Binging with Babish - Krabby Patty from Spongebob Squarepants

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enDon't you get it you crustaceouscheapskate?I can't make a double Krabby Patty with the work!I can't put a patty on a bun with lettuce, cheese, onions, tomatoes, ketchup, mustard, pickles, and top bun together in that order!It's time.It is time.As a thank you to everyone who helped make Binging with Babish my full-time job, it's time to finally make the all-time most requested dish on this show, the Krabby Patty.The ingredients of which are laid here before you, except of course, the secret ingredient.What is the secret ingredient?Well, I just happen to have some right here.That's right, I finally cracked the code.After a year of research, I've come to the conclusion that the secret ingredient is a heaping tablespoon of nothing.That might seem anticlimactic, but it actually makes a lot of sense.Mr. Krabs is a shrewd businessman and it makes sense that rather than buying expensive secret ingredients, he would create a burger that is its own guerrilla marketing campaign.That being said, several sources cite the secret ingredient as being a pinch of King Neptune's Poseidon Powder, which I think is monosodium glutamate or MSG.So we're going to start by seasoning a store-bought frozen beef patty with salt, pepper, and MSG.Now some people are saying that it's a crab burger, but Mr. Krabs is a crab.That's pretty horrible and barbaric even for Nickelodeon.So, once thawed we're going to prepare our burger much as we would any other burger.Vegetable oil, high heat, cast-iron.Then we're going to follow Spongebob's exact order of assembly, which starts with lettuce on top of the burner, which is a terrible idea.Never do this, I'm doing this for science.Then we're going a single slice of yellow American, single slice of Vidalia onion, tomato, ketchup, mustard, and the absolute most important part.Do not forget the pickles.You don't want Bubble Bass doing that god awful laugh of his.Top bun and there you have it, a Krabby Patty with the works.Even kind of looks like that one in the training video, right?Normal fast-food burger protocol would be to just dig in, but I haven't been able to do a cross-section that's shown in a while, that's a big relief for me.Now as expected this was a totally delicious burger.MSG makes things taste better and while it's perfectly safe I understand if people have reservations about eating it.Now if you want to up the natural umami content of your burger, here's a few ways to do it.The first step is to make a seasoning out of some natural umami bombs.We're going to start with a bit of bonito flake, which is a shaved dried fish, some dried shitake mushrooms,some dried kombu, which is a sort of sea kelp so this seems even more accurate if I had to really realistically guess what Mr. Krabs secret ingredient was would be that, and a single anchovy.Now this is all sounding pretty fishy, sorry, but rest assured that these will not make your burger taste like seafood.We're going to grind these into a fine dust, and all we're going to get from them flavor-wise is their glutamate content.Use a spice grinder like this one to completely powderise these ingredients so they make an easy sprinkling dust for later on.Now onto the burger patty, umami refers to the unctuousness and savoriness of a dish, so it only makes sense that we use some fatty flavorful cuts of beef.So we're going to cut equal parts beef, short rib, and chuck steak into 1-inch cubes that we're going to place in the freezer for about 15 minutesalong with the blade of a food processor to get everything nice and firm and cold.Pulsing your food processor until you achieve a nice pebbly ground beef.Make sure not to over process your beef or you're going to end up with softballs instead of burgers.Back on umami duty, it's time to address tomatoes.We're going to oven dry our tomatoes in a low oven on a nonstick surface like a Silpat, drizzle with a little bit of olive oil, sprinkle with a little bit of kosher salt,and place in a 200 degree fahrenheit oven for about an hour and a half or until they come out wrinkly little prunes like these guys.Next, to up the glutamate content of our ketchup, we're going to make a puree of sun-dried tomatoes.Add a little bit of olive oil if they're not smooth enough and combine this with a bit of good old-fashioned ketchup.This is going to add a few additional megatons to our taste explosion.Each one of these steps is optional, but this one is especially optional.If you'd like to additionally amp up your mustard and if you like the taste of yellow miso, combine the two.Last but certainly not least is the issue of cheese.We're going to make parmesan cheese crisps by baking grated parmesan at 350 for about 15 minutes.Season and sear the patties as usual and make sure you remove the burger from the heat before adding your spice powder.Unless you want to set off every smokealarm in your zip code.We're going to assemble our burger properly this time starting with the patty, followed by some caramelized onions, one of our oven dried tomatoes,a bit of our misso mustard, a bit of our sun-dried tomato ketchup, this stuff is awesome, parmesan cheese crisp, and last, where it belongs, a handful iceberg lettuce.Top your burger and slice in half of thatcross-section and try to contain your embarrassment over the fact that you've overcooked the patty.But celebrate the fact that this burger is a symphony of flavor.You guys know me I don't clean my plate unless it's really really good,especially because these things are going straight to my thighs before I blow up.\n"