- Close your eyes and bite your lip. Are you doing it? – Mmmhh. (upbeat music) – The world is huge and full of unique cuisines, but we don’t have to travel to taste it for ourselves. Because today we are taking a trip of the tongue out to Japan where Burger King has this sandwich they call- – The Kuro Ninja Burger. – It’s time for – [Both] So Far So Good. – Alright, Chase, so Burger King did not expand into the Japanese market until 2008, which as compared to McDonald’s back in 1971, was already there. So part of Burger Kings entrance into that was a limited run of a burger in 2013 called the Kuro Ninja Burger that came with an actual ninja mascot on a sticker. And mascots are really big in Japan and this burger had one. All right, so on this burger, it starts off with a black bamboo charcoal bun cause ninjas, right? They were dressed in black. They had to be stealthy ’cause they were trying to kill Burger Kings. (Chase laughing) – [Josh] It’s how I understand it. It also had a tangy soy onion garlic sauce. There was a crispy hash brown patty, why? A little bit unclear, but we’re gonna make it and we’re gonna try it out. And then also there was a giant bacon tongue. Is the only way it can be described because it overhung on the burger and it had grill marks and it was a Japanese style bacon, which is pronounced bay-con. (Chase laughing) – That’s real. – You keep like gesturing down here when you mentioned these like really cool things. And all I see is lettuce and patty. – That is a great segue because what we have from Burger King to fill out this burger are normal Whopper patties, iceberg lettuce, and then a small cup of mayonnaise. Turns out you can go to Burger King and say, “Hello. I’d like a small cup of mayonnaise.” And they will fulfill that for no charge. Don’t charge you for mayonnaise. – That’s how I’ll do my grocery shopping next time. – Hey, give me 19 sides of mayonnaise, King. (Chase laughing) – Chase, you ready to get cooking? – Woo! – Oishii! (plane revving) – All right, so we gotta make these black charcoal buns. So we’re gonna take three cups of flour. Can you measure that out? – Yeah. – But we have to add a bunch of activated charcoal to it. This activated charcoal brought to you by Belle Chemical. Always a good idea when the name of the chemical company is on your bag of food. It says it’s food grade, but it can also be used to make soap. – The thing that was weird about making soap out of charcoal, that stuff gets everywhere and it doesn’t come off. – No. – Even with soap. So that’s the part that confuses me most. – Yeah, yeah, ’cause people use the charcoal toothpaste ’cause it whitens their teeth and it’s like, well now it just looks very, very black. Is that three cups? – [Chase] Yep. – All right, I’m gonna just dump in, let’s call it like a quarter cup. We want these to be jet black because that’s what the Kuro Ninja Burger was. It was these jet black buns and this was like the era where everyone was just doing different colored buns, trying to grab attention on Instagram. – Alright, so I’m gonna add some yeast and sugar into that as well. Chase, can you just spin that up a little bit? (mixer whizzing) – [Josh] You a big fan of Japanese food? You eat a lot of sushi, a lot of tempura? – Sushi and tempura is about the level that I get into Japanese food. It’s just ’cause it’s the most easily accessible. – Sushi really exploded across America because of the San Fernando Valley, which I think is very cool. It’s like sushi in Japan is relatively traditional, but like here’s where it got crazy. Get crazy in the valley. – That’s the first time something nice has been said about the San Fernando Valley at Mythical Entertainment. Everyone- – I love the valley. Now that I live here, I’m a huge fan. I’m just gonna crack one egg into that and then also, gonna dump in some water and just spin that up as I’d dump the water. Yeah, yeah. Do it. (mixer whizzing) – All right, let’s take this out and need it by hand. – [Chase] Okay. – Alright, Chase, get in there. – Josh, do you think this will help or hurt my carpal tunnel overall? – [Josh] Oh, it’ll help. Yeah, yeah. Anytime you have an injury, the thing to do is you repeat the movement that caused it but heavier and more often. That looks really good, man, hey let me let me get in there a little. – [Chase] Oh thanks. – I’m just gonna go ahead and generally smash, smash that heel into there. Just smash the hand heel. This is how you knead dough, this is how Burger King does it. Everyone at Burger King, especially in Japan, they do everything by hand. – Josh, where is the palm heel strike come from? – So I learned it from a Dutch kickboxing master named Bas Rutten. He was actually… but it was in URA that it was in a Japanese fighting league that tried to combine pro-wrestling with real fighting. But they did bare hand boxing, but there was no closed fist punches. So you had to fight like this. And he would just essentially slap people in the face with the palm heel strike. – Yeah. – But he was known for his kidney shots. So what he’d do is he’d kind of come at you and slap you in the face and then just kick you right in the liver and you were done. Google “Bas Rutten best knockouts,” you’ll have a fun time. Can we get Bas Rutten on the show? (high pitched beep) – Feel that. – It’s heavy. – [Josh] Just gonna lube up a bowl, get that in there, toss our dough in, lube her all around. And then we’re going to cover this, let it rise. And then we’re going to actually form (Josh blows air) – Our black charcoal buns. (plane revving) – All right, Chase, we have our black charcoal buns. Well, they’re not buns. This is just dough. Yeah, you see it’s nice tacky feel to it. – Where do you stand on that? Is this a bun? Like if you… (Chase chuckles) – You act like that was a hot button political issue. Now, where do you stand on the pre-bun issue? I don’t think a bun is a bun until you’ve baked it into a bun. Otherwise it’s just dough. We’re gonna take this. (whip cracking) – Bas Rutten, liver kick. We’re just gonna punch that out. You wanna get the air out of it before you put it through a second proof. All right, so now you got to form these buns. We’re just going to take these and kind of turn them into a ball. So grab one of those. – Got it. – [Josh] And then you’re just going to kind of mash into a ball. Try and like pinch it at the bottom. And then you’re going to put it onto this here table. And you’re just going to roll it like that. That’s actually going to kind of- – Are you rolling it? – Work the bottom. – Or you just like scrubbing it like you’re using a sponge? – Just close your eyes and bite your lip, are you doing it? – Mhm. (high pitched beep) – [Josh] You’re doing it. Do you feel rolling around in your hand? – [Chase] Oh, totally. – Yeah, yeah. All right, so I got my buns. That one’s real small. This one looks good. We’re doing three buns. (Chase laughing) – So we’re going to go ahead and take these and just press them out into a circle because the Whopper bun is actually very, very large and these are going to go through a second proof. So right now, it looks like they’re going to be a little bit flat, but we’re going to cover them. We’re going to get them risen and then they’re going to rise even more in the oven. – I’m making an angel. See he’s going wings! – Yeah, put it there. We’ll bake it. We’ll see what happens. – [Chase] Cool. (plane revving) – Okay, Chase so those have gone through the second proof, including your beautiful angel. Wow, and how angelic she is. Remove the plastic wrap, brush those down with egg wash and then get them in the oven. While you’re doing that, I’m going to start creating our hash brown patties. Now I have a couple of potatoes in a drawer. I call them drawer potatoes. I keep them aging in a drawer. You’ve heard of drawer potatoes, it’s culinary term. We’re trying to create like, a sort of McDonald’s style hash brown patty. Even though this is Burger King. But Burger King, they have the potato crowns. They don’t have the large hash brown patty, which is interesting because in Japan, they actually have this large patty on the burger, which they also had introduced in the Idaho burger in their great American burger series. Shout out to Trevor, he’s from Idaho. (Trevor whooping) – Boise, baby. B-town down. That’s what we say in Boise. – Go Trevor! – How’s that egg wash coming? – [Chase] It’s good. – [Josh] What the fudge is going on here? (high pitched beep) – Hit the old pivot. All right, so what you want to really do when you, just roll with it. So you really want to do is you want to massage the egg wash into the bun. A lot of people might just brush the coating on the outside, but that’s really gonna burn. See what Chase is doing, is he’s actually massaging it. It’s the same way that they do Kobe cattle. – I’m also really bad at massages, so say many people, so I don’t know- – That’s not what I heard. – How these buns are going to turn out. – I think you have the perfect size hands for a massage. You know? – I do, but once again, there’s that carpal tunnel thing going. So I might start strong, but I finish in two minutes. (crew laughing) (high pitched beep) – God! Dude. – Is it plugged in? – No, no, no, no, no, wait. Nope. – See, this is the part where normally I’d get to stop down with Rhett and Link. – This seems like it would be it. – But this is staying in. – But this is the same thing that we did before. – [Chase] It’s exactly the same thing. – That must mean it just goes fully the opposite way. I feel like this is the same. Yeah, so that’s, that’s also not correct. Step one: the blade is in. This is on, this is locked. – Yeah. – Yes. – That’s a lot of steps for step one. – And now we’ve tried a lot to do this way it seems. – [Chase] Yes. – [Josh] We should try it one more time. (Chase laughs) – No, this isn’t fitting in. So this, we’ve eliminated one option. – We’re really good at deductive reasoning. – That’s correct, the food processor must be broken. – But it’s like when you’re working a Rubik’s cube, you just gotta like do the same thing you think you’ve already done. – You know, wait, turn this. – A bunch of times. – That’s good. I don’t think this looks right. Yeah, yeah. Now put that in. Alright. So Chase, we got the potatoes in there on the first try and now we just need to kind of pulverize them into this little bit of a mush. We got our potatoes in a nice cube-y mush, right? – [Chase] Yeah. – But now you see you check this, check this out. – [Chase] Careful, there’s a blade in there. – It’s all wet, right? Pop the towel on there. We’re going to pour our potatoes in there. Expecto potato! – I don’t like Harry Potter references anymore. – No me neither. It makes me pretty, bums me out. Take this. We’re just going to juice our potatoes. Do you wanna taste it? – [Chase] Some went into your lube pocket. – It’s the new thing. It’s like you have almond milk. You got oat milk, this is a potato milk. – Starchy. – Would you add this to your coffee? – No. – Why is it green? (high pitched beep) – Did you ever bake those buns? – Oh, was I supposed to do something with them? – Yeah, sorry, that was my bad. Can you go ahead and put those in the oven for about 15 minutes? – Yeah. – [Josh] Thank you. – This one? – Yes. The oven. – Well there’s that one! – Either oven. Both are the same oven. All right, so we’re just going to form these hash brown patties. We want them to be a little bit bigger than the burger. In the photo of the Japanese Ninja Kuro burger, it was kind of sticking out of the bun. And so I want these to be like nice and thick boys, I like them thick. (plane revving) – All right, so Chase, we have to make this tangy onion, garlic sauce. And we also have to figure out our bacon situation or bay-con situation. So as you see, we’ve got a grill pan going, cause there were grill marks on this bacon. And then we have four not bacons. The bacon that was on the Kuro Ninja burger wasn’t quite bacon. It was definitely not made from pork belly. It was a sort of emulsified product that was meant to taste like bacon, probably more similar to ham. – Spam bacon. – Pretty much. So we got a couple different things. We got, it really looked like this. That’s why we got this floppy turkey bacon. We also have this tongue like beef bacon, as you see it’s large and floppy on the outside. – Yes, sure. – But also it seemed thick and like ham. So we got some long ham strips. – Okay. – And then we got this, we went to 99 Ranch, a large international Asian market. And this was the closest thing we could find. This is technically a Chinese brand of ham that seems to be headquartered in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. So we’re gonna try grilling all these up with the sauce. First, take this ginger, and you’re going to take a spoon and scrape away at the skin. – Awesome. – So I’m going to take this large ham steak. I’m going to throw it in our grill pan. We’re just gonna taste these. See what we like, see what we want to go with on the final burger. I’m gonna take our bacon weight, slam it down on that. – Bacon press. – This is nice. It really is kinda like jams it all in there, you know. – Bacon press does sound like the kind of thing that I think my strength coach would have said in high school, like, “Now give me some of the bacon presses” and like one person knows what that is and the rest of us are like, “I play water polo.” – [Josh] Go ahead and chop some of these scallions. Again, we just want to get some of that ginger, garlic and scallion, big sort of East Asian flavors in there. And then, here, take some garlic. (punching sound effect) – Can I do one? – Yeah, yeah, yeah. – [Chase] Hai! (punching sound effect) – [Chase] I liked that. – It was nice, right? I really love how cleanly and efficiently we work. – But once again, I think it’s just, like, us growing up in this same Southern California area, we learned the same kind of hygiene and cleanliness. And that is, I don’t want to use that. – I got nipples, Greg, could you milk me? (high pitched beep) – Chase eat this Lancaster County Chinese ham. You know, it’s not for this burger, but it is good. This is a flavorful ham. I got the beef bacon, I got the Turkey bacon. I just got a slab of ham. But again, we’ve never tasted this hamburger. – That’s true. – So we don’t know what this tasted like, but we have read that it was pretty good. So I’m gonna try and do that. So add some sesame oil. – Do you want this one? – Yeah. A little bit of rice wine vinegar. Just through some sort of tanginess, cause it was called like a sweet and tangy onion and garlic sauce and then low sodium soy sauce. Wait, who bought the low sodium soy? Oh, you’re worried about my heart health? Nicole, why? – You did go for the diet red bull instead of the regular one. – Yeah, I did. I love diet red bull, zero calories, all the rage. All right. We’re going to add some mirin to that. That’s a sweet Japanese cooking wine. And when this all reduces, it’s going to thicken up real nice. So you can take a bunch of sugar, dump that in there. (Chase laughing) – If you just looked at this, you would have no idea what we’re making at all. (high pitched beep) – All right here is turkey bacon, eat some of that. – Ow, it’s really hot. – Yeah, sure is. – Letting you just put things in my mouth. (high pitched beep) – Chase, we’ve officially set the record for the most times we’ve cut to bars and tone for an episode Mythical Kitchen. And everybody throw it up. We did it! (applause) – We’ve wildly screwed up more than we’ve ever screwed up before. This is thanks to you. Our audience, and you, my sous chef, and you two being no help! (high pitched beep) – All right Chase, grab this ham. – Thank you. – Kanpai. (Chase laughing) – I like the ham. I think race track ham is our winner. – Race track ham? – [Josh] Our sauce is nice and glazy and thick. You can see all those sort of chunks of garlic and ginger. So now, Chase, all we got to do. Is we got to burger up these burgers. (Chase laughing) (plane revving) – You gotta take these frozen hash brown patties and we’re going to drop them into our fryer. Watch out ’cause it is the frozen brick. It will start sputtering. It may explode. And then after that we got this beautiful. Why is there a fork? Why is it a fork for a sauce? I don’t know! – This is your kitchen. – So we got these black buns, the buns look beautiful. Do you have your angel bun Chase? – It’s right over here. Turned out great. I realize that my angel doesn’t have arms. It’s just wings and legs. – I know, Golem. – But it doesn’t have a mouth, which is cool. – Can I eat it? – Yeah you want to share it? – This is a frightening looking food, but I don’t- Is this going to like dry out impurities in my body? – Yeah. It’s good for you because it’s activated. – I know- (Josh laughing) – What’s crunchy in the bun? – There is something- – Oh my God, that’s just charcoal. Just crunching through it. We put way too much charcoal in that. (high pitched beep) – [Josh] This looks great. This looks nice and crispy. It’s gonna be a lovely, textural contrast. So all we gotta do, we’re just going to take the bottom bun. Maybe schmear a little mayonnaise on the bottom. Just to get a little protective layer. – Good schmearing. – Helen Schmear-on. So now we’re just gonna take, the Whopper. Well, I didn’t know if that Whopper patty was better. We’re going to take this nice ham. – Racetrack. – I have nipples, Greg, can you milk me? (high pitched beep) – [Josh] So we’re going to take a fair amount of that tangy onion and garlic, soy sauce. And we’re just going to splap it all there, and give it a nice splap. We did the schmear, now we got to do the splap. – Gotcha. – And then we’re just gonna take this potato patty. – Do you know if burger King in Japan still does the have it your way? – I don’t know. I’d guess not. – Can you make mine with cheese? – I don’t have any cheese. Do you want beef bacon instead? Do you want some Chinese ham jerky on there? Made in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania Chase? Cause that’s all I got. So we’re going to take some of that mayonnaise. – [Chase] Schmear? – [Josh] Not a shmear. This is gobbin’, it’s all right. So we’re going to take that and just right there and this is it. Does this make you excited about burgers? – I’m very excited about burgers. (upbeat music) – Chase it has been, wow. What an incredible journey to get here, but we finally have our Kuro Ninja burger and check it out. Look, we got the sticker. It’s got a ninja on it. – [Chase] That’s the real sticker. – That’s the real sticker they have in Japan. We imported a sicker from Japan. We paid $69 on eBay for it. – We should’ve just imported the burger. (both laughing) – No. Alright, so we got, wow. This is, look at that floppy bacon tongue. That’s what I like, look at that. All right, whoa, it happens sometimes. What’s your strategy on this? – I don’t know. Since it’s kind of like a plus of like patty and ham. Okay, I’m just going to eat it then. If you’re just gonna eat, I’m gonna eat it. – The tongue was tickling the back of my throat. – I don’t like thinking about that. – [Josh] I do. – That’s okay. – That’s kind of my thoughts exactly. – I do think we overdid it on the charcoal. Cause I’m still getting that kind of like sandy bite. – The ham is really nice. I love the interplay between the mayonnaise and the lettuce. It tastes like a latke that like fell into like a garbage can behind a Panda Express. (both coughing) – Do you think they should bring this burger to America? – Totally. (both coughing) – Yeah, that’s the charcoal, huh? Cause we’re both getting that. – I’m really getting it. – It’d be too much of a coincidence. What if we do it protein style? – Put the lettuce, on the top. – There’s a lot of particulates in the blood. – [Chase] And the bottom. I would eat this in America. – Here’s my thing. I think if you drop the bun, then you just get a Whopper Patty with a large slab of ham, some potatoes and a whole lot of mayonnaise. But I think that’s pretty good. My official answer. They should bring this to America. Ditch the buns. Sell this to the keto community. Really trick those weirdo food nerds. I’m gonna be eating this. – Okay. – But do I think they should bring the full sandwich to America? No, Chase, and I almost choked and died. Is that our own fault? Because did we make this? Yeah, of course, but I’m blaming Burger King, Japan. Thank you so much for stopping by Mythical Kitchen. We have new recipes every week. We have new episodes of our podcast, A Hot Dog is a Sandwich, every Wednesday wherever you get your podcasts. Hit us up on Instagram @mythicalkitchen with pictures of your mythical dishes under #dreamsbecomefood. If you think the Kuro Ninja Burger needs to come to America, tweet @BurgerKing with #sofarsogood. We’ll see you next time. 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