Look, it's like "Stomp." Welcome back to "Mythical Kitchen," where dreams become food. All right, so today we're making a chicken-fried cheeseburger, a dish that holds a
special place in my heart, but we'll get to that in a minute. Today's video is sponsored by ButcherBox. ButcherBox delivers a 100%
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ButcherBox for sponsoring that portion of today's episode. All right, like I said, this
is a very special recipe for me because the chicken-fried cheeseburger, it's the first dish that
I ever made for Mythical. This is back in 2015 when
the only cooking equipment in the studio was a toaster
oven and a hot plate. Oh gosh.
Look at that. Oh, I know the answer to this
one just by looking at it. Then you got the gravy here. Now I will finally
reveal to you the secret that I just took the pre-made cheeseburger and kind of deep fried it. So I don't know what to tell ya, but I will show you how to do that. And I'm also gonna make my updated 2021 version of the dish. It's gonna get a little bit weirder. I mean like real weird stuff. Like delete your browser history stuff. And hey, if you like podcasts, me and Nicole have one of those. It's called "A Hot Dog is a Sandwich." We got new episodes every Wednesday. Go check out the latest episode. It just dropped yesterday, because yesterday was Wednesday on account of now is Thursday, provided that you are
one of the 63% of viewers who watches on first day, thank you. Broken the recipe down
to three easy steps. You can find the time codes right there, but we also get a full written recipe down in the description. Let's go back to the past of 2015, the thing that I said
earlier, let's get cooking. All right, so we are making
the chicken-fried cheeseburger. That all starts obviously
with bacon gravy. So I'm gonna take some
cold bacon and I'm gonna, there we go, I'm just gonna
add the cold bacon to a pan. We're gonna get that fat
rendering out of the bacon. And then that fat is gonna act as the liquid to our roux. So instead of butter, we're
using bacon fat in there. So the whole story. Look, it's like "Stomp." The whole story behind the
chicken-fried cheeseburger. This is one of the rounds
for "Will It Burger" back in like 2016, the first
thing I ever made for Mythical. And back then we can say the food program wasn't as advanced as it is today. And so literally the directive was just to take a whole
burger and deep fry it as if it were a chicken fried steak. And so the bun really gets
logged with a lot of oil. It is a very delicious dish,
but it is incredibly indulgent. So I'm gonna show you all of the nuance that went into Mythical
cooking about five years ago. Also, if you want to hear the full story behind my first ever time
at the Mythical studio, I literally just talked to Chase about it on "Good Mythical Crew," the podcast that you can listen to
if you are a second tier society member and you can watch the video if you're a third-year society member. Head to mythical.com,
sign up for the society if that's something that you are into. It's a really wacky story. It involves Chase and
a lewd Russian website. I don't know how else to
describe it, but watch the story. So we're waiting, we're
waking for this bacon. I'm waking for the bacon. We're waiting for the
bacon fat to render out and for this to get crispy. But meanwhile, we got to
start cooking cheeseburgers. So I got a nice little
grass-fed beef patty right here. I'm just gonna season it
up a little bit of salt on one side, a little pepper, a little bit of oil in
the pan, check it out. This is the ultimate
burger cooking technique. You hit him with like a step back then you kind of
underground finger roll it. And then I'm using a two slices of your finest American cheese. So I'm gonna put one on
the bottom of the bun, one of the top of the bun, that's gonna act as an
adhesive for the burger so when we fry it, it
doesn't all just splay apart. Bacon is looking nice and crispy. You're getting all that fat. I'm gonna take the paper
and just peel it away. Always season both sides
of your burger, obvi, duh. I remember the first time
I heard someone say "obvi" instead of obviously, and
I was in a fit of rage. You shortened that word. So if you see, I got Maggie, look at, look at how much fat. Are you proud of me? Yeah. Now I'm gonna take this
flour and dump it in. You've seen this before. This is a roux, typically
made with butter, but when you do it with
bacon fat, it just gets nice. Gonna hit this with a little bit of salt and a whole lot of black pepper. Black pepper gravy on
a chicken-fried steak, what a treat, shout out
to the state of Oklahoma, inventor of chicken-fried steak, one of the world's great foods. So burger patty should
be cooked on one side. Give it a little flip, then I'm gonna add a slice
of cheese right to that. The roux looks nice and
cooked in that gravy. I'm gonna add a little bit of milk to it. Then we're gonna whisk that milk in there. That's gorgeous. I said "that's gorgeous." That's just a thing that cooks say. They just go "Oh, that's gorgeous." Like Gordon Ramsey, when he salts meat, just goes like, "Oh, that's gorgeous." Like yeah, are the white
flecks on normal meat gorgeous? No, you just didn't hear
yourself speak for three seconds so you said a word, and I know a little something about that. Anyways, we got this gorgeous milk sludge and then we let that come to the boil and it's gonna tighten
up very beautifully. Beautifully. What? Have you heard of the hamburger bun? It's like bread, but it's
got like more film on top. You can look it up on the internet. You can find it. I'm gonna take a little bit of mustard. I'm using the Irish
burger chain's formula. The burger chain, it was
owned by two Irishmen. So what I'm doing, I got ketchup, mustard, I got pickles on the top bun. No, not yet. What was on that? Was there raw meat on that? Cheese! Cheese, cheese,
cheese, okay, we're good. Anyways, what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna take this bottom bun, I'm gonna add a slice of cheese to it, and then I'm gonna take my hamburger, which coincidentally not made of ham, a little false advertising much? And I'm gonna take that and I'm gonna put it
right onto this cheese. Again, if you look at
the architecture of this, which is very important,
cheese on the bottom, that's gonna melt into the
bun, hot meat, more cheese, melt into the top bun,
should seal it all together. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna
flatten it out a little bit. I'm just gonna add it back to the pan. Kind of really smash it, get
your hands down in there. There we go. There we go. There we go. Give that gravy a sir. Just need the gravy to
boil for about 10 minutes, really want it to tighten up. Yeah, there we go, that's nice. Flatten out the burger, 'cause again, we are taking this whole cheeseburger and we're gonna dunk it
in flour and egg wash and then deep fry it, stay tuned. Hey everybody, welcome back. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take this here cheeseburger, and I'm just gonna
simply dunk it in flour. You know what's about to happen. And then we're just gonna take it and I'm gonna dunk it in this here egg. Yeah, yeah, yeah, kind
of roll it all around. And again, you could use
any battering method. You could tempura fry your cheeseburger, you can panko crust your cheeseburger, but I'm chicken frying it, which to me means seasoned flour just a nice, you know,
Cajun-esque seasoning going on in there, you can use whatever you want. And now that we've got all
the flour packed in there, we're just gonna throw
it into a thing a hot oil and see what happens. Well not see what happens
because we've done it before. And there it is. Now we're gonna do that for a little bit and then we're gonna flip it. I'll wash my hands, give me a sec. I wish I could tell you like
the key to chicken frying a whole cheeseburger is there's no key. It's all a raw animal instinct, I think. You know, your body craves the
chicken fried cheeseburger, the way I look at it,
evolutionarily speaking. Also anyone who ever starts a sentence with "evolutionarily speaking," probably run from that conversation. It's not gonna be good. Evolutionarily speaking,
your body is trained to want carbohydrates
and fats and proteins. And this has got a lot of all of them. All right, so I'm gonna
take this here cheeseburger and I'm gonna flip it, and you see that gorgeous
little browning crust on there? That is why we don't deep fry it. That's why we use something
like a cast iron skillet because you're gonna
get that lovely browning from the direct contact with the pan. This cast iron skillet, it's been in my family for 19 generations. That's right, 19, we've been
chicken frying cheeseburgers in that for all 19 of those generations. My Amish great, great, great,
great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great,
great, great grandfather. Amish was actually his name as well. He founded Amish-ism. So this is really kind of
a cultural recipe for me. Is the gravy doing okay? Yeah, it's looking pretty good. I actually do have a lot
of Mennonite relatives, been in America for a long time. So splashed some oil
on top of that burger, really get the grease soaking in there. So I'm gonna pull these here
chicken-fried cheeseburger. You don't want to drain any of the oil off because that is what we call flavor. That's the, like the water
slide to Flavorville. It's all the oil that's gonna be just dripping off this
right here, see that? That's the waterfall. That's the waterfall to Flavortown. People hike to this spot. They get married there, Maggie. So now simply plate this up. I don't have any garnish planned. I don't know if you guys think there's any good garnish ideas for this. I didn't have any. So all I'm gonna do,
you see we got a whole chicken-fried cheeseburger right here, and now I'm just gonna take, I don't know why I'm using a spoon. Should just use like a, like a mug. You get a mug of bacon gravy on there. I mean, say what you want though, this is good eating, come on. And garnish, you're gonna
take a single slice of pickle and place it next to the plate. All right, we got our gorgeous original chicken-fried cheeseburger, first dish I ever made for Mythical. But now I'm gonna show you
my updated 2021 version and like everything in
the Mythical Kitchen, it doesn't taste better, but
it is a lot harder to make. All right, the 2021, this
is the futuristic burger. This is the self-actualized version of the chicken-fried cheeseburger. What I'm gonna do is
I'm gonna take the spoon that I had hiding in
the gravy the whole time and I'm gonna dollop it
into this here muffin tin, because what we're gonna do is we're gonna make frozen gravy disks, and then we're gonna take the cheeseburger and we're gonna stuff it
with the frozen gravy disc. Then when we cook that cheeseburger, the frozen gravy disc is gonna loosen up into a molten gravy core, and then we're gonna
deep fry that whole thing in panko to give it that crunch. So it's like a Juicy Lucy, except it's like, I call
this the Gravy Gary. All right, Trevor! All right, so we're gonna
put that in the freezer. That's where our freezer is. I throw things over there and
a small robot named Nicole grabs it and puts it into the freezer. Also the updated version
involves me grinding my own meat. Honestly, a really awesome thing to do is grind your own meat
for your cheeseburgers. I'm using a little bit
of a leaner beef here. These are sirloin, sirloin. I'm using a little bit
of a leaner meat here. I'm using sirloin tips 'cause I'm gonna be
grinding it with bacon, and that has fatties in it. There's fatty, fatty, boombalatty bacon, and then we're using some
lean sirloin tips here because I want the best
of both of those worlds to really coincide, and then
you're gonna marry the flavor of the actual burger. You're gonna marry the
flavor of the actual burger with the bacon and the gravy. So I'm gonna this meat grinder on and then I'm gonna mash the beef in it. Yeah, yeah, there we go. There we go. You want to mash the beef. Make sure your beef is cold
when you're grinding it. And now I'm gonna shove
some bacon through there. Whoa, go meat, go! You want about a three to
1.6 ratio of meat to bacon. So I'm taking the bacon fat and I'm tossing that
with these sirloin tips. One of the best parts about
making your own burger out of fresh ground meat is that you can sort of like loosely pack it. And so it doesn't just
get like hard and compact. Hold on. Hey, do you remember the
gravy that I freezed? I did it. So they're gonna take a gravy disk. If you see, you can play just
a little ice hockey with it, you know, kind of go back
and forth and whatnot. So we got a frozen gravy disk. Just take a nice claw full of meat and then we want to hit, oh gosh, let's say an 11-ounce burger patty. And then we're gonna pop that
onto some panko crunch buns to sort of like reify? No one says, who says reify? Anyways, to reify the
chicken fried steak motif. Nice little thick burger
patty, disc of gravy. And now we're gonna create
a thin little burger hat. Pop that on there. Now you're gonna pick up the whole thing. just gonna use your fingers
to work around the sides and make sure to really
press that together. I might be terrible at folding dumplings. I might be terrible at being a father, but I'm really great at
hand forming burger patties. I've used the joke enough
that I have children. I don't. All right, so you see, this is a little bit of a prego burger. It's pregnant with a
disc of gravy, you see. So what I'm gonna do,
I'm gonna sear this off just to get a nice crust on the outside, and then I am going to put it in the oven to get it cooked all the way through. And then we're actually gonna
be double panko crusting this because I really want
a really thick crust. And then we're gonna drop
that in the deep fryer and cover it in stuff. Now that we have this setup, what I was gonna do is I
was gonna pull this out and I was gonna put some cheese on it and then put that in
the oven to melt cheese. But I really want to
deep fry the cheese now. Any objections? Thank you. Flour up that cheese, get it into the egg. And then you're just gonna
panko up that cheese, and cheese is gonna go
right into the fryer on top of the burger. What you're gonna do is
you're gonna angle the cheese right above the burger
and just pull it out and there you have your crispy cheese hat atop of your burger. The prestige! Yeah, that's good. That's fun, but this isn't
my vision for the burger. What I'm going to do, it was gonna be three slices of Gouda. I'm gonna take two slices of Gouda. I'll pop that on top of the burger and we're gonna pop it in the oven at 350, just for, oh look at that slide around. This is ridiculous. Look at that. You can pop in the oven at
350 for about two minutes just to melt it, and then we're gonna put the rest of our
toppings on our burger. Fancy, it's French, idiots. So, what we got here, this
is a panko crunch bun. Trevor made this from scratch. Trevor, you got glorious buns. They're supple yet I can tell weighty. So what we've done is
we've just brushed the top of the bun with egg wash,
and then hit it with panko and that's gonna get the
crunch right off the bat. So what I'm gonna do
is gonna open that up, we're gonna fly that in there, but first we gotta make our condiments. I'm calling this, I'm calling
this 2001 a space island. I'm making gravy thousand
island, that's what I'm doing. Gonna take some pickles
and add that to ketchup, and then hey, you
remember that bacon gravy that we made a while ago? I'm gonna take bacon gravy
and add that right there. Thousand island looks a
lot different than this. Well, whatever we're doing it. All right, so you're gonna
take some of that gravy island that's got all that bacon
in there and give a nice, it looks less good than
I thought it would. No, no, no, it's gonna be great. The flavors are there, and now I'm gonna take
a little bit of lettuce and then I'm just gonna throw
it right in the garbage can. We're gonna take our burger
and we're gonna put that, just nestle it atop the bun. And then now I'm taking roasted tomato. It's one of my favorite
things to add to a burger. This is a lovely beefsteak tomato that we've just roasted
off a very hot oven, olive oil, salt and pepper. Now pickled fennel, add
some pickled your burger. I'm gonna put a nest right on top. All right, now we're gonna
take the rest of that 2002 space island odyssey, and then crown that bun right on top. There you have it, there's
the updated 2021 version of the chicken-fried cheeseburger, the first dish I ever made for Mythical. I cannot freaking wait to eat this. Man, I'm getting all emotional here. We got the old school in the new school. I can't wait to dig in. I'm gonna try the old school first. This is a bite of nostalgia for me, and honestly it still
looks pretty freaking good. Make sure to swipe it in the gravy. Oh yeah, burger is still
a little bit medium. Okay. Yeah. I get the appeal of that. That's a really freaking good though, but can't wait to try and
cut into this bad boy. This is a big Bertha of a burger. Oh no. Oh, look at that. Maggie, I call you Maggie? Okay, I'm just gonna go upside down. I'm gonna have to split the hips and I'm just gonna bite into it and try and slurp out all
the inside gravies, okay? Meg, are you getting this? I'm going right to you. Um, I uh, I wish I had a beer, man. It's actually really
stupid how well this works and how incredibly that
gravy cooked inside there, because you get the meat
juices falling into the gravy. Then when you slurp it
like a nice juicy burger, not only are you getting
those burger juices and it's really good beef, but you're getting all the gravy
just slurp into your mouth. It's un-freaking-real. I need Jake to taste it. Jake, you ready to be sporked? Hey Josh, I'm ready to
spork, how's it going? It's going good, we've been talking for the last like seven
hours consistently. Yeah. Jake, I don't exactly know how I'm gonna spork
this, but I'm gonna try. I'm at least gonna get you a bottom bun. I trust you. Guys, not every dish can
be eaten with a spork. Did we ever think about this
when we thought of this idea? Jake, I've made you a burger salad. Jake, choo choo, also the spork's now
loose and it's swiveling. Oh, awesome. How is that? Amazing. Did Nicole cook this? What? I did it this time. I mean, it's pretty great. Are you sure Nicole didn't cook this? I'm telling you, my sweat is in that. Okay. That's the seasoning. It's a 10 out of 10. Yes! A little gymnastics, they're not even, I don't even know if they're
scored on a scale of 10. Jake, thank you so much. Thank you for sharing in this
sentimental moment with me, and thank you all so much for sticking by the Mythical Kitchen and believing in me and
Nicole and Trevor and V and the whole crew here, your
energy flows through me today. The world is one big organism! We have new episodes out every week. We got new episodes of our podcast, "A Hot Dog is a Sandwich"
out every Wednesday wherever you get your podcasts. Hit us up on Instagram @MythicalKitchen with pictures of you or Mythical dishes under #DreamsBecomeFood, and
a sincere thank you, bye. I'm covered in gravy, man. I'm covered in so much gravy right now. There's gravy in my orifices. Got orifice gravy. You can cook up your
own feast while wearing the Mythical Kitchen apron,
available now at Mythical.com.
