This is a neat comment, but as someone who's been to a couple different Momofuku places (incl. Ssam Bar) but never had that dish: how heavily spiced is it? The dish is inspired (simultaneously) by Mapo Tofu and Bolognese --- it's supposed to literally be Ssam Bar's take on Mapo Tofu --- which suggests to me that the quality of the pork is probably not all that important to the overall dish.
A good hamburger, on the other hand, relies almost entirely on the flavor of the beef.
There's an informal rule in cooking about how the simpler a dish is, the better your ingredients and technique have to be, because there's nothing to hide behind.
That really depends on the type of burger. Occasionally, I enjoy a good In n Out Burger. I don't expect their meat quality is particularly good.
"Patty melt" style burgers are generally less reliant on meat quality as long as you can get a good, crunchy, umami seat on the thin mean patty or patties.
I suspect the thicker higher end style burgers would be more reliant on the quality of the beef.
However, for economic reasons, they are probably the necessary target of impossible meat until they reach a scale large enough to compete with cheap beef.
In-n-Out burger patties are never frozen and the chain has a number of high-profile chefs as fans. Their beef may be ground and it's fast food, but McDonalds it ain't.
Freezing isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially for burger patties with a good amount of fat. I'd rather have that than something that's been sitting around in the fridge for too long. As long as it's frozen very quickly and defrosted properly, freezing is fine.
In-N-Out meat is pretty good; it's just super thin. McDonald's is not good, but believe me, if McDonald's had a good burger patty, and if they wanted to freeze it, it wouldn't be any worse for it.
On the other side of things, In-N-Out doesn't freeze their fries, and they're much worse than the frozen fries from places like McDonald's or Shake Shack's crinkle-cut fries, and it's specifically because they don't do the fry-freeze-refry process critically important for great fries.
The critical thing about great fries is that they are fried twice, once to cook the potato and the second time for the crispy shell. The freeze step in the middle is likely just for transportation logistics.
While the double frying is critical, the freezing step in the middle is not just for logistics. The fries are better when they're frozen post-initial fry. I make fries all the time from scratch, and I always throw them in the freezer before the second fry. The final product is better than when I don't freeze between fries. Freezing helps add irregularity to the surface and aids in crisp them up post second fry.
> Freezing the potatoes causes their moisture to convert to ice, forming sharp, jagged crystals. These crystals damage the cell structure of the potato, making it easier for them to be released once they are heated and convert to steam.
Yeah, you can buy those all-natural 100% potato french fries from the supermarket and fry them into something truly fantastic. When restaurant fries taste "frozen" it's because they're not being refried well.
> Who freezes ground beef before turning it into a world-class hamburger? What's the best frozen hamburger I can buy?
I do, because I'm not a restaurant, and I don't buy enough meat for one or two servings of hamburger. If a restaurant's been around long enough and has enough turn over, they won't have my problem, but a place could want to freeze for time reasons, or to help with getting a gnarly crust by cooking it from frozen, etc. If you're freezing with the kind of thing the NYC sushi guys use (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/08/nyregion/sushi-fresh-from-...), and defrosting properly, a truly great hamburger could easily be made from a frozen patty.
I've never heard of a good prefrozen hamburger patty unless you're getting something from Snake River Farms or something along those lines (they ship frozen meat). I freeze my own.
When I don't want to take the time to grind my own meat I have the butcher do it for me. I don't know any restaurants that incorporate freezing to improve quality, only to lower costs.
It comes down to logistics. Maybe I'm a smaller restaurant, and I want to serve BBQ or fresh bread. Might not be feasible for them to smoke a brisket every day if they're not a brisket place, but you can definitely freeze some brisket and bring it back to life in pretty good quality. It doesn't improve it, but it lets a restaurant serve something that they otherwise couldn't.
Same goes for fresh bread. Maybe they want to serve pastrami sandwiches in Manhattan, but the best rye bread they can find is in Detroit, and so they have their baker freeze the bread and ship it over. It's not that the bread is better because it was frozen, but they're able to get better bread because they could freeze it.
Yes, these are examples of people maximizing for a variable other than quality. The linked study indicates that the freeze-thaw cycle has significant negative effects on the quality of ground beef. I believe ground meat is probably more damaged by freeze-thaw than whole cuts of meat.
The methodology used for that paper makes it irrelevant for a discussion of optimizing the quality of frozen items——the packaging, the cooked burger doneness (167F), and the fat percentage are all significantly different from what would be used in a high-end commercial setting.
I've been saying that a great burger could be cooked with a frozen patty (and you could even freeze the bun as long as you don't freeze them together), not that the freezing itself improves the quality of the meat for typical burger metrics of quality (with the exception of crust formation, which could be much better potentially if cooked from frozen).
Freezing food has a stigma that it doesn't deserve if the freezing and thawing is done with care. As I mentioned before, the best sushi restaurants in Manhattan all freeze their fish and store it in extremely cold freezers, and there's no significant detriment to quality. If Shake Shack wanted to do so, they could freeze their patties, and they'd still have one of the best restaurant burgers out there. They certainly would not be freezing their meat in the way that was done in that burger paper, nor would they be using meat of that quality.
You definitely cannot freeze cooked barbecue brisket and bring it back to life at adequate commercial quality. You can freeze raw brisket, but that doesn't solve the core problem of serving barbecue brisket, which is that it takes so long to cook that you have to either be really good at predicting your turnover or close up early when you run out.
Long story short: freezing brisket, not a great plan.
You certainly can freeze barbecued brisket and bring it back to life in great shape——I've done it plenty of times. It took a lot of trial and error, but it's not impossible. I'm not cooking a 18 hour brisket just to eat a quarter pound of it and toss the rest.
1. It's unlikely that Impossible Foods will ever match the quality of a grass-fed, grain-finished 80/20 chuck + short rib blend from a purveyor like Pat LaFrieda.
2. The dish is heavily spiced and the Impossible Foods product is playing the role of the bolognese. It can hide under the seasoning and spices.
3. I still think the product is valuable. The vast majority of meat product Americans consume meets a much lower bar. I think Impossible Foods already makes a product that's better than the ground meat that goes into a lot of fast food chains. If you didn't tell people, I suspect they'd prefer a Taco Bell or White Castle product made with Impossible Foods instead of the "mix" that they currently use.
A good hamburger, on the other hand, relies almost entirely on the flavor of the beef.
There's an informal rule in cooking about how the simpler a dish is, the better your ingredients and technique have to be, because there's nothing to hide behind.