Blended Burger Contest: Winner Announcement

This isn't gonna be pretty at all, all right?

Let me just, like, apologize in advance,

let me grab a couple napkins.

Hi, I'm Chris Morocco,

test kitchen director from Bon Appetit.

And today we are going to be determining

the winner of our blended burger contest.

For the second year in a row

we teamed up with the Mushroom Council

and invited home cooks from all over

to submit a recipe for a blended burger.

I'm going to be cooking the recipes

from all three of our finalists

and whoever gets chosen is going to win $10,000.

Hi Lauren, thank you so much for being with us today.

Hi Chris. It is so nice to meet you.

I am so excited to see you cook my burger.

I can't wait to see what happens.

So you went through several iterations of this burger,

and you've mentioned you like

shiitake mushrooms in particular,

any specific reason why that mushroom?

They have a really nice, unctuous flavor.

And the mushroom bacon,

I love the mushroom bacon,

I, you know, I like the smoky flavor

and to have something that

gives you the feeling of bacon,

but not actually be eating bacon.

I really like that.

Yeah, totally, I'm glad we started with this one.

Step one, chili maple brunch burger,

I need to make mushroom bacon,

oyster mushrooms, shiitake mushrooms, and cremini mushrooms

onto our little baking sheet here.

1/4 cup of maple syrup,

one to two teaspoons Calabrian chilies.

I mean, I think we all know

we're doing two teaspoons of Calabrian chilies.

Keep it on hand, you'll want to put it on everything.

Ground turkey, some hot Italian pork sausage,

and then 1/4 teaspoon of brown sugar.

With a blended burger,

what we're talking about is kind of incorporating

25% mushrooms in with our ground meat.

We're already concentrating the flavors of those mushrooms.

We've added seasoning, we've added smoked paprika.

You get all of the additional benefit

of having kind of concentrated the mushrooms flavors

and having developed a ton of, kind of, umami

and kind of nuance from, you know, having roasted them.

Those look awesome.

They came out perfectly.

We're gonna cook our egg.

You want it to be just firm enough

that it's gonna hold together.

Cheddar.

Got our burger going on our buttered, toasted bun.

Mushrooms on top of the burger.

Mushroom on top of the egg.

Whoa.

Let's break it down, all right?

So you've got buttered, toasted sesame bun.

We've got arugula, chili maple sauce, a fried egg,

our mushroom bacon, cheddar cheese,

patty, which is hot Italian sausage, ground turkey,

and more of those roasted mushrooms

folded right into the mixture.

Bun all the way down from there.

All I can say is

the bar has been set

very high.

You get mushroom, you get heat and you get richness.

Hi Tyler, how you doing, man?

Nice to meet you.

A little nervous, but I appreciate you having me.

Do you want to walk me through a little bit,

kind of what your thinking was

and how, where the ideas came from?

I sat down with my wife,

we mapped out 36 different variations

of what I typically make.

When you have to try 36 different burgers,

that gets kind of rough.

Take a couple bites, notes, bites, notes,

Pepto, more bites,

and then it just became perfect.

We'll see where we end up, all right?

I know you're going to do great with it.

Tyler's putting white button mushrooms

in his burger mixture, which is probably the smart play,

just 'cause they give like a nice, sort of like,

more sort of subtle expression of mushroom flavor.

Whereas the maitake is gonna really bring it

when it comes to flavor.

Two different textures of mushroom

to kind of play with here.

Tyler wants them finally diced

and that is what Tyler is gonna get.

Feel like I need a paper bag to breathe into,

like, just start hyperventilating.

This is 3/8ths of a pound of ground meat, okay?

One tablespoon of the dry rub mix.

It seems like a lot, but it blends in real well.

I can tell Tyler's watching me.

It's very stressful.

You're stressed, good god!

Robust sized burgers.

Just tear it until you have these like

beautiful sort of like little like plushie things

that are then gonna get kind of flattened

and sort of crisped into the skillet

almost as if it was like its own little burger.

Maitake mushrooms,

probably my favorite mushroom out there,

maybe one of the most flavorful things ever.

Our rub mixture.

Yeah, yeah.

Got great color on that second side.

There is a lot of cheese going on this burger.

Oh yeah, I've got some drippage, we're good.

Okay, feelin' better.

[laughing]

This ain't a little person's burger.

Let's break it down.

You've got the bun, you got mayonnaise on the bottom bun.

We've got green leaf lettuce,

the burger, 20% ground beef chuck

with white button mushroom,

our dry rub, peppered bacon, crispy maitake,

Jarlsberg, Gruyere, bread and butter pickles,

onion, tomato, yellow mustard,

and ketchup on the underside of the top bun.

Whoa.

Whoa could be good or bad.

You're just like running full speed into a wall of flavor

where everything feels integrated.

Everything that feels harmonious.

Oh, yeah.

See, I told you guys,

You got tons of nuance and intrigue

from all the different spices happening in the dry rub.

It's very good.

I'm glad he likes it.

That's the whole point of the burger.

Hi Stephanie, how you doing?

Hi, Chris.

I'm really looking forward to,

you know, hearing about

what your development process was like for the recipe.

I called it the French bistro smashburger.

At first, it was kind of an idea of like,

French onion soup.

And then I also had kind of like a beef Wellington in mind.

It just kind of evolved from there.

Tell me about the choice of criminis as your one mushroom.

I just liked the depth of flavor that it gave.

I thought it was a nice medium-flavored mushroom.

If you're gonna go with just one mushroom

and cook it down from a texture perspective,

crimini are just a great all-purpose mushroom

that can kind of go crispy

or can kind of stay a little bit on the meatier side.

I'm excited to, to get into this here

and I will probably check in with you later, okay?

Okay, sounds great.

You know, Stephanie was the only person,

only contestant to only go with one mushroom.

Oh, that's interesting.

In this preparation,

I want to be a little bit judicious

with how much fat I'm putting into this mushroom mixture,

just because I know that

it's going to be combined with ground beef chuck.

Sirloin tends to be quite a bit leaner.

Sirloin wasn't gonna cut it for this burger.

Half of a medium Vidalia onion.

Aioli is really just kind of a,

it's a garlicky mayonnaise,

kind of homemade style mayonnaise.

I'm gonna weigh my burgers pre smashing these.

Loving what's happening with those edges

and the mushrooms around the edge.

Great, great, great time to flip and put your cheese on.

Fewer elements, but kind of working harder, perhaps,

we'll see.

All right, time to put it all together.

Have a brioche bun, once again.

So we have a patty, ground chuck with our mushroom mixture,

butter, olive oil, crimini mushrooms,

shallot, garlic, thyme,

and then deglazed with a little bit of Sherry wine,

Gruyere cheese on top of that,

caramelized onions with balsamic vinegar

and Worcestershire sauce,

garlicky mayo with little pops of cornichon in there.

Just fantastic.

That patty-

I think he likes it.

That patty is pretty hard to beat.

The aioli has lots of brightness, and lots of acid,

the cornichon adds so much there.

The two kind of balance each other out.

Yeah, I'm going to have some really hard thinking to do.

I know it's always a cop out to sit there and say,

oh, it was a really hard decision,

but it was.

I think what we got was three burgers

that all work phenomenal.

The burger that wins [drum roll]

$10,000 from the Mushroom Council

is Lauren Holly's chili maple brunch burger.

Oh my god!

I was just completely swept off my feet by this burger.

I loved the mushroom bacon,

all the different ways that like,

funk and heat were brought into that burger,

topped with an egg.

It just had everything for me.

Thank you so much.

Thank you to the Mushroom Council and Bon Appetit.

And thank you, Chris, for making my burger

so much better than I could make it.

Yours combined, I think just like, in your face flavor,

but really supreme makeability.

It's a lot of fun for me to watch you make it.

Oh yeah?

You did some things that were different

than the way that I would have made it.

And it made me kind of think, oh, that's a good idea.

I, I don't know what to say.

I'm just so happy, thank you.