Black Bear Burger are truly something new to me, not living in Brixton I simply had not heard of them until very recently.
A friend happened to share a picture of what looked to be a gourmet burger and fries being eaten from the comfort of their home for a Birthday treat on Instagram.
I obviously looked them up immediately and saw for the reasonable price of around £25 plus postage you could get a DIY meal for 2 sent in one of their weekly deliveries.
Sounds expensive for me a DIY, but when compared against a meal out, not really. Compared to a Hello Fresh it’s about double the price for the a daily meal hit then we’re talking about an extravagance with a lot of expensive ingredients (and quite a bit of cache).
So with Valentines coming the wife and I agreed this is what we’d try. Bear in mind (pun intended) that BBB did not increase their Valentines price at all, this now feels like a very cheap meal, at probably a 1/4 of a valentines day meal’s average price.
The meal was delivered in a large cardboard box, with included massive ice blocks, by next day delivery.
Every aspect of the burger was individually portioned and packaged and the fries were part cooked and packaged. Tbh it looked very impressive.
Crucially the 4 patties looked very nice, large, pink with a lot of fat content marbled throughout. There is absolutely no way this would be dry.
Two vacuum packed seeded buns, a small pot of diced onion, a small pot of relish, 4 teeny weeny rashers of the streaky bacon, 2 small pots of garlic mayo and 4 of the tiniest craft cheese slices I’ve ever seen.
Also there was detailed instructions and recipe of how to make both the burgers and the part-cooked fried (which included large lumps of beef dripping).
Two pans and a baking tray are all that’s needed and tbh the burgers are basically fry each side until nicely crispy but pink inside, top with onion on each and add a cheese slice on top. Let that sit for the last minute of cooking and then relish, cooked bacon, stack and into the bun (which has been toasted and covered in garlic mayo).
The fries are just fried, no special treatment except to be turned. They were also lovely, incredibly crispy and tasty.
The burger bun was cool, very seeded and the process of toasting it really softened it up and pulled the moisture back into to make it taste freshly baked again.
The burger taste was very mild, very juicy and very enjoyable. It had a delicate flavour which let all the other ingredients come through nicely.
There was no annoying lettuce or thick slices of tomato to worry about, everything soft and easily biteable. Despite being very juicy it wasn’t that messy because you weren’t fighting with a tomato hanging on to the bun, pulling the filling out… we’ve all been there.
Very high fat content, the pan was half filled with 3 patties and so I guess that accounts for a bit of the subtlety. A bit like a really nice piece of sushi, or a really marbled steak.
I very enjoyed the entire experience tbh. Our timings probably weren’t perfect but it most definitely didn’t end up overcooked, it was still super juicy and extravagant and decadent and tbh that’s exactly what we were going for.
