keto-ish burgers

Undeterred by my previous Chris Cooking Nashville failure, I used another of Chris's recipes to make his "carnivore" hamburger buns. This recipe (page 2 at the link) didn't call for heavy cream this time, and I added a Korean-brand artificial sugar to the batter (if batter is the right term; the recipe reminds me a bit of a soufflé). The recipe called for 227 g of cream cheese; I had a 200-g container of it, plus a bag of dry, crumbly cottage cheese, so I added the cottage cheese to make up the difference.

I think I did everything almost right this time, and I'm pretty sure the added sweetener helped to make the buns more tolerable. Something went wrong, though, when I finished baking the buns and let them cool inside the oven per the instructions: they all collapsed—again, a lot like a mishandled soufflé. See the result for yourself:

Oh, what a world... what a world...

I swear, they'd looked good while baking—nice and puffy.

makes me think of a Scotch pie

The crumb was dense and underbaked. If I do this again, I'll give the bake another five minutes.

It's hard to see, but in the crumb, there are flecks of white—maybe egg white, maybe unmixed cheese.

For this plate, there were two burgers. Here's one completed and one topless, with BBQ sauce and shredduce.

Barbecue sauce was the one non-keto element with this burger. The sesame seeds lend the burger buns more authenticity than they deserve, being collapsed and all.

prepped and ready for eating

not much left

Surprise, surprise—these burgers were actually good! The taste of the buns was unobtrusive, and they were sufficiently breadlike as to be almost unnoticeable. Taken by themselves and on their own terms, the buns were somewhat the wrong consistency, but they were appropriately soft and had almost a fast-food kind of feel to them. They weren't quite breadlike enough for my taste, but they were perfectly tolerable, and I'll definitely be making them again. I might have to find a different way to let the buns cool down, though, so as to prevent that soufflé-style collapse. (Or was it the artificial sweetener that caused the collapse? Uh-oh.)

These buns were an improvement over yesterday's spongelike-but-dry bread. I'll see about making that bread into keto French toast as a way to rescue it. My Korean coworker, despite my warnings, avidly grabbed almost half of that loaf, and he ended up throwing most of it out. He'd been charmed by how the bread looked, but I warned him that the most important thing was how the bread tasted. He fucked around and found out. Should've eaten a sample first.

The recipe I used was enough to make four burger buns, and the meat patties, originally 100 g each and made from twice-ground skirt steak, had been pressed flat enough to extend outside the buns: a must when making burgers. (A burger patty too small for its bun is a cardinal sin. The meat must always win.) I'll keep working on the process of making these buns and, we can hope, I'll have something respectable to present to you later this year.

Suffice it to say that this recipe made me a believer.

Chris's recipe video is here. That thumbnail, though, is pure bullshit. You can't see the thumbnail if you use my link to click through, but if you approach the video via YouTube (search "Chris Cooking Nashville burger buns"), you'll see it, and you'll immediately recognize that that's a Photoshop job using a real hamburger bun. Sneaky, sneaky.

ADDENDUM:

The Korean sweetener I used is some sort of "slow-absorption" formula.