3 Ways to Cook a Smashburger with 3 Burger Experts | The Burger Show

[Music] hmm these days smash burgers are the air jordans of the burger world that is everywhere so for today's challenge i invited two experts burger scholar george boats and home kitchen guru kenji lopez alt they're gonna show off their smash burger skills and teach us some history and technique along the way and as always i've got a little something special up my sleeve here is your ultimate smash burger master class yo what's up guys what's up how's it going good to see you good to see you i wish we could see each other in person but this will have to do how's everybody doing doing good yeah keeping busy that's good hustle alive making food making burgers excellent excellent well today our episode is all about the smash burger smash burgers are the new standard of of burger making it's the craze right now why do you think that is well i would say it's an old standard that's just been sort of recently repopularized yeah i mean i think people are very nostalgic about hamburgers to begin with and i think that when people start to realize that hamburgers pre-date you know the fast food guys like the mcburger kings they went wait a minute this this stuff is older than than those fast food places 50s it goes back to when it goes back 100 years or more you're actually tasting history in there it kind of maximizes flavor you know it's like because you're getting so much of that browning on there it's like eating like a like a potato chip you know it's like that that salt and that crunch all three of us have different approaches to the smash burger and it would be great to to show everyone our perspectives you know for me it's i always just try to come up with creative weird ways and i have you know i have a little something special for you guys to to kind of show you what i've been working on my burger's gonna be a little it's gonna get a little weird too i will definitely be the most historically accurate that's for sure if he's exactly accurate no i may be in costume by the way i can't wait to see what goes down if we're going to talk about the history of the burger we need to go all the way back to the beginning welcome to georgie burger can i get you a hamburger why do they talk like they're all irish i don't know um today i'm going to make for you the smash burger that would have made 120 years ago at the very beginning the dawn of the hamburger age i got so excited about it i even built a historically accurate tent i had some custom equipment made i had a special spatula made this one happens to be a barbecue fork with a piece of metal attached to the front of it the beginning of the hamburger age was all about making do with what you had good again it's also hot as balls at air the very first burgers that were made in america were actually smash burgers there were no paddy formers nothing was standardized about the hamburger business at all one of the reasons that i love the smash burger so much is because it has a very very deep history at the end of the 19th century hamburgers really didn't exist in restaurants mostly you'd find them being served at state fairs and from street carts which were pulled to factory entrances to feed the working class a small ball of beef would be placed in a skillet or handmade shallow tank and pressed into the shape of a patty using a custom spatula made quickly and cheaply as possible these itinerant stands stained the burger's image and in 1906 when upton sinclair's groundbreaking book the jungle exposed the inner workings of the meatpacking industry it spelled doom for the hamburger in 1919 white castle restored the image of the lovely burger by emphasizing safety and consistency owners walt anderson and billy ingram designed the restaurants in the shape of castles white signified cleanliness while castle symbolized strength inside you'd find young men wearing clean white shirts and paper caps rules restrict if their paper hats got dirty employees were instructed to throw them away they went through so many caps that in 1932 ingram started his own paper hat company to supply the growing burger chain the experience of eating at white castle was all about spectacle men would slide porcelain plates down the counter as they called out your order allegedly coining the term slider in their goal for efficiency white castle standardized the burger bun which helped usher in a scalable fast food hamburger for the masses even with the rise of white castle many burger operations were still cruelly constructed the combination of makeshift tents and pans filled with hot grease with nowhere to dispose of it meant the burger stands were in danger of going up in flames at any moment and often did new technology revolutionized the slider thanks to the invention of the grease catch on flat tops with these clean ultra hot surfaces burger cooks could explore new methods of preparation leading to the rise of super crispy lacy edge burgers from places like working man's friend in indiana and carl's drive in missouri that remain hallmarks of this style to this very day this is the story of the smash burger [Music] all right let's do this so what do i have here i have a tank now back in the day they would have cooked in a skillet but at some point they would have graduated to a larger custom-made tank just like this because they realized that people actually liked the flavor of beef that was cooked in tallow so this actually is a tank that is full of rendered beef fat so they would literally put the beef into the tallow just like this you would do nothing more than press them into shape just like that and that's how the hamburger was born it's almost like we're deep frying the burger here also they would do this really cool thing i've noticed in some of the old pictures where they would keep onions at the top corner of their tank just sitting there kind of sitting in the beef tallow ready to be used as a very happy condiment and arguably the only condiment for what i can tell jesus doesn't come around for another 25 30 years the guy was making hamburgers on the street he would have had to go to a local baker not you couldn't go to the store and buy hamburger buns you had to actually go buy dinner rolls at a baker these were actually made by my local baker caputo's bakery in brooklyn step up and get the best georgie oh [ __ ] i'm covered in grease how did these guys do this back then this is back then it would have been five cents turn of the century but by 1910 i've noticed they were about a ten cents per burger they would take some onions from the top of the griddle and put them over there stick them over there right there we go put the butt on top and there you go original american hamburger right there i've been transported i've gone back in time i find it fascinating that the smash burger has gotten so popular recently but i want to make sure people understand this is no fad the smash burger is the first burger georgie burgers only five cents take it away alvin mo showed us the history of a smash burger but i'm gonna bring us back to the present wait for it ladies and gentlemen it's called the flapper this is what is this the flapper you're basically just folding over a smash patty creating pockets of cheese that's almost like a juicy lucy it's almost like a hot pocket and when you're biting into it cheese just gushes out of it who doesn't [ __ ] want that i saw a burger at miz known where they folded over like a taco i thought that was super cool and then i saw herds kind of just smashing burgers like freestyle and i thought that was super cool it was texturally crunchy juicy there still had some soft pieces of beef in it and i wanted to have that same like flavor explosion in this particular burger let's get it i have these guys but those aren't gonna cut it today i'm calling in the big gun this is at least five pounds of pure stainless steel this is amboy burger blend it has chuck it has brisket it has a whole bunch of mind your business you just basically drop it on the griddle it has about 20 to 25 fat content and just start smashing it almost like an iron and then you're going to taper it out you want to get these nice crispy edges so you're basically trying to get a patty that's smashed to about 10 inches round you want all of that surface area to get nice and crispy if you can see we have all that meat candy developing at this point you just want to season it with salt a little bit of pepper we're going to flip this guy over and now the undisputed burger cheese american on one side and on the caddy corner so that when we flip the burger all right the cheese is starting to melt i'm going to fold it over one time just like this so that is what's going to turn into the juicy lucy effect now the cheese is trapped in the patty and we're going to fold it over one more time we'll top it with one more piece of cheese so you can see where the miz known influence is coming from you can see where the herds influence is coming from and there you have it i present to you the flapper you got pockets of cheese right there if you give it a little squeeze you can see all the cheese coming out that's the juicy lucy effect you got all this beautiful my yard beef candy hanging flapping from the edge of the burger thousands of smashed burgers later this is what i come up with layers of meat pockets of cheese let's see what you got kenji you're up next all right so alvin it looks like you made a burger that is all about crust and cheese pockets what i'm trying to address is the um the contrast between crustiness and juiciness so when you make a smash burger it's all it's really all about that mayard reaction about that browning and about that nice beef crust that you get on it but you also lose some of the um the tender juicy texture of a thicker pub style burger so what i'm doing is i'm going to i'm gonna i'm gonna make a burger that addresses both those issues and then on top of that i was thinking all right the american cheese that's another thing that some people have issue with you know i love american cheese because there's nothing that melts like it um so what i was thinking was all right how can i take that cheese element but i'll actually boost the beef what i'm essentially doing here is i'm gonna make beef cheese and what i have here so this is a um basically a beef demi-glass this is like the kind of sauce that you would put on like a really fancy steak at a at a restaurant this is this is like why fancy food is expensive because there's like five pounds of beef bones reduced down to like a half cup of sauce here american cheese is made with extra liquid and then a emulsifying salt so in this case i'm going to be using sodium citrate and what sodium citrate does is that it allows the cheese to remain emulsified even when it's melted and this is just like a um a mild cheddar so i'm gonna add about a teaspoon sodium citrate here and then i'm just gonna start whisking in my cheese this is like basically beef flavored nacho cheese dip now so now i've got this plastic wrap on the bottom of a sheet tray like this i'm just going to pour my cheese mixture over it i'm going to run down and put this in the in the walk-in or in the fridge so that it can set up and then i'll come right back and we can start making the actual burgers i'm gonna make two different burger patties so one a juicy patty with a slice of beef cheese and on stacked on top of that a smash patty so i'm gonna start by doing the the thicker burger so this is going to be like a about a four ounce patty the outside of a burger always cooks more than the middle does which means that it constricts more and so what happens is it kind of cinches up like a belt so by forming it with a little bit of an indentation in the center you make sure that that doesn't happen a little bit of oil in the pan i like to use a skillet that is you know just bigger than the size of the burger because you want that pat where at least i want the fat to kind of pool up a little bit so that the burger's really cooking in its own fat there and so for the smash patty i'm going with about a little over two ounces of beef all right while that rests we're gonna take this back there all right so um so back here i'm gonna start with um my bun on the flat top and i'm using just some of our garlic mayo here to toast the bun the keys with toasting a bun is that you want to really move it around because that's what's going to get you the nice even toast so the key to a good smash burger is a dry griddle you don't want any oil on there because you actually want the burger to stick at the beginning for a long time i had trouble with smash burgers sticking to the bottom of the spatula so what we do now is we have these little sheets of parchment paper give it a smash and i smash like kind of around in a circle so that the edges spread out a little bit and then this is the real key that um a wallpaper scraper which we get from the hardware store with a razor blade on it so that's how you get those nice nice lacy edges here all that stuff there that's what we're looking for all right so we're gonna get this back on the other side assemble our burger with our cheese okay so i got my burgers my cheese is all set finish off this burger by basting that cheese a little bit with the hot burger drippings to get it nice and melty stack our smash patty on top let's do one last slice of beef cheese on top of that give that guy a quick base last swipe of mayo i like laying like a nice little bed of stuff for the beef because then you know that way anything that drips out it kind of seasons the toppings underneath and make sure it doesn't all slide around all right [Music] again you know with a burger you know the smash burger the brownie that you're getting so that that's mayard browning right it's a it's a reaction that's named after a french scientist who discovered these reactions what's happening essentially is that there's proteins and carbohydrates um in the meat that uh break down and so they they start out as complex structures and then they break down into basic building blocks and then the heat triggers this sort of series of chemical reactions like a cascade of reactions that forms hundreds of new flavor compounds and that's why you know meat that's browned or bread that has a nice brown crust you know when you toast your bread it takes on a much more complex flavor because you're actually creating hundreds of new compounds that add complexity to that meat all right so we got our nice medium rare fat patty underneath our layers of beef cheese and then that crispy smash burger on top i'm actually surprised at how good this is this is the first time i actually made this to completion in my head it sounded good but it tastes better than i even thought it would taste and i don't know what we call this burger the the double joy i don't know so there you have it folks it's the smash burger episode of the burger show and we will see you next time what's up everybody thank you for watching the burger show make sure you hit that like button make sure you smash that subscribe button hit that notification bell if not for me for the burgers thank you

Channel: First We Feast

Views: 1,910,429

Rating: 4.9441004 out of 5

Keywords: First we feast, fwf, firstwefeast, food, food porn, cook, cooking, chef, kitchen, recipe, cocktail, bartender, craft beer, complex, complex media, Cook (Profession)sean evans, the burger show, the burger show season 6, the burger show george motz, alvin cailan, alvin cailan burger, alvin cailan the burger show, smashburger, smashburger tutorial, how to make a smashburger, burger experts

Id: Py9YW8rIylg

Length: 16min 24sec (984 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 08 2020