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I’m stuffed

I’m stuffed

I can’t move and I am currently wishing I had elastic-waisted pants. Today was Build a Better Burger finalist selection day and because I’m so incredibly dedicated to my job of informing you about the goings on of BBB, I insisted on trying all 15 of the beef burger semi-finalists. I don’t know all the names of the recipes but whoa. 15 beef burgers. See the sacrifices I make? It’s rough, I know.

OK, so truth be told I had a quarter of each of those 15. But still. I’m not a math major but I think that works out to be the weight of a small child in beef.

All were insanely good, some more than others.

My favorite recipe had an apple slaw in addition to bacon. Note: you can never go wrong with bacon, for the record. But this recipe had a sweetness to it that was balanced by a tang. I’m not exactly sure where all those flavors were coming from, but I may have had an additional quarter of that burger. And by maybe, I mean I totally did. There was also a recipe that included onion rings on the burger which was way yummy.

So lemme give you a little background info. Basically, we have 5 judges for the semi-finalist rounds. Each judge takes a region and looks at alllllllll the recipes from their region. Then they narrow it down to the Top 10. Then all the judges confer and pick the Top 3 (of those original 10) from each region. Hence the 15 burgers–3 from each region.

Our judges extraordinaire (in no particular regional order) are: James McNair, Jeffrey Starr, James Houghton, Matt Bennett and Andrew Moore.

And did I mention Food Network was on hand? They will filming for the upcoming Food Network Challenge: Build a Better Burger III.

I will spare you the pics of me with sauce dribbling down my chin (as attractive as that is!) but check these out (in case you need a little burger inspiration for the 3-day weekend)

I bet you’re so jealous that I got to try this. You should be. It was awesome.

That is totally going to be an awesome bite

Check out that spread. Now see why I need elasic waist-banded pants??

Staples of any good kitchen

Stay tuned for the finalists! We will announce the winning recipes from today’s festivities next week!

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