Hamburgers are Home. And Colombian Hamburgers are Love.

There are comforts of home that one craves while traveling.  While I am often able to feel "at home" while on the road, I still fall victim to the cravings of my usual comfort foods, like pizza, tacos and the one thing that is as American as it gets, the hamburger.

While I often enjoy the different interpretations other countries have of things like pizza, I've been known to say that only the United States can make a proper hamburger.

Europe, I'm sorry.  I love you, and you've done my tastebuds proud in many, many ways.  Your bread is incomparable, your produce is divine... But stop trying to make American-style burgers.  You just can't.

Central America... Don't even try it.  I'm not even sure they use real meat in Costa Rica.  They called that stuff beef, but it tasted like bean paste.  Also, I've seen their cows.  I'm pretty sure you couldn't scrape enough meat for one burger from ten Costa Rican cows.  It's just sad.

I'd basically given up on foreign attempts at burgers before I came to Colombia.  But COLOMBIA.  You, Mi Amor, can make a burger.  It's not American in its style by any stretch of the imagination, but you won't want it to be.  You'll go back to the good old U.S. of A. and judge them because there are no crunchy potato sticks and they only use two or three types of sauce, which are all totally identifiable.

A Colombian burger consists of, from what I can tell, one or two thin patties of beef, a slice or two of cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, probably pickles, one or more optional forms of pork (bacon, ham and chorizo are all possibilities), a sauce that may or may not be mustard, other miscellaneous sauces (one source says pink sauce, pineapple sauce and aji sauce) crunchy potato sticks, sometimes onions, sometimes not (I prefer not).

Too big to fit in my mouth OR my arteries.  Oops!

The Colombian burger I had last night was a special creature of its own, like something that came directly from the annals of ThisIsWhyYoureFat.com:  Two beef patties, cheese, chorizo, ham (there might have been other meats, but I'm not even sure.  I could barely keep my eyes open after one bite.  I'm surprised I lived to write this blog post after eating that burger), lettuce, tomato, all the sauces and, of course, crunchy potato sticks.  I had no idea what was coming when I ordered this.  I just knew that a person from the United States had given me the unsolicited advice that if I had not eaten this burger yet, I had to do so immediately.

I mean, I'm not one to turn down unsolicited advice about food, unless it's from my doctor and pertains to cholesterol, and this is a decision I shockingly did not regret hours later, as my arteries did not, as I expected, shut down in my sleep last night.

In addition to the joy of killing yourself slowly with fatty meat, there is the additional pleasure of all the ingredients coming out the sides, onto your face, your hands, your clothing... pretty much everywhere.  This makes the burger a two-course meal, as you then get to eat all the pieces that did not make it into your mouth on the first go-around.

So, in summary, burgers in Colombia are a major win.  For your tastebuds, that is.  They're probably a pretty big loss for your heart's longevity and your waistline, but hey, at least you enjoyed your first heart while you had it, right?