I Hate Long-Ass Recipes: The Smash Burger

Kenji López-Alt's smash burger recipe on Serious Eats is four written pages long. It is six hundred words longer than the Declaration of Independence (1,959 to 1,320), and has fourteen photographs (including a helpful one of the outside of a building where hamburgers are cooked). The entire webpage clocks in at 3.3MB, which means that transmitting it produces a larger carbon footprint than actually cooking the burger.

In addition to copious information about the science and lore of this style of hamburger, it covers a recent bicycle repair that his wife needed, sanitation challenges faced by early Parisian civil engineers, and a lengthy recounting of his favorite day ever (it involved both a watercolor lesson and a man complimenting his hat).

May "For sale: baby shoes, never worn" be our guide when writing recipes.

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MY SMASH BURGER RECIPE

Look at my picture. You can reverse-engineer this, because you are quite intelligent.

OKAY, FINE 

Two-ounce ball of beef. Screaming hot pan. Squash hard under parchment until wider than bun. Scrape loose when edges darken, flip, cheese, serve.

(Word count: 23)

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EPILOGUE

I will admit that I have had a sore throat since Monday, and being listlessly homebound makes me very, very cranky. I want to dig my new rain garden and listen to podcasts at the gym and work on the upcoming novel, not complain about recipes like some barnacle on the ass of the Internet.

But if you are interested in more of these condensed recipes, sans-vitriol*, I have been hard at work on a dead-easy hummus, and we could start there. Fresh hummus from the food processor is an entirely more magical animal than the refrigerated store-bought stuff, has more fiber, costs like a buck-fifty to make...and you will never find a sentence that florid, irrelevant, and selfishly long in the final writeup.

* or with, your choice