Cooking hot dogs on the grill today? Don't grab them with a fork to turn them over.

Do you like hard plastic on your hamburgers? I'm a mustard guy myself, so I wouldn't want these.

Price Chopper is recalling packages of hamburgers and ground meat because they might contain small pieces of plastic. The meat being recalled is in various forms, so take note: four packs and eight packs of 80% lean ground chuck, 85% lean ground round patties, and four packs of 90% lean ground sirloin. The packages have a date of May 13 on them.

Growing up in Los Angeles (my family lived there until I was nearly 9 years old) we were lucky enough to have In-N-Out Burger, Tommy's Original World Famous Hamburgers and Fatburger within easy driving (although given that my mother a health food devotee, we didn't actually get to visit these places frequently). I've always loved that Fatburger was so willing to include the word "Fat" in its name, as it's a moniker that would never have passed muster these days.

On January 26, 2008, Lovie Yancey died at the age of 96. She was the founder of the Fatburger chain, creating the first one on Western Avenue in 1947. It was originally called Mr. Fatburger and in 1952 she dropped the Mister and the partners with which she had originally founded the shop. In 1990 she sold her rights to all locations, save the original one, to a group of investors.

[via la.foodblogging]

Chances are, if you didn't make reservations last year for Valentine's Day this year, you might be out of luck, unless of course, you don't mind sitting across a table covered with a white tablecloth, candles, roses and...tiny square hamburgers?

White Castle is having their annual Valentine's Day celebration on Thursday February 14, 2008 at their restaurants around the country. But you can't just saunter in during the event, which lasts from 5 - 9 PM. Reservations are required. Check the White Castle website for locations and to make reservations.

Today is National Hamburger Day. The guy on the right must be going crazy.

There are a lot of ways to make hamburgers. Some people just take a burger and slap it on a bun and that's it. Some might be so adventurous as to slow some cheese on it (maybe even cheddar!). But let's take a look at some more exotic recipes for burgers.

Five Guys Famous Burgers and Fries, a D.C.-based chain that has garnered rave reviews up and down the East Coast recently entered the New York metro area. I visited their Queens location and, despite Five Guy's obsession with cooking all their meat well done, I found the burger quite good.

The Guys recently opened a shop in Hackensack, N.J. Now here's where it starts to get interesting. Überblogger Jason Perlow reports that Burger Boys, an independent joint, has also set up shop in nearby Fairview. They copied Five Guys' menu format. No big deal, right? But that's just the tip of intellectual property rights infringement iceberg. Rather than give these con artists any free advertising, I chose a pic of the Five Guys ordering area from Perlow's site. The shots he took of Burger Boys are pretty shocking.

How shocking you ask? Let's put it this way. Burger Boys didn't stop at copying the Five Guys' menu. They also lovingly reproduced the Guys' interior design, presentation of the food in brown paper bags and its insistence on cooking everything well done. I almost forgot, the Boys dress their staff in red T-shirts and hats, just like the Guys. I'd love to think that this is merely some confluence of East Coast burger synergy, but clearly it's a simple case of out-and-out theft of the Five Guys' concept.

That's according to preschoolers, anyway.

A study done by a researcher at Stanford University has concluded that kids think that anything that McDonald's does taste better than anyone else. And not just the burgers and fries. This also extends to the milk, carrots, and apple juice! As long as it has a McDonald's logo, it's better. To quote Diane Levin, a childhood development specialist: "You see a McDonald's logo and kids start salivating."

As many of you know, I'm a huge fan of both White Castle and barbecue. So when I read that the Castle was experimenting with pulled pork on a bun, my reaction was a, long-drawn out "Nooooooo!!"

Is nothing sacred? Seems to me that two great American traditions, the State's first hamburger chain and barbecue, would be sullied by the Castle's introduction of pulled pork. That's not to say I have anything against pulled pork on a miniature bun. Done right, it's tasty as hell and a more healthful portion than the gigantic sandwiches one usually eats at barbecue joints.

Sadly I don't think the Castle is going to do justice to pulled pork. And I'm not just saying that because I want to lump their new product in the McRib category. Further reading of the article in Nation's Restaurant News (registration required) reveals that it will arrive at the store's frozen. I can't help but feel that it will also be saturated with liquid smoke and have the consistency of cat food.

I hope my suspicions about the quality of the Castle's pulled pork are wrong. All of a sudden, I'm craving a pulled pork slyder topped with an onion ring.

Here at Slashfood burgers have been on our foodar since May. Heck, now that we're into summer they're on everybody's mind, including the good citizens of Akron, Ohio, who hosted the National Hamburger Festival this past weekend.

The hefty hamburger above was cooked up this weekend, but not in Akron. Weighing in at 10 pounds, Big Bad Bubba's Double Wide hails from Huntington, W. Va. Specifically Hillbilly Hotdogs, which last year created a 5-pound burger known as, you guessed it, Big Bad Bubba's Single Wide.

This weekend HH added the BBDW to its menu. This massive sandwich may sport a 6.5-pound patty, but it's still less than one-sixth the weight of the largest burger I've ever heard of. Either way, I'd love to see Kobayashi take one down, if only so he could declare himself a big bad bubba, even if he is only half-wide.

I find cookouts rather boring (as I've said here before, I'm not a fan of summer, cookouts, parades, or humidity - bring on the fall!), but if I were going to throw one, I'd try to find different things to make other than the usual burgers and hot dogs and corn-on-the-cob. Or at least find a way to do a different spin on those mainstays.

Over at AOL Food, there's a recipe for Inside-Out Cheeseburgers from EatingWell. The cheese -- both cheddar and Gruyere -- goes on the inside so it can ooze out. However, I think if they really want to make these cheeseburgers inside-out, they'd find some way to put the bun on the inside too!

Happy Fourth of July!

Holidays always give us an excuse to eat badly. We always say that it's OK that we're eating cheeseburgers and drinking beer because we'll start exercising and eating well - seriously! - on July 5. At least that's what I'll be saying today when I have cheeseburgers and beer.

So what are you eating? Are you going to a cookout? Are you having a cookout yourself? Are you going to the movies instead to see Live Free and Die Hard and eating popcorn and candy? If you need some ideas, check out some of our recipes for the Fourth, including Thomas Jefferson's Ice Cream, Hamburgers with Herb Butter, Grilled Korean Marinated Ribs, Roasted Fig, and varous red, white and blue desserts.

Before there was Supersize Me, before Eric Schlosser penned Fast Food Nation, Matt Malmgren was busy acquiring Big Macs for his Burger Museum. According to a video that has spread like wildfire throughout the blogosphere, Malmgren purchased two McDonald's hamburgers on Jan. 1, 1989. He ate one and placed the other in his jacket pocket and forgot about it. A year later the video tells us in large red text "It looked and smelled EXACTLY the same!"

Since nobody believed him, gasp, he proceeded to amass more burgers and now has the world's largest, and probably the only, collection of
Immortal Big Macs, double cheeseburgers and hamburgers. As an ominous soundtrack plays, the video lists the "secret ingredients" that make such immortality possible. Among them are 1,1,1-trichloroethane, chloroform, ethyl benzene, styrene and toluene. In the interest of full disclosure, it also notes that the ingredients were taken from the FDA's report on pesticide residues in fast food. The Web site that hosts the video even has directions on how to make your own Immortal Hamburger. It bears pointing out the Web site, Best Day Ever, is a promotional vehicle for a raw foods guru. [via Neatorama]

Have you ever eaten in a restaurant or bought a food product at the store and said to yourself, "heck, I can make something better than this!"? Well, then this contest is for you.

Wendy's is looking for someone to design a new burger for them. You get to choose from a variety of various toppings, cheeses, and sauces. I have to admit that pepperoni on a burger sounds quite good, though I don't know if I'd go with sauerkraut. The winner gets $25,000 and they might add your creation to the regular menu in 2008. Runners up get free burgers for a year! (Wendy's are my favorite fast food burger, I should enter.)

The site says "may we suggest you start your burger the way we start all Wendy's burgers - with a fresh, never frozen, beef patty." What, did we have another option? Heh.

Before anyone ever heard of Harold, much less Kumar, before the invention of the Crave campaign, before the word Slyder was trademarked I was a teenage White Castle worker. On this last day of National Hamburger Month I'd like to share my memories of working at America's oldest hamburger chain, as well as my thoughts on its present state of affairs.

I started working at White Castle during my senior year in high school. I'd eaten their burgers with my folks as a kid and had enjoyed their "restorative" effects after drinking with my buddies. We used to call the tasty little suckers "White Crapples." When one opened in my neighborhood, I figured what the hell, and applied for a job. After management determined I had a pulse and some level of manual dexterity, however minimal, I was hired.

Back then the uniform was slightly different than it is today. I remember wearing a brown shirt and a baseball cap. All burger cooking was done in clear view. To the left of the register, customers watched their square patties being steam-grilled. I still remember the time a Little League team ordered 100 burgers. Instead of letting the line back up, we opened another station and got to work.

Once after blowing a joint with my co-worker Max, the burgers on my flat top started burning. As I stared into space, he sounded the alarm by screaming, "Bang your head" at me. He averted disaster by ladling onion water onto my griddle. Back then there was no shortage of onion water, since we used dehydrated onions. Small dust clouds would form as we poured dried diced onion into stainless buckets before adding water.

Today's Burger of the Day comes from the National Cattlemen's Beef Association of all places. As you can tell by the name, this quarter-pound burger is meant to fall into the realm of fusion. I don't think Ming Tsai created the recipe, though.

Before we get into the burger itself, I have a wee bone to pick with the ad copy. While I realize that the tag line is about lean ground beef, it still rankles me. Calling beef fat is a compliment as far as I'm concerned. Evidently, the NCBA is not promoting beef brisket or other luscious cuts that form the backbone of Texas barbecue with this campaign.

Now that my rant's over, let's get back to the burger. It's certainly one of the most healthful specimens that we've written about this month. And with a spicy sesame-soy mayonnaise and Asian slaw dressing the peppery burger it's probably quite tasty. So far, I understand the East part of this burger. I guess the West part refers to the beef itself since there's nothing particularly Western about any of the other ingredients.