Korzo’s Deep-Fried Lángos Burger

My good friends Maria and Otto Zizak at Korzo of Brooklyn have already given us the only veggie burger I will eat (see the Beet Burger), but let’s talk about the reason I know them in the first place (spoiler alert: it was not the veggie burger). This is one of the most unusual burgers I’ve ever eaten and is a fun science experiment to try at home. Time to impress your friends and family with the tasty deep-fried lángos burger.

I’ve come across plenty of dough-wrapped, deep-fried foods in my extensive global eating adventures. Many, many foodways of the world have some version of filled, cooked dough, most of it street food and all of it tasty. The list is enormous, but consider the Brazilian pastel, the Southern fruit-filled hand pie, the Cornish pasty, kolaches, dumplings, pierogis, potstickers, and empanadas just to name a few. There’s even the crumbly loose beef-and-cabbage-stuffed bierock (see recipe), which goes back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, invented by Germans living along the Volga River in Russia. When we define the burger, it is understood that Americans were the first to make the Hamburg steak portable by serving it on bread. But the beef-filled bierock predates that invention by almost a hundred years, loosely challenging (no pun intended) the established history of the hamburger.