I will gladly pay you Wednesday for a sirloin black truffle burger today

Yesterday was a good day.

First, I won an e-bay auction which landed me some pretty awesome seats to take my Dad to a Cardinals game when I do my Memphis-St. Louis jaunt next month. Yay me.

Then about ten minutes after that, J.T. won Survivor: Tocantins and the fan favorite award, which means he'll have ample means to support me when I move to Alabama to have his beautiful big headed backwoods babies.

But before all that, the best part of the day happened: I made black truffle burgers.

I'll let that sink in for a moment.

Remember when I said that I had to cook something from the Top Chef cookbook that wasn't from Season Two, because I hated Season Two? Well, the Black Truffle burger is from Season Three. So that's one life goal down.

The Black Truffle burger is the brainchild of one Howie Kleinberg, who is frankly probably better remembered for the fact that he spent most of season 3 dripping beads of sweat off his bald head and directly into the food than he is for the food itself.

Howie made the Black Truffle burger for the Red Robin Corporate Sponsored Burger Challenge which was the quickfire in the first episode of the "Restaurant Wars" challenge in Season 3. He was in the top group, but lost to CJ's Scallop Mousse and Shrimp Burger with Tangerine.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, CJ is extremely tall and good looking and has one testicle and I love him and want to climb him like a tree. On the other hand, I'm opposed to seafood burgers getting the win in any sort of "ultimate burger" competition, because let's face it: the ultimate burger is always, always, always made from a member of the cow family. And on the. . .third hand, a scallop mousse and shrimp burger sounds like anaphylaxis on a bun.

And on the. . fourth. . . hand. . . the black truffle burger is so goddamned good. I don't know if I've ever had a burger this juicy and delicious before. I've sure as hell never made a burger this juicy and delicious before.

Mise en place, my bitches:

You will need: a pound and a half of ground sirloin; three ounces of truffle butter; 4 oz of Taleggio cheese; 4 slices of pancetta, and salt.

So let's address the elephant in the room first. These burgers. . . .they're not cheap. These are definitely special occasion burgers, like when you're watching the finale of a TV show that systematically starves people for 39 days, and you want something really juicy dripping down your face.

They're also not as expensive as you think they're going to be. The truffle butter was $7.99 for 3 oz, yes. But the sirloin was $6 something, the cheese was $3 something, and four slices of the pancetta was 80 cents (I got extra). Throw in $3 for buns and $3-ish for lettuce and tomato, and you're still coming in at about $24 total, or $6 per burger.

Now imagine what you get for $6 at your local burger joint. Yeah. And these bitches have truffles in them.

Second issue: finding truffle butter. Since Top Chef has a tendency to be one big Whole Foods commercial, and since I also remembered CJ and Tre buying truffle butter to use in a pasta dish at Whole Foods during the third season, I assumed I'd be able to get it at Whole Foods. Nope. No dice. Apparently not everything you see on reality TV is true. Who knew?

They did have it at Harris-Teeter, though, in convenient 3 oz containers. Exactly the amount I needed. Oh, Harris-Teeter. If I could marry a grocery store, I'd marry you.

So you plop your meat and your entire container of truffle butter and your tsp of salt into a bowl, and start working them together until, according to the directions, the butter is "just incorporated."

Something I'd recommend based on my experience is that you let the butter soften up a bit before trying this. Incorporating cold butter into cold meat is no easy chore. I stood there, massaging the combination and trying to mentally raise my body temperature the way you do when you're trying to stay home "sick" from grade school. I tried thinking about sex. I tried singing the burgers the song of the hummingbird as it gets ready to find that female hummingbird, and -- make sweet love to it -- all night long. Just two hummingbirds moaning' and groanin' and letting their bodies caress and touch each other in ecstasy. . .

Anyway, eventually I got to this point:

And I figured "good enough." Attractive, isn't it? Who doesn't want to nosh down a huge ball of raw meat flecked with greasy white spots?

Anyway, I love him, and I call him Blobby. Like Bobby, only with an L.

After a few minutes of scraping every last molecule of truffle butter out from under my fingernails and pressing it back into Blobby so that it wouldn't go to waste, I formed him into four patties.

Pretty.

And then I gave each of the Blobby Jr.'s a hat of delicious thin sliced pancetta.

Mmmmm. . . .Pancetta Hat.

So while you're doing all this, you want to get your oven preheated to 350, and an oven proof skillet heating up over medium high heat on your stove.

I used my big ass cast iron skillet, because I love a chance to use a big ass cast iron skillet. I especially love testing for heat by flicking water at it and seeing if the drops "dance," which I feel like I learned from the Little House on the Prairie or something.

Once the water dances, get the burgers into the pan, pancetta side down.
The pancetta, which is like the super-awesome Italian cousin of bacon, does its thing and cooks up and creates a nice slick of Italian bacony grease in the bottom of the pan.

Let it do that for 4-5 minutes (4 if you like your burgers rare; 5 for medium-rare), then flip them over.

Look how good the pancetta hats look now!

So then they cook for 4 or 5 minutes on that side, and the bottoms of the burgers get to soak up all the delightful grease their pancetta hats made for them while they were cooking on the pancetta side.

And then you put a slice of taleggio cheese on top. So the cheese becomes like the feather on the pancetta hat.

And then you slide the whole shebang into the oven for 5 minutes.

The result? One filthy, greasy, cheese covered cast iron pan. And this:

So yeah, I should've gotten smaller rolls. I was expecting the burgers to come out larger (which, yes, I realize I could have made them larger and flatter, but I like a fat patty).

But these were sooooooooooooooooooooooooo goooooooooooooooooood. All of the separate elements came together perfectly into an orgy of juicy, salty goodness that made me cry happy tears. And inhale my dinner.

So thank you, Howie Kleinberg, for busting me out of my Season Two recipe rut, and for inventing this completely awesome burger. You totally should've beat CJ's scallop and shrimp burger ass.

CJ, I still want to climb you like a tree.