Is there any other more aptly named festival in the world than the Taste of Hamburg-er Festival held annually the Saturday before Labor Day in Hamburg? To be frank, if Hamburg held a hot dog festival instead, people would have an obvious beef with that.
The amazing allure of burgers makes Hamburg a major destination each year. Even with remnants of Hurricane Harvey making for soggy buns, thousands flocked to the festival again this year to sample the wares from a whopping 37 burger stands.
What is it about hamburgers that make them so appealing?
For obvious starters, they’re delicious unless they’ve been overly burnt, making them more suitable to serve as coasters. Hamburgers make your salivary glands shift into third.
They’re versatile. You can dress them up with a variety of toppings — cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, bacon, mushrooms, onions, pickles, cucumbers, jalapenos, mayo, mustard, ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, Chipotle sauce, onion rings, fried eggs, avocado, chili, guacamole, pineapple, teriyaki sauce, spinach (for health nuts), alfalfa sprouts (for health zealots) and turpentine (for house painters). Burgers can be pan fried, barbecued or flame broiled and served either rare, medium rare, medium, well done or ruined as in the aforementioned burnt.
Hamburgers, unless you use all of the aforementioned toppings at one time, also are easy to eat. Because the meat is ground up, you don’t have to do much chewing. It’s served on a bun, so no need to bother with a knife or fork. There’s no cutting, only lifting. You can consume your burger with either savagery or precision depending on whether you’re a Viking warlord or an insurance actuary.
If you’re dining out, burgers usually ride in tandem with a generous pile of fries and tend to be one of the most economical options on the menu.
Another factor in the immense popularity of hamburgers is familiarity. Sometimes when we go out to eat, we don’t want to be challenged. We want the taste of the familiar and nothing’s more familiar than the taste of a burger — specifically the char that appears on the exterior of the meat after it hits the hot flame; that specific smell and taste conjures up memories of backyard barbecues. It’s comforting to know that we never forget that particular smell and taste even in our senior years when we’re trying to cut through the gauze of memory and fight through the cobwebs in our brain to recall more mundane things.
Hamburgers are for everybody. If you’re a vegetarian and the mere thought of ground beef churns your stomach like an old washing machine, the patty can be made of vegetables or tofu instead of beef.
Since hamburgers are practically a religious experience, it’s surprising they aren’t served with incense. But they do have their annual High Holy Day with the Taste of Hamburg-er Festival.
