Food for a week, memories for a lifetime.

In many ways, our reporter Ayaka Idate’s culinary tastes run towards traditional Japanese things. Among other projects, she’s whipped up a batch of sweets using a 1,000-year-old recipe from the Heian period and made the single largest piece of sushi any of us have ever seen.

But that doesn’t mean Ayaka only likes classical Japanese cuisine. On her shopping trips to Costco, she’s always been tempted by the gigantic packs of hamburger patties. It’s long been her dream to cook the entire thing and stack those succulent disks of meat in a towering burger high enough to touch the face of God himself.

But when would she ever have the occasion to eat that much meat? Why, she’d have to completely avoid going out to restaurants and eat every lunch and dinner at home for like a solid week long to finish all that off…

Wait a second, that’s exactly what we’re supposed to be doing right now as part of social distancing!

And so it was that Ayaka came back from her grocery run with a 12-pack of Costco hamburger patties, ready to live the American dream of multiple meaty meals.

With no barbecue to flame-grill on, Ayaka instead cooked everything up in a pan, after giving the patties a series of firm presses to make sure they’d be dense enough to support each other when stacked into a tower.

With the deafening but enticing sound of sizzling meat filling her ears, Ayaka began thinking about what to do for bread. Unfortunately, the store had been sold out of hamburger buns, but she did have some English muffins that should make a decent substitute.

▼ As you might remember from that time we made Pikachu Burgers, regular hamburger buns can be kind of hard to come by in Japanese stores.

Since she was going to be making a gigantic tower burger, Ayaka wanted something a little more special than just ketchup to put on it. So instead she created a custom mixture of ketchup and okonomiyaki sauce, and also sliced and grilled some onions. At about this time she realized that instead of just a tower burger, what she was really craving was a tower cheeseburger, so she also got a dozen slices of cheese out of the fridge.

And with that, it was time to start stacking.

With a dozen patties to work with, Ayaka had to be careful to make sure the stack maintained structural stability.

To help in that regard, she used multiple skewers and chopsticks, spearing through the center of the patties to keep them all on the same vertical axis.

Once the tower was complete, Ayaka wanted to move it over to her table for some more photos. However, before cooking, the meat alone had already weighed 2.186 kilograms (4.8 pounds), and now she’d added the onions and bread to her edible architecture. With her arms shaking, jaw clenched with determination, and, most of all, stomach rumbling, Ayaka picked up the plate and barely managed to get it to the table.

But once she had, and could take a moment to gaze upon the majesty of the burger tower, it was glorious, with a total height of 48 centimeters (18.9 inches).

And now, all that was left was for Aya to dig in! Obviously, her first instinct was to grab the burger in both hands and bite into it like a cartoon character…

…but as soon as she tried that, the whole thing came heat-stoppingly close to toppling and falling onto her floor.

So instead, Ayaka partially disassembled the tower, removing one of its top sections to eat by itself.

But just like a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, a burger tower in any other form still tastes really, really good.

We don’t expect to hear much from Ayaka over the next few days as she spends them in leftover burger paradise, but as long as she’s staying home and staying safe, we understand, and also envy, her.

Photos ©SoraNews24
● Want to hear about SoraNews24’s latest articles as soon as they’re published? Follow us on Facebook and Twitter!
[ Read in Japanese ]