Amami Superman Photography

In all my years living in Japan, I've never barbecued hamburgers. I love having barbecues but I've always strayed away from making hamburgers for the simple fact that ground hamburger in Japan isn't 100% beef. Usually when you go to the supermarket here, you'll find ground hamburger which is usually made up of 40% ground pork and 60% ground beef. If you've every barbecued any kind of a pork cut, you know it gives off a lot of grease which usually turns into a bonfire. Because I always use an open grill and wood charcoal, I was afraid I would just ruin the hamburgers if I tried.

They recently opened a new supermarket here in Amami called Taiyo. They have a few other older Taiyo supermarkets here, but this one dwarfs them all. It's almost as big as an American size supermarket which is rather big for here on the island. Anyway, their opening day they had huge sales and everything was cheap. We decided to go despite crowds we knew were going to be there and we actually bought quite a bit of food for pretty cheap. One of the things we bought there was a very large pack of ground hamburger. My wife also got a recent shipment in for her import shop and we had some real American style barbecue sauce. I thought it was time to try and barbecue some hamburgers.

So those are some of the photos I took of my first try at barbecuing hamburgers. To my surprise, they didn't cause a bonfire and turned out better then I could have imagined. They were excellent. These photos were taken on the 31st of March so it was over a month ago I took these. Since then I've hosted a few more barbecues for some friends and family and I grilled up some hamburgers for them and they loved them. My wife also sells bags of marshmallows in her shop and we actually roasted marshmallows for dessert. Most Japanese have never had that experience and they all had a blast.