Cheeseburger Takoyaki | Japanese Octopus Balls X Cheeseburgers | Recipe

So last week we made takoyaki, the ordinary version but this week I'm going to show you something a little bit different. This is the cheeseburger takoyaki. The marriage between a cheeseburger and a takoyaki might seem a little bit strange but it really isn't at all. If you look at the way a cheeseburger fits into American culture and the takoyaki fits into Japanese culture, they feel kind of the same purpose. It's a simple snack food that's easy to make, strong in flavor and absolutely delicious. I'm going to show you how I make mine. First all I need are these ingredients here. Most of them are pretty similar to what you might see on ordinary takoyaki but here are a few differences. Instead of octopus I've got minced beef, instead of the beni shoga, the red pickled ginger, I've just got some red onion that's been finely chopped. I've also added some pickles and of course some shredded cheese as well. I'm still keeping a few of the ordinary takoyaki ingredients, things like tenkasu, the tempura batter bits, the nori, seaweed, aonori and then also the bonito flakes as well but as well as our takoyaki sauce I've also got ketchup and American mustard. So let's start making our cheeseburgers. I have never believed that you need to add a lot of different herbs and spices and things to make a good burger. All you need is some nice beef and by nice I don't mean lean, I mean beef that's quite fatty. When I make a burger I find the best thing to do is to go to the supermarket and buy the cheapest mince possible because the cheapest mince tends to be the one with the highest fat content. You want about 20% even 30% fat in a burger and your mince that you buy from the supermarket, the cheapest one is probably going to be about 17 odd percent fat and so that's good enough for making a half decent burger. All that goes into my burgers, minced beef and salt. Just give that a good mix. Now you don't need eggs, you don't need breadcrumbs, you don't need anything to hold it together. What's actually going to hold it together is the salt because the salt is going to help the proteins in the meat bind to itself. It's going to give us a nicely textured little tiny, tiny, tiny little burger. Now for my burgers all I really need to do is make incredibly small little balls about the size of a marble. I can then fry the little burger patties. These really do have to be small, if they're too big they're not going to fit inside our takoyaki plate so have a little bit of a look at that. You don't want to take up too much of the inside of that takoyaki hole so these tiny, tiny little burgers are all we need. Now that'll do us for now, I'll go over and fry these little burger patties and just a grind of pepper to finish these off and we're ready to start cooking our takoyaki. I've got my takoyaki maker, my takoyaki batter and if you want to know a little bit more about either of these things, particularly how to make the batter, just check out last week's video, link should be just up here. My ingredients to scatter over the top of my cheeseburger takoyaki, I've got my tenkas, the tempura batter bits. I'll just finely chop these pickles, some finely chopped red onion and of course my cheese. A bit of oil into the pan, give the batter a good stir because the flour does go to the bottom and then fill all of these little holes to overflowing. Now for the burger patties, I just drop one into each hole and scatter on the rest of my ingredients. The tenkas batter bits, the finely diced red onion, the chopped pickles and of course the cheese all over the top. As the batter starts to firm, you just want to draw your skewer in like a crosshatch pattern that goes between the holes and push any overlap into the holes. Now to turn them, you stick the skewer right to the bottom, kind of do a half turn and then push any bits of overflow or skirt that's coming around the holes into the ball and then complete the turn. As these start to cook, I just keep rolling them around and these are my favourite parts where it starts to crisp where the cheese has leaked to the outside and brown. I'll pull those out now and finish off my cheeseburger takoyaki. Now to finish this off, a bit of sauce, a touch of takoyaki sauce but because they're cheeseburgers, I also want to add some ketchup too. Of course we'll need some mustard and mayonnaise over the whole lot. Then we can scatter that with a bit of powdered nori, some sesame seeds and of course some bonito flakes too. There you go, a bit of an odd mash-up but one that is absolutely delicious. Cheeseburger takoyaki.