Delta Air Lines has been slowly rolling out Shake Shack burgers as a pre-order meal choice in domestic first class since late fall. I finally had a chance to try it and was seriously impressed.
I’m picky about burgers, and I know it. A great burger starts with quality beef and you need to cook it properly, ideally grilling it. You should get a nice char on the outside, while leaving the meat rare-to-medium rare on the inside.
It should have processed cheese that melts well. And it should be inside of a potato bun. Brioche and ciabatta are not well-matched to a burger. The bun is the delivery vehicle for the burger, big enough to contain it but not so large that it overwhelms the contents. Everything you put on the burger needs to fit inside so it doesn’t fall apart when you eat it. You want to balance the flavors inside, getting a combination of everything with each bite.
The United Airlines first class burger was disgusting. The American Airlines sliders were better (not great, but better) but they were prematurely pulled. Alaska Airlines does a genuinely nice job with its burgers.
United burger
American Airlines sliders
Alaska Airlines burger
The beef was hot, the bun was cool. It’s like back in the day when United Airlines and McDonald’s had a partnership, and the airline retrofitted their galley carts to keep the beef hot and bun cool serving those burgers in economy. But these weren’t McDonald’s burgers.
The benefit of not heating the burger and bun together is that the bun doesn’t get overcooked and stiff. And it was a pretty good piece of meat and not at all greasy.
I do wish they’d attempt fries instead of offering a bag of chips, but fries on a plane are hard. You aren’t deep frying them onboard, you’re reheating them. Bottom-line is that the Shake Shack burger succeeded, and I’d gladly order it again.
By the way, perhaps my most controversial opinion about burgers is that Margot wasn’t the one ‘who escaped alive’ at the end of The Menu. She died, just after the movie ended. Recall at the beginning of the film, when diners are given a tour of the island, Elsa says that perfection is aging their meat for 152 days – but aging it for 153 means that the bacteria in the meat would kill anyone that ate it. That’s called foreshadowing.
When Margot eats the burger she gets packed up to go, it was certainly made with 153 day aged meat. Everyone misses this point.
Seriously? You want REAL hamburgers aloft? Then install a BBQ with charcoal and cook ’em while you fly. Heck, the airplane is pressurized. Just open a vent and watch the smoke disappear (be careful not to open the vent too much, the oxygen masks will deploy, which will feed the fire / BBQ and make QUICK work of the burgers).
Nothing quite like an in-flight BBQ.
I have to agree that the Shake Shack burger on Delta is pretty good. I’m not a huge French fry person so the chips didn’t bother me at all.
I’m not sure about the Margot thing though. I think the burger was cooked with passion and love – the love he’d lost amongst those represented by the s’mores. Also, if it was over aged to the point of causing illness she would just puke and/or shit her brains out.
@James Thurber:
If you’re on a Boeing, you just have to position the grill next to one of the fuselage joints that’s appropriately out of tolerance.
@Ben: Food poisoning can take 1-3 days to present itself.
An interesting take. I’m impressed with your bravery to eat airline ground beef at medium rare or colder. That’s an invitation for e.coli.
Have never seen the movie, but those “stats” about dry aging make zero sense. Nobody dry ages for that long except as a weird experiment. Most aim for 30-45 days. After that the taste starts to get worse, even for people who like dry aged “funk”. And it would be an incredible waste of meat, dry aging for that long would require discarding A LOT of pellicle.
And if you dry age properly, you could eat beef that had been dry aged for a year or more, not that you would want to- it would taste horrible.
Also, I don’t think you dry age meat meant for a burger? That just sounds odd.
The AA sliders are a choice on a flight from IAD to DFW next month so they may be back. I had them last month since they were going away at the time but the sliders and fries were terrible. Good thing you can bring Shake Shack on the plane from DFW and other airports that have one.
I would recommend not eating hamburger that is thoroughly cooked unless you ground the beef yourself. I’ve personally seen the downside of contaminated hamburger — professionally cooked in a commercial establishment — where bad things (i.e. fecal matter) can get mixed in during the production process. Resulting (sometimes fatal) illness is not something I would wish on anyone (including a kid hospitalized for close to a year).
If you buy a slab of beef and grind it yourself, you can at least ensure it was done in a way that avoids that.
That’s my advice, but caveat emptor.
In a way it is kind of funny. Passengers who get meals served on USA airlines sometimes get food that is good, sometimes get food that is marginal at best and sometimes get just plain bad food. Coach passengers flying domestic flights don’t get meals (unless they pay for them) but end up eating better meals bought at the airport or brought from home or a restaurant away from the airport (carried onboard or not).