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Pictured recipe: "Fajita" Burgers
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CM: How do you cook the perfect burger?
BA: I like to get a good sear on it. It’s hard to beat a grill for burgers—I like the smoky flavor it adds. But I’m not opposed to pan-grilling in a cast-iron frying pan, which is my favorite pan to cook a burger in. The biggest thing people do wrong when grilling is to cook over a huge open flame. You never want char. We’ve all had burgers that are burnt on the outside and nearly raw inside. You have to learn how to control the heat, and grill with various intensities of heat, so you can move the meat around.

CM: If you had to eat a fast-food burger, where would you stop?
BA: [Silence] I’d have to be awfully desperate. [Laughs] Even when I drove across the country with my wife, Nancy [Nancy Oakes, chef at Boulevard Restaurant, San Francisco], in 2001 I think I pretty much avoided all the fast-food places. Um, you know, I don’t have an answer! The last time I was in McDonald’s was 1962. [Laughs] I grew up in Los Angeles, and there’s a famous place there that I love called Apple Pan. That’s where I got the idea for my Smoky Bison Burger—it’s a riff on their hickory burger.

CM: What’s the best burger you’ve ever had?
BA: I gotta give my wife credit for the best burger I’ve ever had. Number one, she used really great beef, it was Wagyu [a breed of cattle whose meat is intensely marbled]. The bun was from a small, local bakery. And it had homemade mayonnaise and really great aged Cheddar. It wasn’t exotic but everything was as good as you could get, you know?

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