Byron : The Diner Cookbook

If you like good hamburgers, this cookbook is a must for your collection. Byron was written by two professional chefs, Tom Byng and Fred Smith, who successfully downsized their restaurant recipes to home-kitchen level. Byron is the name of a chain of sixty small, high-end hamburger restaurants in London. Thankfully for us American cooks, they converted the metric units to our system for our convenience. This cookbook is beautiful, with awesome photographs throughout illustrating mouthwatering photos of the twenty hamburgers whose recipes they present, including the two basic and most popular ones: the classic hamburger and cheeseburger, also including vegetarian versions. To make your own, they give us lessons, particularly on buying the beef and grinding it twice, warning us away from pre-ground supermarket packages. Instructions are given for both barbecuing and pan-frying. They round up this excellent cookbook with many additional recipes: sauces, toppings and dips, full meals, salads, desserts, and drinks. And for a good hamburger, we must make our own hamburger buns. And, to top this off, they give a recipe for homemade cheese slices. The only criticism is of the chapter introductions, which use tiny white font over a black background—this is hard to read.