The day Mathew Ramsey went viral was nearly his last. It was March 8, 2014, and traffic to his over-the-top blog, PornBurger, had just gone through the roof after a mention on the technology website Gizmodo.com. And as he was sitting at his kitchen table, watching it all happen, he took a bite of a ham sandwich and began to choke.
“I was like, ‘I am dead, and everything is about to happen right now,’” he says. He was about to self-Heimlich on the back of a chair when he finally coughed the ham out of his windpipe. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, my life just flashed [before my eyes] over a stupid ham sandwich.’”
If Ramsey had bitten the dust, he wouldn’t have gone on to invent a burger-infused whiskey, or a marijuana-infused burger, or a Cheetos-infused tequila. And he certainly wouldn’t have gone on to write his pun-infused cookbook, PornBurger: Hot Buns and Juicy Beefcakes, released this week.
The 36-year-old calls himself a burger pervert. He has a full mustache and a home decorated like a Southwestern ranch. His burgers, photographed in lascivious detail, have cheeky names: the Full Mounty, topped with bone marrow poutine sauce; A Fish Called Hitachi Wanda, a trout burger named after a vibrator; Calicornication, which he describes as “some serious hard-core soft-core porn;” and unprintable others. He is the Larry Flynt of burgers. His motto: “Let’s get weird.”
The catalyst for all this is a word Ramsey made up: “slurst.”
“It’s a combination of slutty and thirst,” he said. “It’s so carnal, and your thirst will never be satisfied. That’s how it is with burgers sometimes. Like, I don’t care how messy my hands get. I just need this in my face.”
Ramsey’s first job was at National Geographic, where he worked as an assistant for reporter-host Lisa Ling and later as a producer for TV shows including “Hogzilla,” about an enormous wild hog. That’s when he learned the true meaning of slurst: He participated in the Slog, a 10-day, 200-mile charity walk with his colleagues to raise money for Sudan, during which participants were not allowed to eat.
“I was able to perceive food in a way I’ve never ever encountered it, because I couldn’t eat it. My brain was just hyperactive; that’s all I was thinking about,” he said. “I could smell granola bars from distances, I could taste these things that I was thinking of. It was really wild.”
He had already been tooling around in the kitchen for hours each weekend. But the 10 days of culinary hallucinations provided the final push: He quit his job and moved to San Francisco, enrolling in a 15-month program at Le Cordon Bleu.
During culinary school, he apprenticed at a few restaurants and interned for the food section of the San Francisco Chronicle, where he tested recipes, took photos, styled food – he had studied photography in college – and even did a little bit of writing. A 2009 review he wrote of Hubert Keller’s Burger Bar cookbook now reads like a premonition: Keller “takes the classic hamburger, explodes it and meticulously reconstructs it,” Ramsey wrote.
A video production job at LivingSocial brought Ramsey back to Washington. All the while, he was itching to use his culinary degree. In January 2014, he had friends over for dinner and served them a venison burger topped with Spam, Taleggio cheese and quick-pickled beets. “They were like, ‘What are you going to call this burger?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know, the Bambi?’”
A blog was born. Ramsey decided to make one burger a week as a creative challenge – initially, just for friends. He called it PornBurger as a nod to the love-it-or-hate-it term in the food world for an especially desirable (and well-photographed) dish.
“I think food is very sensual,” he said. “It’s one of my biggest driving factors in the kitchen: creating sexy, gorgeous food. Food porn, for me personally, it’s drippy, it’s saucy, it’s also obtainable and real.”
Initially, he said, the name posed a problem for his parents, who live in Caledonia, Texas.
“They’d tell people at church that their son has this [web] site called PornBurger,” he said. But they’d forget that his URL is PornBurger.me and send people by mistake to the .com version, “which is just a straight-up porn site.”
Ramsey creates each burger in his basement man-cave of an apartment in Bloomingdale, filled with kitchen gadgetry and watched over by Fred, a mounted antelope head, and Daniel Day-Lewis, a taxidermied squirrel paddling a tiny canoe. (“It’s just us boys down here,” he said.) He likes to name things: His chef’s knife is John Wayne.
Many of the burgers are also brazenly heteromasculine: Some women might be disinclined to make, for example, a peanut-butter-and-jelly-themed burger called the Lolita. “There’s a lot of machismo in the cooking world,” he acknowledges.
Often, he’d draw the burgers in a sketchbook. Then, late at night and over a glass of fernet, he’d cook his burgers, style them and photograph them in a particular lighting that gives them a sexy glisten.
“Late-night stoner food,” he calls it. “Well, some of it’s early-morning stoner food.” It could be as highbrow as a foie gras gougère burger or as lowbrow as a bacon-wrapped burger in a doughnut (the Wake’n Bacon).
“He’s able to make masterworks on his ... electric stove, and on a hot plate and a toaster oven,” said artist Martin Swift, a collaborator on Ramsey’s book. “And that’s what makes him great, is that these beautiful, picturesque dishes come out of a very small basement apartment.”
It wasn’t long before other blogs took notice. Ramsey’s photos were picked up by Gizmodo, BuzzFeed and Grub Street, and the opportunities began pouring in. He was contacted by reporters from Norway, Japan and Australia. He got an offer to collaborate on a women’s underwear line. He began workshopping a television concept that he says may or may not happen, in which he would travel around the world to discover new ingredients, then make burgers out of them. It was his first chance to make money from the blog; he had resisted advertising because he thought it would “muddy the creative waters.”
And he got the book deal. Because he had been making burgers for fun and photographs, he’d never written down many of his recipes, so he had to retrace his steps. There were a few burgers he was never able to replicate.
It can be hard to replicate a viral success, too. Jon Chonko, the blogger behind Scanwiches, another viral food-photo site, made a book of his work and said it has been more of a passion project than a windfall: His annual book profit “covers roughly what I would pay for sandwiches to put them on the site.” (He eats a lot of sandwiches.) “I hope he does better.”
The phrase “food porn” comes and goes out of style, too, which is the kind of thing that can date a book. But that doesn’t faze Ramsey.
“In a few years, this book will be dated, and all of my puns with it,” he said. “But that’s the fun of it. You get to keep creating.”
Which brings us to wabi-sabi, a word that sounds as if it could be an exotic burger condiment. Instead, it’s a Japanese philosophy of life that values austerity and modesty, traits that seem incompatible with PornBurger’s excess. But wabi-sabi is the medium-rare middle of Ramsey’s cowboy exterior: a practice, along with his intermittent study of Buddhism, that drives his creativity and worldview. One of its tenets is that of impermanence: All things, from art to scientific theorems to the planets and stars, “eventually fade into oblivion and nonexistence,” according to one of Ramsey’s books on the subject. The key to life is to enjoy things in the moment. Including food.
“As soon as you’re done cooking it, it starts degrading. In 10 minutes, it’s gone,” said Ramsey. “I find there’s a beauty in that.”
You could say the same thing about going viral. “It’s exhilarating,” he said. But “I try not to put any stock in that at all. Because it is fleeting, it’s so temporary.”
The trick, then, is to harness the virality, to make it into something that lasts, and to shape your own image. Because as much as Ramsey loves burgers, he doesn’t necessarily want to be Mr. PornBurger for the rest of his life. That’s why he and his friend and former Washingtonian food editor Kate Nerenberg started Bar R, an occasional supper club that showcases his fine-dining cooking as well as his burgers. It has a playful bent: He frequently reserves a place at the table for his favorite actor, Bill Murray, and sometimes offers his handful of guests a joint as an amuse-bouche of sorts.
For the past few months, he worked at Sally’s Middle Name on H Street NE, just to get used to being in a kitchen again. He says he hopes eventually to open up a space of his own – and it won’t be a burger joint. When he’s not making PornBurgers, Ramsey pushes the boundaries of creativity with dishes such as salmon ice cream, blue cheese marshmallows and boozy won tons.
One hurdle standing in the way of Ramsey’s future restaurant is his handle on finances. “I lose money on these things every time,” he said. For his most recent Bar R dinner, he charged $250 per couple but spent $400 at West Elm on tableware alone for his eight guests.
Ramsey spent days preparing for that dinner and was up cooking until 4 a.m. the night before. Most of the prep took place in his apartment kitchen, where, at noon, he was slicing braised beef tongue, a recipe from his book. “Tongue-on-tongue action,” he said.
The dinner that night was the first Bar R to take place outside his home. He had leveraged some National Geographic contacts to use the Earth Conservation Corps headquarters, a small brick building on the bank of the Anacostia. The building had no kitchen, so he brought his deep-fryer and a hot plate.
Guests were ushered onto a boat, where an ECC volunteer gave them a closer look at osprey nests on a pylon of the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge. When they returned to shore, Ramsey opened with what he called a ham and cheese sandwich: toasted brioche filled with prosciutto and Parmesan gelato, a haute upgrade to his meal on the day he went viral. Other courses: frites topped with mole made from local Harper Macaw chocolate, beef tongue with apples and radishes, a scallop seviche studded with pickled ramps.
Between courses, there were more surprises: Ramsey had enlisted Rodney Stott, a falconer, to give guests the chance to hold Mr. Hoots, his owl. A bluegrass band strolled into the room and performed a half-dozen songs. And Ramsey produced his traditional joint (though most of the guests politely declined).
The entertainment threatened to upstage the main event: Ramsey’s burger, two smash-cooked patties with American cheese, lettuce, tomato, black-vinegar-pickled onions, potato chips and a name whose Urban Dictionary entry might make you blush. It’s like the famous saying about obscenity: You know it when you see it. Beauty is fleeting, as wabi-sabi teaches, so it wasn’t long before the guests made those lusty burgers disappear.
Veggie PornBurgers
Servings: 6
Notes: This could be the meatiest-looking meatless burger you’ve ever tried. Beets lend earthiness and color; chickpeas and wheat berries provide texture and bulk. Pan-frying gives them a nice, crisp exterior.
Their creator, Mathew Ramsey, packs these patties thick; we found that smashing them down provided for more crispy surface area. We also found the original recipe very lemon-forward, so we reduced the amount of zest by half.
You’ll need an instant-read thermometer for monitoring the frying oil.
Serve with the condiments of your choice.
MAKE AHEAD: The uncooked mixture needs to be refrigerated for at least 30 minutes and up to overnight.
Ingredients:
1 cup cooked, no-salt-added chickpeas
1 cup cooked wheat berries
1 cup peeled, shredded beets (raw or cooked)
1 large egg
3 scallions (white and green parts), coarsely chopped
¼ cup minced cilantro
¼ cup minced flat-leaf parsley
2 cloves garlic
Finely grated zest of ½ lemon
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more as needed
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
½ teaspoon ground cayenne pepper
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon cornstarch
½ cup plain panko (dried bread crumbs)
Canola oil, for frying
Brioche Buns, for serving (see accompanying recipe)
Method:
Use your clean hands to combine the chickpeas, wheat berries, beets, egg, scallions, cilantro, parsley, garlic, lemon zest, ground coriander, the teaspoon of salt and the black and cayenne peppers in a large mixing bowl. Add the olive oil, cornstarch and panko, mixing until well incorporated. (Alternatively, you can combine the ingredients in a food processor and pulse to the desired consistency.)
Cover and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes (and up to overnight); the mixture will be a little loose but should hold together when pressed.
Form the mixture into 6 patties of equal size (at your desired degree of thickness) while you heat an inch or two of the canola oil in a wide skillet over medium heat to 350 F. Line a platter with paper towels.
Working in batches as needed, fry the patties for 6 to 8 minutes, turning them halfway through, until crisped and browned on all sides. The centers should not be mushy. Transfer to the platter to drain; serve warm on buns.
Ingredients are too variable for a meaningful analysis.
Adapted from Ramsey’s PornBurger: Hot Buns and Juicy Beefcakes (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2016).
Brioche Buns
Servings: 8
Notes: These bake up soft and tear-apart tender, yet once they’ve cooled, their texture turns out to be just right for soaking up burger juices.
A kitchen scale is useful for creating buns of equal size.
MAKE AHEAD: The dough needs a first rise from 1 to 3 hours (until it doubles in size); once the buns have been shaped, they need to rise for 1 hour.
Ingredients:
4½ teaspoons active dry yeast (from two ¼-ounce packets)
½ cup warm water (105 to 110 F), plus a splash of tap water for the egg wash
3 tablespoons warm milk (105 to 110 F)
3 tablespoons sugar
4 large eggs, plus 1 large egg for the egg wash
3 cups plus 3 tablespoons bread flour, plus more for the work surface
2 teaspoons kosher salt
10 tablespoons (1 stick plus 2 tablespoons) unsalted butter, at room temperature
Canola oil, for greasing the bowl
1/3 cup sesame seeds, for garnish (optional)
Method:
Whisk together the yeast, warm water, warm milk and sugar in a medium bowl. Let it sit for 5 minutes. (If the yeast doesn’t foam up, it might be dead. So dump it out and start over with fresh yeast.)
Lightly beat the 4 eggs in a separate bowl until they are well blended.
Combine the bread flour, salt and butter in the bowl of a stand mixer; beat (paddle attachment) on medium speed just long enough for the mixture to look crumbly, then stop to add the eggs and the yeast mixture. Beat on low speed for about 10 minutes to form a loose, soft dough.
Lightly flour a work surface. Generously grease a large mixing bowl with oil.
Turn the dough out onto the work surface; gently and lightly shape it into a ball, then place the dough in the greased bowl. Cover with plastic wrap and let it sit in a warm, draft-free spot for 1 to 3 hours or until the dough has about doubled in size. (Start checking after 1½ hours.)
Line two baking sheets with parchment paper. Dust your hands with flour. Uncover the dough and lightly punch it down. Use a bench scraper or sharp knife to divide the dough into 8 equal portions (weighing them helps).
You don’t need to re-flour the work surface for the next step: Flatten each portion of dough into a disk. Imagine that the disk has 4 corners; fold each one in toward the center, then turn the dough over so the seam side is down. Gently shape and smooth each dough piece into a ball, placing it on a baking sheet as you work and spacing the balls a few inches apart. Loosely cover with plastic wrap; let them sit in a warm, draft-free spot for about 1 hour or until nicely puffed.
Meanwhile, position upper and lower oven racks; preheat the oven to 400 F.
Whisk together the remaining egg and a splash of water to form an egg wash.
Uncover the buns; brush them with the egg wash and sprinkle with sesame seeds, if desired. Bake (upper and lower racks) for 12 minutes, then rotate top to bottom and front to back; bake for 8 to 10 minutes or until golden brown on top. Let cool completely before serving or storing.
Nutrition information per serving: 350 calories, 11 g protein, 41 g carbohydrates, 17 g fat, 10 g saturated fat, 130 mg cholesterol, 330 mg sodium, 2 g dietary fiber, 5 g sugar.
Adapted from Mathew Ramsey’s PornBurger: Hot Buns and Juicy Beefcakes (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2016).
Basic Beef PornBurgers
Servings: 12
Notes: PornBurger author Mathew Ramsey considers this to be the perfect blend for juicy, well-rounded beef burgers, with notes of “buttery richness, nuttiness, and even a subtle kiss of grass.” It’s pictured here in a re-creation of the Slumberjack from his cookbook, built with a crispy potato pancake, sausage and mushroom gravy, a fried egg and scallion on a cheddar buttermilk biscuit.
In the book, Ramsey offers several ways to cook a beef burger; we used his “skillet/pan-fried” technique. He follows a ratio of 1 part sirloin to 1½ parts short rib to 2 parts chuck. To cook the burgers on an outdoor grill, see the VARIATION below.
You’ll need a kitchen scale, an instant-read thermometer and a meat grinder or a meat-grinder attachment for a stand mixer. You’ll use large (3/8-inch) and small (¼-inch) grinder dies.
MAKE AHEAD: The parts of your meat grinder and the meat itself need to be chilled in the freezer for 20 to 30 minutes before using. You may have ground meat left over; it can be frozen (in separate cuts) for up to 3 months.
Ingredients:
One 1-pound sirloin steak, preferably aged, cut into 1-inch-wide strips
1½ pounds boneless short ribs, cut into 1-inch-wide pieces
One 2-pound boneless chuck roast, cut into 1-inch-wide strips
1 tablespoon canola oil, or as needed
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
Method:
Place the strips and pieces of sirloin, short rib and chuck on a rimmed baking sheet (or other flat pan that will fit in your freezer). Place the meat grinder parts in the freezer, too. Freeze the meat and metal for 20 to 30 minutes.
Grind each cut of meat separately, using the large die on a low speed; reserve any remaining beef for another use. If the meat is still not quite cold, return it to the freezer for 10 minutes or so.
Combine the grinds and grind them together one more time, using the small die. Try not to compact or press the combined ground beef. Gently form the mixture into 4 balls of equal size, keeping your touch light to further form them into patties. Place them in the refrigerator while the pan heats.
Heat a large cast-iron skillet or grill pan over medium-high heat. Once it’s quite hot, add the oil and swirl to coat.
Season the patties generously all over with salt and pepper. Working in batches as needed, cook the burgers until their internal temperature taken at the center registers 125 to 130 degrees (medium-rare), turning them every 45 seconds or so to help develop a nice crust.
VARIATION:
To grill the burgers outdoors, preheat a gas grill to high for at least 15 minutes before cooking. For a charcoal grill, make sure the coals are glowing orange and ashed over. Brush each seasoned patty with canola oil and use your thumb or finger to make a slight indent at the center of each one. Feel free to flip the burgers often in this arrangement as well.
Nutrition information per serving: 330 calories, 33 g protein, 0 g carbohydrates, 22 g fat, 9 g saturated fat, 120 mg cholesterol, 410 mg sodium, 0 g dietary fiber, 0 g sugar.
Adapted from PornBurger: Hot Buns and Juicy Beefcakes (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2016), by Mathew Ramsey (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2016).
