I can't tell you excited I am. Or was.

After years of pondering how, and actually trying a time or two, to come up with the famous Biff Burger sauce recipe on my own, I found a website that has it.

I'm not sure how wide spread were Biff Burgers, but while I was growing up in the Southeast, they seemed to be everywhere. And that was a good thing for me. They also prepared and sold my favorite fast food. It was the sauce. Oh, sure, the wafer thin burger patties were char-broiled, and the moist and toasted buns had sesame seeds on top. It was a patented Roto Broil process. But it was the sauce that made the Biff.

My best friend growing up, “Murph-The-Surf Murphy,” and I would always stop at the Lane Avenue Biff Burger in Jacksonville, Florida after playing a round of golf at the Hyde Park Golf Course.

The taste of a sauced up Roto-broiler and tater tots made up for us each losing a dozen balls on the course where Ben Hogan once took an 11 on a 75 yard par 3.

Well, at some point before 1980, just like Ben Hogan in that Jacksonville Open Championship, the Biff Burger business got biffed. They lost. They shut down. Everywhere. Or so I thought.

In the fall of 1980, my brother and I traveled to Charlottesville, Virginia to attend a North Carolina-Virginia college football game. We drove all night to join some other family members and family friends there. We arrived shortly after sunrise on the day before the big Saturday game. The others arrived the day before, and were up and raring to go sight-seeing and shopping shortly after we arrived. My brother and I decided to forgo the sight-seeing and shopping. We opted for sleep.

Now my brother enjoyed Biff Burgers as much as anyone. But we both sort of silently mourned the end of the burger chain. We never discussed it, that I can remember. We just went on with our lives and filed the Biff Burger away with flat top haircuts, '58 Chevys, and five-dollar football tickets.

That Friday afternoon in Charlottesville, after he and I had our mandatory two or three hours of sleep on a football weekend, we set out on a sight-seeing tour of our own. We explored the mountains of the Shenandoah for a couple of hours. Our tour took us to Staunton, Virginia, a sleepy little mountain town about 40 miles west of Charlottesville. We were looking for nothing in particular and saw nothing spectacular. Just nice scenery, some late fall mountain colors, and a few old and quaint downtown Staunton buildings. Then, we turned a corner and rounded a curve and from out of nowhere came a sight I thought was gone forever. It was our mecca of sorts. The sole surviving Biff Burger.

Big smiles, hard high-fives, and loud “unbelievables!” preceded a major Biff pig-out just an hour or so before we were to join the others for steaks and bakeds at a fine Charlottesville restaurant. My brother and I were the original honey badgers that afternoon. We just didn't care. It was Biffs for these badgers!

That was the last time I ate one of those sauce dipped and delectable burgers. And as hard as I tried to concoct my own sauce all these years, I never even came close to duplicating that succulent red stuff. I even searched the internet many times over the years, trying to find another Biff Burger location or a recipe for the sauce at least. The closest search result I could find was a page about an annual vintage car show at at old abandoned Biff Burger in St. Petersburg. Until one day last week.

Last week I was reminiscing with some Facebook friends about local fast food burger places in my home town. None of them mentioned Biff. That got me to thinking again. So, I searched Biff Burger one final time. And there it was. Every bit as magnificent as the Staunton mecca. There among all the bytes and gigas. The printed words that brought tears to my eyes: “The recipe.” I was so excited, I emailed the web link to my brother and commenced to jot down the ingredients for my next trip to the grocery store.

2/3 to 1 cup Mustard

1 cup Sweet Pickle Relish

1/6 cup or 1 1/3 ounces Salt

Pinch Ground Ginger

2 tsp. Liquid Smoke

1 large can Ketchup (#10 Can, 115 oz)

Pretty simple and straight forward, I'd say. I couldn't wait to get to the store, buy the long lost ingredients and hunker down with the finest burger ever made. One by one, I placed each item into my cart and checked each off my list. Mustard. Sweet pickle relish. I already had salt. Ground ginger. Liquid smoke.

Now this is where I got a bit disappointed. In the first place, I have never seen a can of ketchup. In the second place, I was disappointed that, until I arrived at the Food Lion condiment aisle, quantity of food stuff never even registered with me. When I made my list earlier, I guess I just thought to myself, “Yeh, yeh, 115 ounces of ketchup. No big deal.”

Do you have any idea how much tomato ketchup 115 ounces is? I didn't. Until, that is, I placed the largest bottle of the stuff I have ever seen in my cart - using two hands, I might add. When I got the ketchup home, it barely fit the lower cupboard shelf. But the disturbing thing is, that massive bottle of Reagan vegetable is only 64 ounces! There is no way that any recipe could call for nearly two of those 64 ouncers of tomato ketchup.

So something is wrong with the recipe. That's all there is to it. Oh, I will try to make the Biff Burger sauce using what I have. The sad truth is, however, I don't even have a bowl or container that will hold 115 ounces of ketchup, let alone the mustard, ginger and salt.

So, I was excited. It just kills me, though, that at my age, and after years and years of delectable pleasure and after even more years of mourning and searching and more mourning and finally rediscovery, that my long lost friend, the Biff, is causing more stress than a stray sesame seed hiding under the lower dentures.

Biff. You're killing me here!

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