PicoBlog

Welcome to the weekend! We’re feeling contrarian this week, eating non-stuffed burgers at a spot known for Juicy Lucys and seeking hot dogs on a road trip through Buffalo. Here’s what you’ll find in today’s newsletter:

Weekender Favorites: The GCB is Greencastle, Indiana’s culinary gift to the world. Now, it’s a Minneapolis staple as well.
Featured Destination: Download our Field Guide to Minneapolis, a 22-page digital dining guide featuring all our restaurant and bar recommendations.
On the Road: Visit this Buffalo-area hot dog purveyor for tasty charcoal-grilled dogs and loganberry shakes.

MINNEAPOLIS, MINN. — Regional burger aficionados associate Minneapolis with its unique burger style: the Juicy Lucy. For the uninitiated, a Juicy Lucy is a cheeseburger made by sandwiching cheese between two uncooked beef patties and then pinching the sides of ground beef back together, thus sealing the cheese inside. The burgers are then grilled, forming a molten core of liquid cheese that oozes out of the burger on your first bite.

While many burger joints in the Twin Cities serve Juicy Lucys, the two spots best known for the Minneapolis specialty are Matt’s Bar and the 5-8 Club. Last year, Chicago Tribune food writer Louisa Chu waded into the hot button issue of the cheese-stuffed burger’s provenance. I will not.

Instead, I went to the 5-8 Club, which has four locations in the Twin Cities, to have one of my all-time favorite burgers: The GCB. As it says on the menu, this cheeseburger is served on a toasted garlic French roll and originated in Greencastle, Indiana. This raises some questions, I know.

Located about 45 minutes west of Indianapolis, Greencastle is home to two beloved institutions: my alma mater, DePauw University, and Marvin’s, a college joint known for fast, free delivery and their signature Garlic Cheeseburgers. During the school year, you can’t escape the GCB, as it is known to students and faculty alike. Most DePauw students have had dozens of them over the course of their college career. Some may have had hundreds.

At the 5-8 Club, Jill Skogheim has made it a mission to recreate the beloved burger for her Minneapolis customers. I first met Jill years ago, when we were both students making our way through the same rural Indiana college. We would order GCBs (along with cheese fries and a Coke) for a student-friendly price that has long since faded from my memory. But the taste of that burger, topped with American cheese and covered in fragrant garlic salt, lingers to this day.

“The key to the GCB is in the bread. It’s not in the meat,” Skogheim tells me. “What makes a GCB a GCB is the bread and the garlic salt.”

Skogheim spares no expense to recreate that memory from our college days. She goes out of her way to source the very same par-baked hoagie rolls from the Ohio bakery long favored by the cooks at Marvin’s.

“That’s the key. Because the GCB has that – crunch is probably too strong of a word – but you’ve got to have that exterior on the bread. That’s why it’s got to be par-baked,” says Skogheim. “If you just buy a premade hoagie roll and put some garlic salt on it, it’s not going to taste the same.”

But the bread is not the only key ingredient. At the 5-8, they season the garlic cheeseburger rolls with the same blend of garlic powder and salt that perfumes the air inside the Greencastle restaurant. In my mind, I had envisioned a secret blend of seasonings that perhaps had been reverse-engineered in Minneapolis. I should have known the reality to be far more simple.

“Lawry’s garlic salt with parsley is the specific seasoning,” Skogheim says. “We use a lot of Lawry’s seasonings but to get that particular garlic salt with parsley — it’s a special order.”

When we sat down together at her restaurant, I took a bite out of what my eyes told me was the very same burger I knew in my college days. The unmistakable taste could have fooled anyone whose DePauw career was fueled by late-night deliveries of carbs and caffeine.

I should have ordered two.

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