The methodology used for that paper makes it irrelevant for a discussion of optimizing the quality of frozen items——the packaging, the cooked burger doneness (167F), and the fat percentage are all significantly different from what would be used in a high-end commercial setting.
I've been saying that a great burger could be cooked with a frozen patty (and you could even freeze the bun as long as you don't freeze them together), not that the freezing itself improves the quality of the meat for typical burger metrics of quality (with the exception of crust formation, which could be much better potentially if cooked from frozen).
Freezing food has a stigma that it doesn't deserve if the freezing and thawing is done with care. As I mentioned before, the best sushi restaurants in Manhattan all freeze their fish and store it in extremely cold freezers, and there's no significant detriment to quality. If Shake Shack wanted to do so, they could freeze their patties, and they'd still have one of the best restaurant burgers out there. They certainly would not be freezing their meat in the way that was done in that burger paper, nor would they be using meat of that quality.
You certainly can freeze barbecued brisket and bring it back to life in great shape——I've done it plenty of times. It took a lot of trial and error, but it's not impossible. I'm not cooking a 18 hour brisket just to eat a quarter pound of it and toss the rest.
It comes down to logistics. Maybe I'm a smaller restaurant, and I want to serve BBQ or fresh bread. Might not be feasible for them to smoke a brisket every day if they're not a brisket place, but you can definitely freeze some brisket and bring it back to life in pretty good quality. It doesn't improve it, but it lets a restaurant serve something that they otherwise couldn't.
Same goes for fresh bread. Maybe they want to serve pastrami sandwiches in Manhattan, but the best rye bread they can find is in Detroit, and so they have their baker freeze the bread and ship it over. It's not that the bread is better because it was frozen, but they're able to get better bread because they could freeze it.
Yeah, you can buy those all-natural 100% potato french fries from the supermarket and fry them into something truly fantastic. When restaurant fries taste "frozen" it's because they're not being refried well.
> Who freezes ground beef before turning it into a world-class hamburger? What's the best frozen hamburger I can buy?
I do, because I'm not a restaurant, and I don't buy enough meat for one or two servings of hamburger. If a restaurant's been around long enough and has enough turn over, they won't have my problem, but a place could want to freeze for time reasons, or to help with getting a gnarly crust by cooking it from frozen, etc. If you're freezing with the kind of thing the NYC sushi guys use (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/08/nyregion/sushi-fresh-from-...), and defrosting properly, a truly great hamburger could easily be made from a frozen patty.
I've never heard of a good prefrozen hamburger patty unless you're getting something from Snake River Farms or something along those lines (they ship frozen meat). I freeze my own.
While the double frying is critical, the freezing step in the middle is not just for logistics. The fries are better when they're frozen post-initial fry. I make fries all the time from scratch, and I always throw them in the freezer before the second fry. The final product is better than when I don't freeze between fries. Freezing helps add irregularity to the surface and aids in crisp them up post second fry.
Freezing isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially for burger patties with a good amount of fat. I'd rather have that than something that's been sitting around in the fridge for too long. As long as it's frozen very quickly and defrosted properly, freezing is fine.
In-N-Out meat is pretty good; it's just super thin. McDonald's is not good, but believe me, if McDonald's had a good burger patty, and if they wanted to freeze it, it wouldn't be any worse for it.
On the other side of things, In-N-Out doesn't freeze their fries, and they're much worse than the frozen fries from places like McDonald's or Shake Shack's crinkle-cut fries, and it's specifically because they don't do the fry-freeze-refry process critically important for great fries.
> Seriously how would it look if Amazon turned down a company because they were competing? It would be an admission of defeat and weakness for AZ. That's not how an "apex predator" thinks.
It looked shitty when it happened with Amazon and Apple