Happy Friday,

I hope you all had a wonderful long weekend. My family had a busy but wonderful one. I was inspired to send an extra email to you all about what I've learned about making a great burger or some tips that might make your next grilling/bbq experience even better, but I was too busy!

I will keep this email short because I want to focus my time on launching the test version of reko.day. If you want to test it before anyone else, reply to this, and I'll sign you up!

As I talk to folks, I hear more and more of products and tools that are trying to solve a similar problem as reko.day, but none of them solve the exact problems I'm trying to. There are lots of apps out there to schedule deliveries from one particular farm or directories of farmers to contact.

Almost no apps let you buy through the app and schedule a safe public pickup.

That means that if we can tell everyone about reko.day and get them excited, it'll be a breakthrough for a lot of folks who want easy, year-round access to fresh, local food!

In fact, here's an article from CNBC extolling the virtues of eating local.

Alright, I can't help myself. I'm going to talk grilling and bbq for just a minute as a way of ending this email. Most of what I'm sharing is material I learned from amazingribs.com.

Let's talk burgers. Here're a few quick pointers before I go into longer form:

• 80/20 is a great mix unless you want to go really fancy with different types of meat
• Our family likes burgers that are 1/3rd of a pound. We find this to be a great balance of flavors. Want a meatier burger? Stack another patty!
• If you're going to season your own burgers it takes A LOT more seasoning than you think
• Construct a burger based on what hits the tongue first. In other words, the bottom up

Now, let's go a little into two topics, salt, and heat. Salting burgers needs to happen at the last possible second. If you add salt to your burger mix even 30 minutes early, the salt will draw out moisture, and then you'll grill them, drawing out more. This makes dry, crumbly burgers. Salting at the last minute doesn't allow that extra moisture to exit before the burger is cooked.

As for heat, I've found that a high-heat grill is best, but I also need to cover the grill for a few minutes on each side. The general pattern is to put the burgers on, let them get color, cover them for a few minutes to cook through, flip, and repeat until done. I find covering the burgers evens out the cook while avoiding any really burnt burgers.

I want to come back to Salt one last second here, though. For burgers, I suggest salting at the last second, like as they go on the grill, but burgers are the ONLY thing I do that with. For every other meat I grill, I salt the meat an hour or more earlier than I want to grill it. This process is called dry brining, and while the salt will extract moisture for the first 20-30 minutes when that process is done, the meat will reabsorb a lot of that moisture back. This makes the meat moist and uniformly salty. If you're doing steaks, salt them 1 hour before you cook. If you're doing something thick like a pork loin, do it 3 hours ahead. Add the rest of your seasoning when you're about to cook and pay attention that you're not adding extra salt with store-bought seasonings.

Anyway, grilling is a great summer activity, and while I'm not an expert, I thought I'd share what I've found that works for me, and maybe it'll be a fun experiment for you too!

Sincerely,

Ryan