The Taco Burger

First there was the Hott Denn Burger, then a re-creation of the Luther, and then the Pizza Burger, so the Taco Burger should come as no great surprise. Many of my favorite foods are frankenstein in nature; Burrito Pizza, Candy Sushi, and Siberian Nachos. I really like taking the flavor elements of a food and applying that to another style of food.

VIDEO AND FLICKR LINK

The Taco Burger was a fun puzzle because we wanted to make sure to get all the elements in, but making something better than just a taco on a burger. As Curt puts it, "Why does it have to be like this?" Rather than go with an authentic Mexican taco we decided that this bastardization worked better with "Taco Tuesday" family dinner style tacos. That means shredded "Nacho" cheese and taco seasoning. To make things a little more interesting, and inspired by Food Jammers, we rounded out the meal.

Taco Burger

We made a diagram of the taco burger and mapped out the ingredients before shopping. The bun and meat are the simple elements of the burger. We started by marinating the beef in taco-seasoning for a few hours and preparing some guacamole from scratch. We also chopped up the tomatoes and onions ahead of time. We were feeling really good about our prep work.

Nacho Fries

Initially we thought about making the nacho fries a little more fancy with sour cream and a little chili powder on them. Curt pointed out that the essential ingredients of the nacho were cheese and jalapeño, and that seemed to fit our more "Americanized" style of Taco Burger. The nacho fries were very easy to make and didn't take up too much counterspace or stovetop real estate. Even after adding the jalapeño and cheese I was a little worried they weren't elaborate enough, but I underestimated the power of cheese. The Nacho Fries were a great success, and served with just the nacho-essential ingredients they made a great side.

Horchata Milkshake

So we decided to try to make Horchata Milkshakes. Having no idea what was really in horchata, I looked up a recipe and scanned the ingredients, but failed to look at the process involved in making horchata. Cheesecloth? Soaking for six hours? Missed that stuff. We put vanilla ice cream, ice, cinnamon, sugar, vanilla, and rice into a blender and expected magic to happen. While the end result tasted great, we ran into two main problems:

• Cheap Blender: Curt didn't have a blender, so we borrowed one, and when I plugged it in I didn't realize it was on and the cap was in the blender. POW! The cap exploded and shards of plastic covered the counter. And I felt like crap for breaking a borrowed blender.
• Rice Is Very Small: The rice didn't blend, so there were chunks of it in the horchata. Not the smoothest thing to drink, and we spent a long time trying to filter the rice out, make the rice softer, and other crazy ideas involving microwaves, coffee filters, colanders, and other kitchen utensils.

As rice is an essential element of horchata I'd use rice dream or rice milk in the future, and just skip using actual rice. Oh yeah, it turns out that a little bourbon in the horchata shake tasted great!

Conclusions

The mishaps with the horchata were mostly amusing. The only real problem we ran into was counter space and trying to get everything ready at once. We decided to go buffet style and offer a visual map of the final product so people could make their own, but also skip any ingredients they didn't like. At the last minute we had also picked up some tortilla chips so people could snack on those as we finished cooking.

With the use of vegan patties and Rice Dream everything could be made vegan real easy with the exception of the nacho fries, and even those you could choose to dress up with guacamole and other nacho toppings instead of cheese I suppose (personally I'm not a huge fan of vegan cheese).

Working in the kitchen with Curt made me envious of the Hot Knives as those guys just seem to perfectly complement each other. Curt was frying the meat while I was prepping the table, but he would often start another task (fries, buns, etc) and have to ask me for help. Eventually I took over the fries and just started assisting Curt, as he knew where everything was ("behind you Chef," I said on one occasion, as I moved a hot frying pan) and things worked better with him clearly running the show.

And as Steve pointed out in the comments, the documentation of the creation and the final product is thin in the video as those times were more hectic and we were less able to make videos with the pressure of actually feeding people. The plan was to end the video with the creation of Taco Burger Pizza, but maybe that will be another entry in the future.