of a burger fanatic as I am, with an added obsession for all things heavy, who also spends far too much time on the internet, you'll no doubt have already heard of this mecca: Kuma's Corner.

picture taken from http://dawchicago.wordpress.com/

Kuma's is a bar and burger joint in Chicago, established in 2005, which I've had the most insane desire to visit since I first learned of it's existence a couple of years back. They have a great selection of both bottle and draft beers, mainly of the American craft beer variety, as well as a tiny kitchen which has a worldwide rep for cranking out the tastiest, most adventurous burgers you'll ever eat. They also blast metal constantly, the rules on their site on their site stating 'NO REQUESTS!'.
Yeah, it pretty much sounds like heaven.

Anyway, it's pretty much the only thing that could drag me all the way over to Chicago, and since I don't see that happening any time soon, I'm destined to live Kuma-less for the foreseeable future.

So I decided I'd take a little 'artistic inspiration' from their burger list, and create my own (no doubt inferior) versions of their burgs!

Here's the ingredients I picked up to create these monsters:

Incase some of those aren't immediately obvious, there's some chipotle sauce (which I have been trying to find in this country for what seems like forever!), BBQ sauce, a fresh salami, Swiss Emmental cheese, a big wedge of Gouda cheese, a clove of garlic, streaky bacon, and 500g of minced beef.

Kuma's uses pretzel rolls for their burgers, but since those aren't readily available here, and I was too goddamn tired and lazy to try making them from scratch, I settled on a freshly baked poppyseed roll and a couple of sesame bagels.

First step in creating the four different types of burgers is.... to create four different burger patties! No fuckin' duh, right?

This is where things branch off. I figured that since I would kill to try pretty much every burger on Kuma's menu, I should make as many of 'em as I could in one night!
I decided on making my own attempts at the YOB, Clutch, Mastodon and Goatwhore burgers.
The full menu can be found here http://www.kumascorner.com/food


YOB

To make the YOB burg, Kuma's uses

• Smoked Gouda
• Bacon
• Roasted red peppers
• Roasted garlic mayo

Chop your red pepper into strips rather than chunks, cut a pretty large chunk of gouda, and finely dice a single garlic clove to use in your mayonaisse.

So first step with this one was to fire the burger under the grill. I'm not used to cooking burgers in a non-barbeque context, so I was a little hesitant about grilling them indoors, not knowing how much time each patty might take, especially not since I'd made them about twice the size of my normal burgers.

Next I oiled up my frying pan, and threw in a coupla strips of streaked bacon, as well as my strips of pepper. Give it around 5 minutes to crisp up the bacon, then throw your diced garlic into a small corner (in a circular frying pan, yeah, I know) just to lightly brown it before mixing it into a paste in your mayo.

I checked on my burgs at this point and they were cooking much faster and much more evenly than I had expected for a grill, so I quickly cut a bagel in half and stuck it in the toaster. Once that popped, you basically just tower all the ingredients on top of one another, like so!

Admittedly, YOB aren't a band I've been into for long, I only got around to checking them out after hearing one of my favourite bands of recent times, Dark Castle, would be playing shows with them in the US. The limited amount of stuff I heard confirmed that this would be an ass-kicking tour that I will never see. So yeah, check out YOB, then check out Dark Castle too, for good measure.




CLUTCH

I was actually a little hesitant about making this, as Kuma's recipe calls for

• Cheddar
• Swiss
• Jack (which I assumed meant pepperjack)
• Smoked Gouda

Yep, that's FOUR cheeses right there. Given that one of my most hated foods in the world is four-cheese pizza (just WHY?! that's too much cheese, it's just dumb, fuck off with your four cheese pizza), I knew there was no way in hell I was making this with all four. There was the added factor that pepperjack cheese is nigh on impossible to find in my part of the world.

So I took a liberty with the 'Jack' aspect of the recipe and convinced myself they meant Daniels. Then I remembered I hate Jack Daniels, and opted to marinade my burger patty in the VASTLY superior Jim Beam.

This one is relatively simple in terms of prep work: marinade your patty in a liberal dose of Jim Beam for as long as it takes for you to chop slices of gouda, cheddar and swiss cheese, then fire your bourbon-y burger under the grill, and once it's cooked, stack it with cheese. Et voila!

The taste of this one was... a little strong for my liking. The Jim Beam marinade didnt really do a whole lot for the burger, it seemed to almost cancel out all the herbs and spices I added in to my minced meat, so it was a pretty bland patty, topped with 3 VERY domineering cheese flavours, all fighting for supremacy over my tastebuds. Overall taste was somehow simultaneously overwhelming AND underwhelming. Oh well, two more burgs to go!

Before that though, here's some vintage Clutch, one of my all-time favourite bands.



"Brown sugar, sweet potato
Sourmash, baby back
Redneck romance
Bless my soul!"


MASTODON

I was looking forward to trying this one as it involves BBQ sauce, something that I don't get to use anywhere NEAR as much as I'd like to.

Kuma's sez...

• BBQ Sauce
• Cheddar
• Bacon
• Frizzled onions

This is the closest to the type of burger that I usually make, so I was pretty confident I would be into it, there's no 'risky' ingredients or anything, just tried and true burger mainstays! I did however decide to marinade the patty in the BBQ sauce, rather than just cover the whole thing in a big dollop of it once it was cooked.

Burger: grill. Bacon: frying pan. Likewise for your onions. Once all of it is cooked, put it together. Easy as that.

This one went exactly as I expected: tasty as hell! The onions turned out slightly sweet, counterpointing the SERIOUSLY salty bacon. Also, the BBQ-marinaded patty was so juicy and just goddamn delicious. I would recommend this burger the most out of all the ones I made.

Major label record companies suck, we all know this, so as a result of them not wanting anyone to hear their artist's music, I can't embed my favourite Mastodon track....

I can however post a pretty excellent quality LIVE version! That guitar... hotdamn!




GOATWHORE

Last up, and yeah, least, is the Goatwhore burger.
This one didn't really get a fair shot, because after eating the other three GIGANTIC burgers and working my way through a couple of Sol beers as I cooked, I was way too full to eat this.
I promise I'll give it another shot, and give it the attention it no doubt deserves.

Kuma's ingredients for this surprisingly include to goat's cheese...

• Fried salami
• Provolone
• Giardiniera salad

For starters, provolone is IMPOSSIBLE to find in central Scotland. At least in all my usual deli haunts and the two major supermarket chains that I tried to find it in. So that was stricken from the list. Also, I wasn't ENTIRELY sure what a giardiniera salad actually was, it seemed to involved a whole lot of olives, and pickled cauliflower...? Either way, that was off too. I at least followed the 'salad' part and bought a few fresh leaves of lettuce.

So yeah, this one was super quick since all I had to do was lightly fry the salami and place it on top of the burger. Pretty boring, really.

Like I said, i really didn't give this one it's due, and couldn't even finish it when it sat there oh-so-pretty on my plate. I packed it up in tupperware, took it to work the next day and ate it cold for breakfast. Urgh. Not recommended.

Goatwhore are Celtic Frost-worshipping blackened thrash from the murky South, featuring guitarist Sammy Duet, who played in the phenomenal Acid Bath.



This blog was far from chronological, I actually prepared all four of these at the same time, and the insanity involved in trying to seperate the right ingredients to go with the relevant burger, shoot pics of before-and-after ingredients, and then find time to actually EAT the fuckers... goddamn, that was a frantic meal! All respect in the world to the chefs who actually prepare burgs all damn day in Kuma's.
Hopefully one day I'll make it for to Chicago and try the genuine article.