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– [Narrator] This episode is sponsored by Cash App. When your personal finances connect you to your funds and the things that matter, that’s money, and that’s Cash App. You know what else is Money? Bigger, better burger bowls, meltier cheese through science, and getting to eat potato rolls as part of your job. That’s money, and that’s Cash App. Download Cash App from the App Store or Google Play Store to add your cash tag to the 80 million and counting. – [Film Character] How do you like it? – Medium, American cheese. – American cheese is the best cheese for a cheeseburger because it melts without splitting. – How much will that set me back? – 9.95. – Will that come with fries? – Neils? – [Neils] Yes sir? – Is the fryer still on? – [Neils] Yes sir. – Crinkle cut or julienne? – [Narrator] Hey, what’s up, guys? Welcome back to "Binging with Babish." For this week, we’re taking a look at that amazing looking burger from the menu, which, at an MSRP of $10 and promising to elicit the burger memories from childhood, I like to imagine goes a little something like this. First, some very thinly sliced onions that appear to be sliced pole to pole, just showing off how not of a professional chef I am. Frozen crinkle cut fries, cooked in 375 degree Fahrenheit’s worth of peanut oil about three to five minutes until deeply golden brown and crisp, tossed, of course, with kosher salt while still nice and warm. Burger balls of four ounces size, just enough so that they’ll be thick enough that we can potentially cook them to medium. A hearty sesame seeded burger bun, split and toasted in just a little bit of oil on a cast iron skillet, removed and replaced with two four ounce balls of high quality 80/20 ground beef. Then not so much smashed as smeared, almost as though you’re pressing down in a bit of beefy masonry, helping prevent any stickies from occurring to the spatula, seasoned generously on one side with kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper. Then the chef prepares his burgers Oklahoma style, that is, with our thinly sliced onions lightly pressed into the burger meat before flipping, effectively spot welding griddled onions into the bottom of the patty. As soon as they’re flipped, both patties are topped with two slices of yellow American cheese. These are left to simply melt while the patty’s finish cooking, then one patty is premeditatively placed upon the other, and both are transported to the awaiting toasty bun and mountain of french fries. So there you have it, an amazing classic double cheese burger with fries, probably overpriced at 9.99, but still capable of eliciting memories of all the great burgers you’ve had in your life. Now, I doubt that they had Kraft singles and sesame potato buns getting shipped out to the private island restaurant, so what would it take to make this burger gourmet and from scratch without engaging in, as Margot puts it, fancy deconstructed out on bull (bleep)? Let’s start by making our own big, beautiful potato buns. Into the bowl of a stand mixer goes 415 grams of bread flour, 75 grams of potato flour, two tablespoons of sugar, and a tablespoon each instant yeast and kosher salt, tiny whisked together before adding 170 grams of water, 110 grams of whole milk, and two eggs, room temperature. Hook it up, shut it down, and commence to kneading until things just come together into a shaggy ball, anywhere from one to three minutes. Then to give our buns a luxurious, brioche-like texture, we’re gonna start adding 50 grams of unsalted room temperature butter one tiny cube at a time, making sure that each cube has disappeared completely into the dough before adding the next. This process should take about three to five minutes, plenty of time to develop your dough’s gluten. Now at this point, you might notice some fear in my fingers, because my dough is very sticky and slack, but especially with brioche, I’ve seen very wet doughs come together and become handleable. So if things look a little too wet early on, just keep working it until it easily passes the window pane test. But after eight or so minutes of kneading, if things are still too sticky, it’s not too late to add a little bit more potato flour. It is, after all, easier to add dry late in the game than it is to add wet, so just keep dusting with more potato flour until the dough is workable and bouncy and supple. Place it in a generously oiled bowl, and cover with plastic wrapped bulk ferment at room temperature for about an hour and a half, unless you suddenly remember that you have a dough proofer. And since we’re pretending that we’re working in a restaurant, we can use that, and thus, in a little less than an hour, my dough has doubled in size. So now I’m gonna retrieve it from the bowl, weigh it, and divide it into five equal pieces, in this case, about 190 grams each. Once divided, we’re gonna roll them into tight and taut little balls, arrange them on a parchment lined baking sheet, maybe a little bit more spaced out than that, and I like to pat ’em down a little bit so they don’t rise too much up and not enough out. And I’m gonna give ’em a little spritz with non-stick spray and covered them with plastic wrap. And since this tray doesn’t fit in my proofing drawer, I’m inflating it with air from my nice warm lungs, which should help them rise over the next hour during which time they should nearly double in size. Now to test our proof, we want to poke the dough. If it springs back too completely or too quickly, we want to cover and let proof for another 15, 20 minutes until our poke leaves an indent that doesn’t really puff all the way back out. Next, we gotta prolifically brush these guys down with a whole egg that’s been beaten together with a pinch of kosher salt, not only to give them that deep brown glossy exterior, but so that we can adhere mountains of sesame seeds to the outside. Rinse and repeat with the remaining buns, and then these guys are headed into a preheated 375 degree Fahrenheit oven for anywhere from 18 to 22 minutes until they emerge too big, way too big. I mean, we’re trying to go for an over the top burger here, but I think that these are a bridge too far, so let’s try again with the dough divided in six pieces for a much more reasonable, but still pretty gigantic bun that we’re gonna let cool completely on the tray. Next up, the matter of American cheese, which as was mentioned, is the perfect cheese for a burger because it can melt without splitting. But using this technique from modernist cuisine, you can make American cheese out of any kind of cheese you want, like this stuff, a mixture of sharp cheddars, Gouda, Colby, and Monterey Jack, but you can pick 32 ounces of the relatively young shredded cheese of your choice. Once shredded, over on the stove top in a large wide saucepan, we’re gonna bring 12 ounces of whole milk to a simmer. Notice that the tripod is off kilter, give that a tip, and then into the milk, we’re gonna whisk one and a half ounces of sodium citrate, a simple food additive used in molecular gastronomy that I figured they’d probably have on hand. Once that’s up to a bare simmer, we’re gonna add all the cheeses at once, reduce the heat as low as it’ll go, and use an immersion blender to blend the cheese and the milk together into a devastatingly creamy, smooth cheese product. Now, this stuff sets up almost immediately, so make sure you have a loaf pan lined with plastic wrap ready to go. Pour all the cheese stuff in there, and then tap it against the tabletop with great vigor in a hapless attempt to remove any errant bubbles. Cover this and refrigerate for at least four hours or until completely set, and there you have it, one big old loaf of American cheese style product. Next up, the fries, which were prepared crinkle cut. In anticipation of this, I ordered a crinkle cutter, which, to my disappointment, wasn’t even remotely sharp, as though were designed for already cooked food or play-doh or something. As a result, these six potatoes would take 45 minutes for me to hand carve into crinkle cut fries. Not much of a lesson be learned here, apart from don’t buy a crinkle cutter that you can rip in half with your bare hands. Now, the potatoes that we’re using today are russet potatoes, very high in starch, so they will begin to almost immediately oxidize and discolor, which is why we’re immediately plunging them into a pot of cold water, then rinsing them three more times to remove any excess starch. Then finally, we’re covering them once again with cold water and adding one tablespoon each kosher salt and white vinegar that is both gonna season the potatoes and help them retain their shape during their absurdly long 20 to 30 minute cook time. We want them almost falling apart in this method appropriately adapted from Heston Blumenthal. I’m very carefully retrieving the fries and placing them on a wire rack set in a rimmed baking sheet where they can cool. The steam that you’re seeing, just like all steam, is moisture. The less excess moisture in the potatoes, the lighter and fluffier the interior of our fries are gonna end up. Once cooled completely, these guys are headed into the freezer for at least four hours or until frozen solid. Then they’re getting their second of three cooks, a low temperature fry in 275 degree Fahrenheit peanut oil. Almost like a potato cold feet, at first they’re gonna sit kind of eerily silently on the bottom of the pot, but before long, they’ll start fizzing and floating, and all the stuff you expect fries to do. Once they just barely start getting a little bit of color on them, we’re gonna fish ’em out and let them drain on a paper towel lined baking sheet. Then I’m carefully arranging them back on the rack, making sure nobody’s overlapping, everybody’s sleeping head to toe, and back into the freezer that they go for at least four hours or up to a few months if you wanna make these ahead of time. Strain all the particulate out of your oil, and when it’s time for the final fry, these guys are now headed into 375 degree Fahrenheit oil for three to five minutes until deeply golden brown and crisp. Fish ’em out, drain ’em on paper towels, and toss them with kosher salt while they’re still nice and hot, and there you have it, our meticulously handcrafted crinkle cuts versus store bought, not a super fair comparison to make. The store bought ones are as good as you can expect, better out of the fryer than out of the oven, but these triple cooked guys are in a league of their own. The fried exterior is super thick and craggly, and the interior is creamy and tender. Even after all the time and care and hand crinkle cutting, if you ask me, worth it. Last up, the meat, and I figured they’re working some pretty nice meat at Hawthorne, so I’ve got my favorite cuts here, short rib for fat, brisket for flavor, and chuck roast for chuck. I’m discarding any sinew or connective tissue, and cutting all the meat and fat into one inch cubes. Letting these guys hang out in the freezer for about 20 minutes before being passed through the medium plate of a thoroughly chilled meat grinder for a lovely, pebbly, fatty, extraordinarily flavorful burger blend. Now, something interesting to me was that this was a smash burger being cooked to medium doneness, so I’m opting for behemoth six ounce balls, which I’m hoping is gonna give us enough width to fill our buns, and enough height to maintain a little pink. This feels about as appropriate a time as any to bust out the flat top, oil it up, toast our buns, preheat to smoking, and commence to smashing. From this point on, it’s the same procedure as before, but I ran into a wrinkle. Everything was going grand until the time came to apply the American cheese. When retrieving it from the fridge, I noticed that it was quite soft. It tasted great and looked like it was gonna melt well, but would it pass through my slicer? And the answer is sort of, in very smeary, soft, thick slices, which on the day of the shoot, I thought looked fine, but now that I’m sitting down to edit it, I’m noticing it looks pretty scraggly, so I’ll be right back. I’m gonna run downstairs and make a half batch of the cheese base, for which I’m gonna try a different method to imitate deli slices. For starters, I’ve got a pizza steel that’s been sitting in a 275 degree Fahrenheit oven along with a sheet pan that I’ve lined with a non-stick baking mat. I’m hoping to use this as a sort of reverse cold stone creamery, a nice hot surface upon which I can spread the cheese as thinly as possible before it sets. This ended up working like a charm, which is good news, because I’m filming this less than 24 hours before you’re watching it. Once you get a nice thin sheet of cheese, I’m gonna throw this in the fridge for a few minutes until it’s solidified, invert it onto a more cut friendly surface like parchment paper, break off the edges first, and then peel away the baking mat, revealing our sheet of American cheese. Break it down into slices, and then it’s ready for much more photogenic burger melting. Now that we all agree that I’ve redeemed myself, I can eat this and go back upstairs and pick up where I left off, at which point I’ll realize that the original burger didn’t really look that bad to begin with, and maybe I didn’t need to do all that. Quick, before this gets too meta, let’s cut to a slow motion burger squish, and can we get the chef’s table text? Nice, eat your heart out, David Gill. Anyway, so yeah, this turned out awesome, just one of the cheesiest, burgeriest experiences imaginable. In fact, let’s go back to the chef’s table cam, add the text, yeah, that does it justice. And while this burger cost a few more bucks to make, what it really cost was time, so I guess that poses the ultimate question about fine dining or whatever. Thanks again, Cash App. That’s money, that’s Cash App. Download Cash App from the App Store or Google Play Store to add your cash tag to the 80 million and counting. (bright music)
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