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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)
