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11/01/09
10/22/09
"Ever wonder what makes special sauce, special? Yo!" #7
10/22/09
10/22/09
10/22/09
10/22/09
10/22/09
It'd be worth it! #7
10/22/09
10/22/09
Take the key feature: 7 patties. What kind of beef? How are the patties made? How are they prepared? Plus, there are the power-user questions. What is the lean:fat ratio? Instead of just piling a ton of low-grade beef one on another, I would go with two decent-sized patties made of hand-ground dry-aged sirloin from grass-fed cattle, with a 81/19 lean/fat composition, cooked to medium-rare on a cast-iron griddle. This would be on artisinal sourdough, sliced to have a middle separator between the patties. Less meat, better quality.
Next, the tomatoes. Those look like generic beefsteak tomatoes, a symbol of technological excess. Pretty much any tomato you find in a store nowadays is bland, flavorless mush - and I include the vine tomatoes too. These tomatoes put too much emphasis on looks and not enough of their central function - tasting good. Really that tomato should be an heirloom tomato. They are not as pretty or photogenic but while they're not easy on the eyes, sophisticated users know that they're the way to go.
Lettuce, especially of the greenleaf and iceberg varieties, offers a bit of texture difference but not much else. Again, unnecessary to the burger's central mission. Because this product is being rushed to market to appeal to a wide userbase, better alternatives are not contemplated. Replace the lettuce with a bit of mustard greens, some radicchio, and some endive.
Undoubtedly, those pickles are mushy cloying bread-and-butter slices from a jar. This widget-approach to condiments is designed to make the consumer feel like there's some value. Remove the pickle slices and replace them with one lengthwise garlic dill slice and one half-sour, with a bit of chili paste for heat.
There should also be two major add-ons to this release: cheese and bacon. The cheese should be one slice of aged Cheddar (from Cheddar, England) and for the other patty, something to add some afterbite, possibly a good Wensleydale. The bacon should be a hickory cold-smoked thick-cut variety from either Virginia or one of the Carolinas. Applewood is a bit overplayed now and you want something that will be able to be tasted with all of the rest. That the cheese and bacon didn't make it out of committee shows how badly this project was implemented.
Underneath the hood, there should still be a bit of the classic Heinz 57 ketchup, but instead of generic yellow mustard, a very coarse brown mustard that has whole seeds still in it.
On the bottom, there should be two hand-cut slices of Bermuda onion to add texture, flavor and protection to the base bun.
Does all of this add cost? Of course it does. But a quality-engineered product is more capable of delivering value in spite of price than a cheaper system that is engineering to be implemented across all platforms. I'll take a hand-compiled burger over this thing any day. #7
10/22/09
10/22/09
10/22/09
10/22/09
@OMG! Ponies!: #7
10/22/09
10/22/09
10/22/09
10/22/09
All this useless complaining yet no one has shed light on the real travesty: 7 patties, plus bun, lettuce, tomato, onions, and pickles only measure 5" tall?! Talk about cheap, flat patties. #7
10/22/09
08/19/09
ALL LAPTOPS SHOULD BE SWIVEL COLLAPSIBLE... STANDARD
There, I said it.
08/19/09
08/19/09
08/10/09
08/06/09
BTW, I use a BRAND NEW HP pavillion, and 4 gb ram, so it isn't a hardware limitation that I can think of.
08/06/09
08/06/09
08/05/09
08/05/09
08/05/09
In my 20+ years of working with Unix/Linux and derivatives, I've had only two PANIC messages (the Unix equivalent of a BSOD) and one was from truly defective hardware.
08/05/09
08/06/09