When it comes to cooking burgers, why innovate?
For Chef Christopher Klocke and the grill staff at Center for Community, it’s not just for the pursuit of flavor, providing variety, or even keeping costs down for students, staff and faculty at CU Boulder.
In this kitchen, a key driver behind inventing new recipes is environmental sustainability.
Consider the blended mushroom-beef burger. It hit C4C menus in 2017, combining ground Never Ever beef with a 20 percent blend of mushrooms. Reducing the amount of beef in the burger reduces the kitchen’s carbon footprint. Reinvented for a national James Beard Foundation competition called the Blended Burger Project: Campus Edition, it was quite popular among the student body.
Likewise, the cauliflower rice burger (a developing recipe) looks to expand the vegetarian offerings on the grill menu. Cook Guillermina “Gigi” Rubio invented this burger at home for her children.
“Anyone on the staff can come up with an idea,” says Klocke, who challenges his staff to invent new recipes. “We have everything from traditional Nepali dishes to things like Beef Guisado and even a banana salsa.”
Barbecue and grilling is a tradition in Klocke’s family. Growing up in St. Louis, Missouri, he fondly recalls the family recipes that emerged from his grandfather’s barbecue grill.
