Alan Olee Book Report

In honor of international Pi day (03-14-16 = 3.1416 = Pi to the ten-thousandths place) I am doing a Spherical Hamburger blog since many interesting properties of spheres can be calculated using the mathematical constant Pi:

Sphere where r = radius of sphere

By MarinaVladivostok – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27570340

For example, it can be shown that the volume of a sphere is:

In 3 dimensions, the volume inside a sphere (that is the volume of a ball) is derived to be

Volume = 4/3 π (r)^3

where r is the radius of the sphere and π is the constant pi. Archimedes first derived this formula, which shows that the volume inside a sphere is 2/3 that of a circumscribed cylinder.

Sphere in a circumscribed cylinder

By Andertxuman – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10648704

Archimedes.  Clever guy.

Anyhow, I’m not going to go into any more detail of all the cool stuff you can use Pi for sphere-wise as you can just Google it.  Instead, I’d like to ask you a question:  Have you ever gotten a Facebook posting showing some sort of super-delicious yet super-simple recipe and it’s a video that goes in super-fast motion?  Here’s one:

Basically, what is going on here if we deconstruct the action, is that we are essentially rolling hamburger into spheres and filling them with a cream-cheese filling and cooking them after flattening the hamburger spheres into hamburger patties. I took one look at this video and decided to try it!

Mixing the ingredients was pretty simple:

I’m not entirely sure I got the cheese-to-burger ratio exactly right…but I figured it would be OK.

Now at this point, I was faced with a problem.  See, I don’t have one of those cool sandwich fryer utensils as shown in the video and I had no way to make french-fries because I also don’t have a deep-fryer.  To get around these obvious pitfalls, I planned on BBQing the burgers, and frying up baby potatoes in grape seed oil  and soy sauce.

Baby Taters with Garlic in Oil and Soy Sauce

Oh.  And I skipped the bacon.  Although it looked awesome, I did cut some corners and that was one.

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So I got the grill going – I didn’t use too many coals because you don’t need that many just for burgers.  Incidentally, you are looking at a vintage “Baby Weber” grill, I’ve had it for like forever and it rocks for small stuff like this.  It does the job.

For a special occasion like this, I spared no detail to make sure everything was just right in the patio area.  I set the table with some festively colored paper plates, hung my best shop light (actually it wasn’t my best one, but it had a long cord) and set the table.

A Scene Dripping with Ambiance

I’m doing some painting and basic reconstructing out back (as you can see!) but BBQs go on despite the construction.

Getting Ready!

It was late afternoon so the lighting, crude as it was, really came in handy as it got dark pretty quickly after we served dinner.

We Did It!

The burgers really were good, too!

Clean-up Time

Critique:  Ends up I had inadvertently used whipped cream cheese – I didn’t even notice but maybe it makes a difference.  Also the jalapenos were very mild and you never know if you are going to get super-hot ones or ones that taste like bell-peppers.  Ends up, these were very mild and I think if they had been hotter, it would have been awesomer.  I’ll just have to run the test again!