Battle Veggie Burger was our second controlled beta test. The featured ingredient of Veggie Burger was a particularly difficult one. I was one of the chefs and I can say that it was very challenging for me. I had made some veggie burgers before but only very basic, using black beans. Chef Scott on the other hand has made veggie burgers many times before so I was in for a tough battle! On top of that, Scott is unbeaten in all of our previous battles. Yikes!
Chef Scott is an engineer and uses that experience in the kitchen to create some very tasty and unexpected dishes. He always seems to pull some amazing things out in the last few minutes. This battle would prove to be no different (unfortunately for me!). Judge Heather is a data analyst, has spent a ton of time cooking and has a critical eye as a judge. She helped Lisa weed out the pretender! Heather was doing double duty as the emcee.
FoodFu was installed on my iPhone 6 again since this was another controlled beta. For this battle we also had an emcee that was not me or Lisa with Heather running the app. So this was an exciting and somewhat nervous night for us! Everything went well though and we got some great feedback.
Who participated in Battle Veggie Burger?
What did the chefs make to highlight veggie burgers?
First of all, let me just saw wow! Chef Scott really pulled out a lot of different things for this battle! He made an amazing veggie burger with a lot if different ingredients (not quite as many as Katsugi from Top Chef, but close!). His burger was made from leeks, garlic, carrots, celery, beets, miso and mushrooms (I probably missed some other ingredients) with a layer of bread crumbs. He also made an aioli with Mama Lil’s hot peppers and topped it all off with a sliced dill pickle. His burger was served up on a Sparrow sliced brioche bun. Next, Chef Scott made a slaw with beets, carrots, cabbage and slices of carrots. Last but not least he made some french fries with smoked salt! Whew! That’s a lot to make in just 45 minutes especially when at around 15 minutes left he didn’t seem to have anything done! Nice work, Scott! Check out the photos of Scott’s veggie burger; see the color was so much like a ‘real’ burger!
Now for my (Chef Jim’s) veggie burger. My burger was a black bean, quinoa, onion, and mushroom burger. I had hoped to use some rice puree to help form the patty and keep it together but that didn’t end up working because I ran out of time. I also made a mustard with some arugula and salt and pepper. Next I created some ketchup-like sauce using fresh tomatoes, onions, and spices. I served my burger on a Sparrow Brioche bun. As an additional topping I created some quick pickles using cucumbers, onions, serrano peppers and spices. On the plate I also put some Jalepeno chips to compliment my veggie burger.
Watch battle veggie burger unfold:
Spoiler alert! A few veggie burgers never made it to the plate. Find out who had butter fingers in the kitchen.
The plates for FoodFu Battle Veggie Burger:
The result of this battle was a tie. You can see from the FoodFu results (shown on the right) that we still had some work to do at this point because it did not show the correct info for a tie. This visual discrepancy didn’t change the outcome of the FoodFu battle; the ending image to share was just not what we wanted it to be.
According to the judges, Chef Scott’s burger had great flavor with a meatiness and earthy taste; the crispiness of the bread crumbs was great. Chef Lisa thought my burger and pickles were too spicy and overpowered some of the other flavors of the dish.
Some things to think about for this battle was that the app was still in beta and had some pretty big issues. The most obvious was the final results image not handling the tie correctly. Some other feedback that we got was that the app needed some additional notifications to tell the emcee when a new question was being asked. Some of the areas where photos were needed to be taken were not readily apparent to user either. In the end we got exactly the kind of input we needed to improve the FoodFu experience.
One final note was that Heather was a judge and the emcee. This scenario will likely happen most frequently when others use FoodFu because it’s easier to get two couples together but it is something for us to think about. As a judge there is not much for Heather to do during the cooking portion of the battle. But at the end, during scoring, Heather was not able to easily be the emcee and a judge. This is something we need to work on as we continue to develop FoodFu. We did notice that this almost helped make the experience more of a group effort because other people (myself, Lisa and Scott) had to fill in for Heather at different times to take video and/or ask questions while she was scoring the plates. This is one of the overall goals we have for Foodfu: we want to create an experience that engages everyone in the room in a truly social event that everyone can enjoy.
I know we enjoyed this test battle with Scott and Heather! We are so grateful to have them as some of our best testers!
