If someone offers you peanut butter on a burger…. Just say no. Peanut butter on its own I can take or leave. Peanut butter with chocolate is one of the best pairings since the two Ronnies (RIP Corbett). But peanut butter on a burger is just a bit wrong.
Strong words indeed from someone who has put bacon on cupcakes, made pizza from sweet potato and stuck a can of ginger ale up a chicken’s nether regions (a dead one, of course).
It was my fiance’s birthday and he wanted to have a takeaway with his family rather than go out to dinner after work in London so I suggested we go out for lunch, since we work fairly close by each other. I knew he’d like a burger so looked on Google to see if there was anywhere new in the area, and as we’d never been to Hache before – and they got very good reviews, including being voted the best burgers in London by the Huffington Post, I decided to book a table there.
The décor and ambience was more like a pub – we sat at a small table in the window near the well-stocked bar. I’d spent some time perusing the menu in advance and even looked up the peanut butter burger on the internet, and found a few blogs where people raved about it. I was tempted by the rosemary lamb burger with mint yogurt, or the steak Bavarian, a burger with smoked Bavarian cheese and caramelised onions, and also quite curious about the steak reblochon, a burger topped with reblochon cheese and red onion chutney. My fiancé, predictable as ever, had the steak Canadian – basically a burger with cheese and bacon.
I decided to be brave and experiment (telling myself since it was only lunch, I wouldn’t mind as much if I didn’t like it) and ordered the steak Louisiana (£8.95): a burger topped with American crunchy peanut butter and mature cheddar cheese. I went to Louisiana last year and didn’t come across any burgers with peanut butter in!
I had a choice of ciabatta or brioche bun and went for the latter, which was a mistake –the consistency of the peanut butter made the roll fall apart pretty quickly and I ended up holding chunks that were breaking off, getting the peanut butter all over my fingers. Unfortunately I thought the peanut butter totally dominated the burger- I could barely tell there was any cheese in it and couldn’t really taste the meat either, just peanut butter. I wonder if this burger would have been better with just a smear of peanut butter – the waitress said the flavour combination was her favourite – but I just wasn’t sold. Next time, I’ll just stick to a regular cheeseburger.