Therefore, today I will explain why the burger is good, and why it has overtaken all other Lithuanian national foods: pizza (of course, pizza is also good), kebab and also pilaf, which Lithuanians have come to love after discovering their inner Uzbekistan.
My relationship with the burger spans almost my entire conscious life. I was able to taste a McDonald’s burger for the first time in Moscow, back in the days of the Soviet Union, when the world’s largest McDonald’s restaurant opened there and the queue for it was such that it surrounded the entire Pushkin Square. But then I thought, I won’t pay that price (crazy humiliating Soviet lines at a FAST food restaurant), it’s against my beliefs – I’ll wait until I’m in the free world.
It happened quite quickly in Finland, during my first business trip to a country of mature capitalism and liquid beer, and there I ate not only a Big Mac, but also burgers from a trolley while browsing around night Helsinki with a colleague and a friend. I was young and had a great metabolism back then, and four burgers a night didn’t do anything to my appearance. It was then that I realized what my goals in life were: to live in countries where people like and eat burgers and where they are available at any time of the day.
When I found myself in England in 1995, I let my hair down. Not only did I eat at McDonald’s and Burger King (significantly better than Mac, because more meat and more vegetables and everything was royal) and Wendy’s (the best, where the burger patties are square, and even then the meat was never frozen, like today in the great chain Five Guys or McDonald’s in the USA and Canada – you may not know it, but the American McDonald’s taste very different from the European one, and it is precisely because of that meat).
No, I didn’t just do that. I bought a barbecue, a very basic one, for £20 (well, that would be forty today, not something at all) and, taking advantage of the fact that I already had a cottage with my own little garden in Reading, Barkshire, I started throwing meat on the grill and gradually worked my way up.
My friends in Lithuania then saw my new habits as an exceptional, ugly, unimaginable act of exploitation. This was quite unusual in Lithuania at that time: some people who bought the first homesteads by the lakes and drove around them in old vw golfs, also sometimes cooked meat – mostly shashki.
But grilling your own burgers, on purchased coals, with fragrant pieces of wood soaked in water so that fragrant smoke would come from them, watering those coals with beer (expensive, two pounds per bottle) to make the smoke even more fragrant – it was madness. I was uglier then than I am now. I also teased them by saying that I don’t mow the grass or trim the bushes myself. I used to invite the gardener. Not because it’s a mandra: it’s just that my parents never had a garden, and I didn’t know how to cut the grass or trim the bushes neatly. Such a thing as “gardener” sounded like an insult in Lithuania in the 90s.
You have no idea how insufferable I was in those days on internet forums, how unimaginably arrogant, provocative, scandalous and nasty I was. This, of course, was a reflection of my inner trauma and difficult childhood. But burgers cured everything.
Then there was a new house, a much better and bigger barbecue with all kinds of openings and functions (ceramics already existed then, but they were mostly owned by those who already had their own boat and pier on the Thames, and for whom they made a little money, and I I couldn’t brag about it, because all my money went to the very expensive private school of my two wonderful daughters, because I needed new topics to tease my compatriots; I remember the mother of one of my classmates said that it’s very bad that Andrius behaves like that, after all, his daughters will not meet ordinary people in those gentlemen’s reserves, and I was just gloating about how good it was that my daughters would be apart from the common people).
Even then I perfected the recipe: thick meat patties, one (for the ladies) or two (for me), big hard tomatoes and onions from the luxury store Waitrose, sometimes pickled gherkins, freshly cooked bacon (as much as possible), French mayonnaise, some an absurdly exclusive barbecue sauce from the USA for the English market, and it was always labeled in every possible way that it was American, American style, and the label was emblazoned with US flags, cowboys, and an American eagle. Because the English, although they look down on America, actually secretly admire it.
As you know, all the English actors who go on and on about how the English acting school is three heads higher than the American one, the English theater is the best in the world and the British English is perfect and the American English is nothing, get out of England and live in California at the first opportunity. , where he drives around in big cars and cooks burgers at his home in Los Angeles, and of course has an American wife.
Those juicy burgers were grilled over hot coals, dripping with fat that caught fire and gave off fragrant smoke that seemed to rise up to the sky where the Concorde flew by every night from nearby Heathrow to New York. Reading (like Windsor Castle) is under the Heathrow flightpath. It is said that the queen went out into the garden every evening and pointed the finger at that plane taking off, so it annoyed her. Although I don’t think that was true.
A burger is a perfect dish, it combines heat and cold, softness and hardness, saltiness and sweetness, freshness and that intoxicatingly melodious taste of meat, as it used to be written in US advertisements, “that toasted protein flavor”. I was excited to write, as I usually am.
Then many years passed, I returned to Lithuania, I have had a Kamado Club grill for several years, like many of you have. Heavy, reliable, incredibly versatile, because it can be used to cook another Lithuanian classic, pizza, and even with a special adapter (which you get in the standard package) – pilaf. You may think that I am promoting kamadoclub.lt here – now is the time to buy, because by October you won’t be eating at home anymore.
Today there is a great value limited edition grill of exceptional quality that is the Boeing 747 of all grills and you won’t get it anywhere else. Yes, it costs money. Nothing is free. It’s not even the mother of all ceramic grills, no, it’s a fearsome and powerful grown-up son, with iron muscles and Arnold’s profile, born to rule for decades. Every day you don’t bake in it will burn your eyes like fragrant smoke: you will feel like you lived that day in vain.
Say Užkalnis sent you, you will be served perfectly right away. It will serve you perfectly in all other cases as well.
Tags: burger healthiest food soul
