A Bristol-based burger business has stormed the National Burger Awards 2022 with its winning signature creation. After winning the Burger Chef of the Year award at last year’s awards, Danny’s Burgers, returned to the competition in a bid to win with the Beef Chucky 2.0 burger and low and behold the Bristol business did exactly that!
Danny’s Burgers in Brislington won over an esteemed panel of industry judges at the UK-wide event with a burger featuring a 50-day dry aged beef blend, dry aged ex-dairy chuck roll, Kerrymaid American cheese, a beer cheese sauce, Kühne sliced dill pickles, mustard, candied jalapeños and fresh white onions, encased in a seeded brioche bun.
Hawke’s juicy chuck roll patty is rubbed with house seasoning and cooked over charcoal and hickory wood in a drum smoker for six hours, then transferred to a foil tray with bone marrow canoes and braised with coffee stout. For the beer cheese sauce, the chef combined cream cheese, jalapeños, cheddar cheese, Red Leicester, American mustard, Worcestershire sauce and beer from a local Bristol brewery.
The Beef Chucky 2.0 burger, cooked by Danny Hawke – the Danny’s Burgers founder and winner of National Burger Chef of the Year at the 2022 event – saw off stiff competition from 15 of the UK’s most elite signature burgers. The burger joint took part in an epic cook-off, which saw popular burger joints such as London’s Bleeker, Burger & Lobster, Dirty Bones and MEATliquor, as well as Bristol’s Squeezed, to fight for this year’s crown.
Danny Hawke said: “I didn’t see it coming at all. It’s unbelievable. I’m a little bit scared about how busy this is going to make us now. After coming second last year, I wasn’t aware of how much of an impact the National Burger Awards could have, but off the back of that it was crazy, so no doubt this will be the same.
I think this will even give me a push to open a restaurant. “It was ridiculous cooking against those other chefs. There are a few in there – Bleecker, Zephyr – who got me into cooking burgers, so to beat them is pretty incredible.”
The National Burger Awards also crowned a Burger Chef of the Year, which went to Oz Harborth of Plymouth’s Zephyr Burgers, who built a delicious technical burger – the Double Patty Melt – from a selection of ingredients supplied by event sponsors. The competition also gave an award to the nation’s Best Vegan Burger, which came from HILLS in Brecon, Wales and consisted of a NoBeef Burger from The Vegetarian Butcher, along with crispy fried onions, pickled red cabbage, gochujang, spring onions and sushi ginger.