Hardee's Special Sauce

Home reconstruction

Burger sauce is a mayonnaise, a ketchup, a mustard and a relish, and the relish is the one that causes trouble.

Sweet pickle relish is packed in brine, and a tablespoon of it straight from the jar brings a meaningful amount of liquid. That liquid thins the mayonnaise base, and a thinned burger sauce runs out of the bun.

Press the relish in a sieve for ten seconds first. It is a trivial step and it changes the consistency completely.

The colour tells you the ratio

Burger sauce should be a pale salmon pink, not orange and not red. If yours is orange there is too much ketchup, which also means it is too sweet and too tomatoey.

Roughly four parts mayonnaise to one part ketchup. The ketchup is a tint and a background sweetness, not a flavour in its own right.

Yellow mustard, not Dijon

Yellow mustard brings vinegar sharpness and turmeric colour without heat. Dijon brings its own pungency, which fights everything else and pushes the sauce towards a French dressing.

This is the same reasoning that applies to almost every American burger sauce.

Two hours, minimum

A freshly whisked burger sauce tastes like its ingredients in sequence: mayonnaise, then a spike of vinegar, then relish.

Rested, the onion and garlic powder hydrate and disperse, the paprika blooms in the fat, and the relish's sweetness spreads out. It becomes one flavour.

Overnight is better still, and it keeps a week, so making it the day before costs nothing.

What you need

• 200 ml mayonnaise
• 3 tbsp tomato ketchup
• 2 tbsp sweet pickle relish, drained
• 1 tbsp yellow mustard
• 1 tsp white vinegar
• 1 tsp granulated sugar
• 1/2 tsp onion powder
• 1/2 tsp garlic powder
• 1/4 tsp smoked paprika
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/4 tsp black pepper

Method

1. 1. Press the relish in a sieve to get the brine out.
2. 2. Whisk everything together until smooth and evenly pale pink.
3. 3. Refrigerate at least 2 hours.
4. 4. Taste before serving and adjust — usually salt.

Full-fat mayonnaise

Light mayonnaise is thickened with gums rather than fat, and once you add ketchup, mustard and vinegar, those gums give the sauce a slippery, faintly slimy texture.

There is no way around this. Use full-fat.

Adjusting

Too sweet? Vinegar, a quarter teaspoon at a time. Not more mustard, which brings its own sweetness.

Too sharp? The teaspoon of sugar exists for this. Add a second.

Too thin? You did not drain the relish. More mayonnaise will fix the consistency at the cost of flattening the flavour.

Storing

A week in the fridge in a sealed jar. It thickens slightly over the first day as the powders hydrate.

Do not freeze. Mayonnaise splits and there is no recovering it.