Mushroom Swiss Burger, Starch Infused Fries, and Strawberry Milkshake

For such a long time, I looked at the impossible burger from Modernist Cuisine and thought, "huh, I wonder what it tastes like"? Turns out, it's pretty epic - but we'll get to that - more on this journey first. I've got a day job and essentially zero training as a chef (minus a comical stage at alinea) and was deterred by thoughts that it would take so much planning, going out and buying stuff, online purchases, calling butchers, and a ridiculous amount of actual cookery to do it. But the thought lingered for a long time... and shortly after I finally picked up the last piece of equipment I'd need to make it (a chambered vacuum sealer), I pulled trigger and decided it was time to go for it.

I figured that I should have some sides or something, so I decided I'd do the strawberry milkshake with dry ice and starch infused fries to go with it... I was already making dinner anyways so why not, right?

A lot of the final components require that you make precursors and so I'll try my best to present things in as linear a way as possible. I'd put the recipe up, but obviously that's ridiculous; my guess is that if you're a home cook both considering and able to make this, then you really don't need me for anything. Anyways, here goes.

Beef Stock

You kick this whole thing off by getting your hands on some bone marrow, ground beef and beef suet. FYI, suet is the fat on a cow that's near the kidneys (I had no idea) and supposedly gets people excited about cow fats in the way people love rendered duck fat. Take your carrots, onions, celery, etc and combine with the bones, suet, ground beef, star anise and garlic. Roast for an hour and deglaze with wine. Above, I tried to take a before/after shot of the roasting process, capturing all of that caramelized goodness. Add in your thyme, rosemary, some more cheap Cabernet, a bunch of water and pressure cook for 2.5 hours.

Tomato Confit



Get the tomato, garlic, bay leaves, salt, olive oil, and glycerol/glycerin (I'm pretty sure these are the same thing). Blanch/shock the tomatoes to peel them and more or less combine everything - then throw it all on a silpat and roast for 5/6 hours at 200F. The silpat I've got is the size of a table - I got it when I was totally excited to try making the alinea chocolate dessert but then realized after the fact that red wasn't gonna work. Time to cut Mr. Sheets down to size. 

All in all, I should probably just start a company that just sells this in bottles - this tastes amazing! But we've got a lot of ground to cover, so moving on...

Hamburger Glaze

This part is pretty easy; just take some of the beef stock and blended tomato confit from above, combine with rendered suet and salt, and reduce on low heat until you've got a glace-thickness. 

 Compressed Tomato

After using a chambered vacuum sealer, you can see the difference in color in compressed vs un-compressed porous fruits/vegetables.

Vacuum Smoked Lettuce

I actually really like how the lettuce brings something to the table for once. For me, lettuce is kind of like the friend you've got that you don't really know how you became friends with and that nobody in your group really likes but somehow always gets invited and shows up to your crap. And he's never really got anything interesting to say and the whole time you're thinking that lettuce should should just go back to school or something. After some vacuum smoking with water and liquid smoke, it's like lettuce somehow landed a job at McKinsey and has all of these fun stories to tell everyone.

Hamburger Bun

I was supposed to get white lily bread flour, but apparently I wound up with white lily's all purpose flour. Thanks amazon... Looks like it's going to be non-white-lily bread flour today.

Mix together the first set of bread flour, water and yeast; cover in plastic wrap and let it sit for 2 days.

Get some more fresh yeast and let it activate in some warm water. Add that with some more bread flour and water along with some egg yolks, L-cysteine, lemon oil, vanilla, salt, sugar and shortening. I never bake anything and so I'm feeling pretty nervous about the bread... better get a backup juuuust in case.

Now that everything's in one place, you have to let it "proof". I still have no idea what that means, but he kindly provided directions in case a "proofing cabinet [is] unavailable". Under what circumstances other than being a professional baker would a proofing cabinet be available? In any case, after proofing, bake these guys at 500F for 6 minutes or until they're nice and golden brown. This was the one part of my plan that didn't quite go how I expected it, and the bread turned out more like a great English muffin than something I'd use for a burger. But the show must go on! 

Restructured Cheese Slices

 

Here, you combine some comte, emmenthal (although I used jarlsburg), salt, beer and kappa and iota carageenan along with sodium citrate. Hydrate the chemicals in the beer and blend in the cheese. Then pour it into a cylindrical mold, let it set, and finally slice it into little singles. This is some seriously fancy kraft. 

Mushroom Broth

Next I put together the mushroom broth. Slice up the crimini mushrooms and pressure cook with some sauteed shallots for 45 minutes. 

Mushroom Ketchup

Start off by sauteing an onion with some garlic and ginger. Then, add the mushroom broth from above, along with approximately a zillion other ingredients. I mean, I still can't believe whole foods had barley malt syrup. Oh yeah, and cane vinegar wasn't available so I used sherry vinegar instead - somehow I can't imagine that being a showstopper. Let it all cook together for 35/45 minutes, blend and strain out the finished ketchup. I probably could have presented this more nicely but oh well; I think it was around 2am on a work night when I finished this part, so I'll give myself some slack. Lastly, 800g yield my ass! My end product barely pushed 250g.

Hamburger Patties

Start of by making a mold for your patties by sawing off/sanding down some PVC pipe. When isn't a trip to home depot standard burger-making protocol?

The blend I used was 4 parts boneless short rib, 2 parts aged rib eye, 1 part london broil. Time to chop up $40 worth of meat and grind it into a burger (keeping the strands parallel, of course).

Use your PVC mold and while doing as little compressing as possible, get it into a log shape. Cook sous vide for around 1 hour at 132F in individual ziplock bags and reserve.

Dip the patties in liquid nitrogen and cryo-sear. I wasn't sure how to do this part but after experimenting with a few sacrificial patties, I found 20 sec in LN2 and then 90 sec on each side with a four minute rest period to be just right for medium rare.

Sauteed Mushroom

I couldn't get a hold of maitake mushrooms so I used royal trumpets instead. They're super delicious with a few grains of salt and when you cut some cross hatches into them as I did above, they fry up beautifully. 

Strawberry Milkshake

Combine strawberries and fructose. Pack sous vide and freeze overnight. 

Let it thaw out the day of service 

After adding in some skim milk, sweet whey powder, and locust bean gum, you're pretty much finished.

That was actually pretty easy. Or was it? 

Starch Infused Fries

The fries are actually pretty simple too  - start out by enriching the fries with some potato starch.

Drain the bag and pack with water and salt. Steam sous vide at 210F for 20/30 minutes. Be careful when removing the fries from the water bath because they are extremely fragile.

Use your vacuum sealer and pull a vacuum until the surface of the fries are dry. Also, I'd like to point out that the rubber top of your seal bar might fall off; something about hot, wet, pressure free environments tends to make things held together by tape less-so.

After you par-fry the fries for a few minutes at 325 reserve for service.

To Complete

Get all of the components you've been working on together and warm up the hamburger glaze. Add some suet to the pans where the mushrooms will be sauteed and hamburger buns will be toasted. Grind dry ice in a coffee grinder and fill a collins glass 2/3 of the way with your milkshake base. Heat a large pot of oil to 375F for your fries.

Cryosear the burger as described above and add cheese to the top of the burger after you've flipped it once, saute the mushrooms and fry the fries. Toast the buns and add the dry ice to the milkshake base.

 

Add the ketchup, cooked patty and cheese, lettuce, tomato, mushrooms, and hamburger glaze to the toasted buns. Serve with the fries and bubbling milkshake.  

 

Despite the comical amount of work that goes into making this, it is an awesome burger. While I don't plan on making this every day, cryosearing really does work to give a superb sear without overcooking the meat. And grinding the meat while keeping the strands parallel helps to ensure a more tender burger than you're used to. Each component is so tasty and I especially love the hamburger glaze (which is also great for dipping your fries into). I've made different fry recipes from this book and this one is no exception to the trend of deliciousness - a super crispy exterior coupled with a fluffy, mashed-potato-esque interior. I might have added a little too much dry ice but the milkshake is pretty nice too. 

What I most appreciate from making this dish from start to finish was learning which ideas that I can apply to every-day burger making that add real, significant improvements to the finished product. And also, now I get to say that I did it. 

Misc

There may have been a slight milkshake explosion at some point

 

The barman on hand thought it was appropriate for everyone to get this eggy version of a hemmingway!

And a round of rusty nails. And then a round of Penicillins! Oh god, this should definitely add some challenge to executing an already complicated recipe.

Aaaaand my apartment was a disaster zone leading up to completion of this dish. 

Praying to the bread gods so that my buns might rise.