Binging with Babish: Krabby Patty from Spongebob Squarepants

Don't you understand, you cheapskate? I can't make a double Krabby Patty with work! I can't put a burger on a bun with lettuce, cheese, onion, tomato, ketchup, mustard, pickles and top bun together in that order! Is the time. It's time. As a thank you to everyone who helped make Binging with Babish my full-time job, it's time to finally make the most requested dish of all time on this show, the Krabby Patty. the ingredients of which are presented here before you, except, of course, the secret ingredient. What is the secret ingredient? Well, it turns out I have some here.

That's right, I finally cracked the code. After a year of research, I came to the conclusion that the secret ingredient is a heaping spoonful of nothing. This may seem anticlimactic, but it actually makes a lot of sense. Mr. Krabs is a shrewd businessman and it makes sense that, instead of buying expensive secret ingredients, he creates a burger that is his own guerrilla marketing campaign. That said, several sources cite the secret ingredient as a pinch of King Neptune's Poseidon Powder, which I believe is MSG or MSG. So, we'll start by seasoning a store-bought frozen beef

patty

with salt, pepper, and MSG.

Now some people say it's a crab burger, but Mr. Krabs is a crab. That's pretty horrible and barbaric even for Nickelodeon. So once thawed we are going to prepare our burger as we would with any other burger. Vegetable oil, high heat, cast iron. Then we're going to follow SpongeBob's exact assembly order, which starts with the lettuce on top of the burner, which is a terrible idea. Never do this, I do it for science. Then we go with a single slice of yellow Americano, a single slice of Vidalia onion, tomato, ketchup, mustard and the most important part.

Don't forget the pickles. You don't want Bubble Bass to make that horrible laugh of his. Top bun and there you have it, a Krabby Patty with everything. It even looks like the one in the training video, right? Normal fast food burger protocol would be to just dig in, but it's been a while since I've been able to do a cross section showing, that's a huge relief to me. Now, as expected, this was a totally delicious burger. Monosodium glutamate makes things taste better, and although it is perfectly safe, I understand why people have reservations about eating it.

Now, if you want to increase the natural umami content of your burger, here are some ways to do it. The first step is to make a seasoning with some natural umami bombs. We're going to start with some bonito flakes, which is a dried shaved fish, some dried shitake mushrooms, some dried kombu, which is a type of seaweed, so this seems even more accurate if I had to guess so. realistically what Mr. Krabs' secret ingredient would be that, and a single anchovy. Now this all sounds pretty fishy, ​​sorry, but rest assured, this won't make your burger taste like seafood.

We will grind them to a fine powder and all we will get from them in terms of flavor will be their glutamate content. Use a spice grinder like this one to completely pulverize these ingredients so they are easy to sprinkle into powder for later. Now, in the burger, umami refers to the oiliness and flavor of a dish, so it makes sense that we use some fatty, flavorful cuts of meat. So we are going to cut equal parts of beef, ribs and filet into 1-inch cubes that we will place in the freezer for about 15 minutes along with the blade of a food processor so that everything is nice and firm. and cold.

Pulse your food processor until you have a nice pebbly ground beef. Make sure you don't over-process the meat or you'll end up with mushy balls instead of patties. Back to umami duty, it's time to tackle the tomatoes. We're going to dry our tomatoes in the oven at low heat on a non-stick surface like a Silpat, drizzle with a little olive oil, sprinkle with a little kosher salt and place in a 200 degree Fahrenheit oven for about an hour and a half or until wrinkled prunes like these come out. Next, to increase the glutamate content of our ketchup, we are going to puree sundried tomatoes.

Add a little olive oil if they are not soft enough and combine it with some traditional ketchup. This will add a few extra megatons to our flavor explosion. Each of these steps is optional, but this one is especially optional. If you want to enhance your mustard even more and like the flavor of yellow miso, combine the two. Last but not least is the question of cheese. We are going to make parmesan fries by baking grated parmesan at 350 for about 15 minutes. Season and brown the burgers as usual and be sure to remove the burger from the heat before adding the powdered spices.

Unless you want to set off all the smoke alarms in your zip code. This time we're going to assemble our burger properly, starting with the

patty

, followed by some caramelized onions, one of our oven-dried tomatoes, a little bit of our misso mustard, a little bit of our sun-dried tomato ketchup, this is amazing. , crispy parmesan cheese and, lastly, where appropriate, a handful of iceberg lettuce. Cover your burger and cut it in half from that cross section and try to contain your embarrassment at the fact that you have overcooked the burger. 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 good, especially since this stuff goes straight to my thighs before it explodes.