Fast Food Perfection

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 00:14:00 -0600

I was shocked to discover this last week how many among my family, friends and colleagues have never had a McGriddle from McDonalds. Here I was, innocently going through life assuming that everybody appreciated this lovely little concoction as much as I, only to find out that there are many who didn't even know what I was talking about. And now, because of these conversations I've had (more on these conversations later) I feel a moral responsibility to inform the world about the unparalleled goodness that is a McDonalds McGriddle breakfast sandwich. While the concept seems pretty simple (basically a McMuffin breakfast sandwich, but with pancakes instead of the muffin) the unexpected synergy that comes from the combination and the delight that you feel when you realize that the pancakes have maple syrup cooked right in makes for a fantastic experience. Let's be honest, who doesn't love to eat a big pancake breakfast with bacon and eggs, especially when the syrup takes over your plate and sweetens everything up. The McGriddle is sort of like the Turkey dinner gum from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (remember, Violet Beauregard turns into a blueberry in her haste to be the first to try it). Anyway, the magical McGriddle is like a whole pancake breakfast wrapped up in a little sandwich. You can get several combinations, but I am partial to the sausage, egg and cheese variety. Now, back to my recent conversations. I decided one morning as I drove to work enjoying some McGriddle goodness that I simply had to discover how to make a McGriddle myself. I would eat them every morning if I could (and if my heart wouldn't explode within a couple months) but they aren't cheap, so I decided I would figure out how to make them at home. I discussed this with the guys at work, and with Suzie to see if anybody had any insight to offer and to see if I was the only one who dreams about these little things. Basically, those who had tried them love them and the rest of the world just doesn't know yet that they love them because they haven't tried them. Unfortunately, nobody was able to offer any insight into how one might go about creating a McGriddle from scratch. Furthermore, it turns out, there isn't a simple recipe to make them like you can find on Google for most restaurant yummies. No, the McGriddle is apparently the result of years of painstaking scientific research. That's right...it's Science!! It's not an easy thing to make a delicious little pancake that tastes like real maple syrup, but doesn't get your fingers all sticky and doesn't overwhelm the taste of everything else in the sandwich. You can try adding syrup to the batter, but it changes the flavor and eventually, if you put too much, starts to make everything sticky and they won't cook right. So McDs R&D department came up with some sort of wonderful maple syrup pellet that gets mixed into the batter to give it the flavor. You can see them when you bite into it (they almost look like blueberries in fake blueberry muffin mix). I eventually found a couple of websites with accounts of others who had tried to recreate a McGriddle at home. The most successful attempts involved boiling down maple syrup until you get a sort of syrup candy which can be broken up into little bits and mixed into the batter. I decided that I just had to try. I have to say thank you so Suz, who let me experiment in our kitchen with A LOT of maple syrup over the last couple of weeks. First I tried making my own maple syrup from scratch, but after many minutes of boiling and watching one of those candy thermometer thingies really closely, the whole potful of stuff instantly changed to a pot full of sugar. It was really strange, and I'm sure it defied several known laws of physics and science (I hope Jason, the Chemical Engineer and pretty good cook, never reads this). My next several attempts took the simpler route of boiling off-the-shelf pancake syrup down until it started turning candyish (somewhere between hard ball stage and soft crack stage for those of you who actually know something about baking). After 4 or 5 tries, I ended up with a pretty good consistency that I was able to freeze and crunch up into tiny bits, but was still sort of soft and wouldn't be gritty and crunchy in the final pancake. Last night I finally tried my first attempt at the whole shebang. I mixed up some regular old bisquick pancake batter and mixed in a quarter cup of maple syrup and then added some of my wonderful syrup crystals. I fried some eggs and bacon for filler and used your basic sliced/wrapped cheese that isn't really cheese. I have to say, I was quite satisfied with the result. It's obvious that I need to mix in a lot more of the crystals to get it just right, but the bites that did get some of the yummy little cooked in nuggets were really similar to the real thing. I think I'll probably try again this week and, if all goes well, I'm thinking about making these for everybody when me and my siblings get together at a cabin in the woods at the end of the week. So there you have my ode to the McGriddle and a first-hand account of my own quest to recreate the world's most underrated fast food menu item in my own home. For those that have yet to experience McGriddle goodness, I strongly recommend you treat yourself this week and report back here with a comment about your experience (unless you're going to be one of those party poopers that says "eh...it was ok", in which case we'll know you're a liar and will have to publicly call you out on this blog). And those of you who already know how amazing these things are, back me up here.

Where do I Start?

Sun, 03 May 2009 00:11:00 -0600

I used to think that people with personal blogs fancied themselves a little too much to believe that the rest of the Internet world actually cared what they have to say. I guess my view has changed somewhat over the past couple of years as it has become a simple thing to sign up for blogger/blogspot accounts and as I've watched friends and family spill their guts for the civilized world to see. I kind of see it now as a way of writing and publishing your own autobiography as you're living life. We all know we should be recording our deepest thoughts and passions in a personal journal, but since none of us remember how to write on paper anymore, why not do it on the computer and why not put it out there where family, friends and wierdo stalker people can enjoy it as well. Now, just for the record, I actually had a blog set up about 5 years ago, but, as I said, I didn't really see any point in posting my own personal rants, so I used it as a family message board for a year or so and then converted it into my full-blown family forum and meeting place that now exists. But I've had a few things happen lately that made me realize that 1) as a professional web developer, I should have some sort of web presence and 2) I actually love to write and might as well create an outlet for that urge and 3) I don't see my siblings/parents/aunts/uncles/friends as much as I'd like and it wouldn't hurt to give them all a little news about me and my family every now and then. And so begins the personal blog of me. Now, a few notes about the blog itself. It's based on a great piece of open-source blogging software called BlogCFC written by a great guy and hard-core geek named Ray Camden. Next, the images in the page header are all images taken by me that represent some place or moment in my life that has significant meaning to me. They're not all great pictures and a real photographer could have done so much more with these moments, but I don't really care. These are the bits of my life that I always want to remember, and what better way to remember than to have them at the top of my personal homepage. Now I say images (plural) because I've actually programmed this page to pull one of 10 or so random images each time you come to the page. In fact, if you refresh the page right now, you'll most likely see a different image. I plan to keep adding to the collection of images that are used in the header as I capture new moments. Also, I was going to give credit for the title of this website, "A Good Life...all in all", but first I'm going to see if anybody besides my wife knows where it comes from. Those who know me well should be able to come up with the source without too much trouble. So anyway, I hope that this site will be of interest to a few people out there in interweb land. But if not, that's ok. It's really more for me than anything, so that I can liberate some of the thoughts and feelings that come to me which normally stay all cooped up inside my head or which my patient wife has to sit and listen to while she tries to get things done. I'm sure I'll cover wide-ranging topics, but for now, I've created the following as my list of entry categories: General Musing, Family, Music, Soapbox, and Tech. We'll see how far that gets me.

A Good Life...all in all - General Musing

Fast Food Perfection

Where do I Start?