Welcome to a new frontier: a Bang for your Burger Buck recipe. I had been mulling over how to jump into the recipe game without going all Smitten Kitchen on you for more than a minute. I would say the timing was perfect when OK! Magazine reached out to me for a recipe. It just so happened that I was working on my soon to be posted Shake Shack edition and had come across their excellent bacon cheeseburger, the SmokeShack. If you know this blog you know that I usually lambast the addition of bacon as a misallocation of precious burger funds. Why not spend that money on more beef? Well in the case of Shake Shack, we find a truly delicious exception to the rule. The bacon is perfectly cooked and is of a complimentary quality to the special proprietary beef blend Shake Shack uses, in other words it ain't Hormel. But what really gets my noggin spinning is the spicy pickled cherry pepper spread. It provides a remarkable counterbalance to the overall richness of the bacon, beef and cheese. Now I love spicy pickled things. It doesn't take a Stephen Hawking to tell you that it's part of my Indian DNA, hell it might read giardiniera as some sort of chutney. And pickled cherry peppers are no strangers to the chambers in my fridge. Weeks earlier I happened to be toying with an aioli spiked with spicy pickled cherry peppers and well, timing right? So now you know how we got here, let's talk about what we are going to make. (more…)