Get Your Ass To Mars Burger (#112)

Our March movie this year was 1990's Total Recall, staring Arnold Schwarzenegger. This sci-fi action film plays with concepts about what's real and what's not and is a great adventure flick. I struggled to come up with a dinner concept for this film, because there aren't really any dinner scenes in the movie, other than an opening scene where Arnold's character is eating a protein shake for breakfast. 

Then I found these pictures: 

As part of the Venusville set on Mars, they had created a fake restaurant across the street from The Last Resort called Mars Burger. It is only visible in a few shots of the film, but the crew used it for a photo op and you can see that in these pics.

This got me really thinking. What would a fast food chain on this version of Mars even look like? In this film, Venusville is full of mutants and humans just struggling to survive. They're very limited resources. Even oxygen is a valuable and limited asset. So what kind of food would be available at their local fast food joint?

If we think about the type of fast food that we have here on Earth, we know that fast food is often made with cheap ingredients and also artificial ingredients. On the Mars colony, I would expect this to be far worse. Would they even have access to ingredients like ground beef or fresh vegetables? Or would everything be highly processed and come out of a can or jar? 

This led to me creating the meal for our movie night. I wanted to create a meal that would look like it came from Mars Burger in Venusville. The goal would be to make a traditional burger and fries, but to make it with ingredients that appeared artificial or highly processed.

This was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun.

Mars Burger Signature Sauces

Every burger place has a signature sauce. And here's a fun fact for you: they're all pretty much the same. Every "secret burger sauce" you will come across is just a variation on Thousand Island dressing. They make it by mixing ketchup with mayo and then adding some sort of acid like pickle juice, lemon, or lime.

For my Mars Burger sauce, I wanted something more unique. I thought about the fact that Mars Burger wouldn't have access to fresh vegetables, and decided that the sauces should act as an artificial looking substitute for that missing produce.

Ultimately, I made two sauces. The red sauce, which I named Mutant Sauce, is essentially a twist on ketchup. It is meant to replace the tomato element of the burger, but also adds some spice and smokiness to give the burger more flavor. The green sauce, which I call Alien Goo, is meant to replace the other vegetables, namely pickles, onion, and peppers. It is essentially a take on relish. The trickiest part of that sauce was getting the consistency right. 

I wanted both sauces to look very artificial and processed, with vibrant, shiny colors. I also wanted to be able to squeeze them from a squeeze bottle and for them to have the right consistency to do so. Of course, it was also important that the sauces tasted good and adequately replaced the missing fresh vegetables. This entire meal was one big experiment. I knew that the sauce would be an important element to make the dish cohesive.

Here are the recipes for both sauces.

Mutant Sauce (Mars Burger Ketchup)

The goal for this sauce was to make something that acted like ketchup, would replace the missing tomato element in a burger, but would have its own unique flare as well. I fulfill this by making the ketchup both spicy and smoky. In many ways, it's almost like a mix between a ketchup and a barbecue sauce.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup Hunt's Simply Ketchup
• 4 tbsp tomato paste
• 2 tbsp Cholula chili garlic hot sauce
• 3 tsp Worcestershire sauce
• 1 tsp vinegar
• 1 tsp smoked paprika
• 1/2 tsp cayenne
• 1/2 tsp sweet paprika
• 1 tsp corn syrup
• 3 or 4 drops of red food coloring

Directions:

1. Blend ingredients.
2. Transfer to a squeeze bottle.
3. Store in fridge.

This ketchup-like sauce came out really good. You'll notice that I started with some premade ketchup as my base. No need to reinvent the wheel. I went with Hunts Simply Ketchup because it's more like homemade and I felt would be a good launching point. The tomato paste and vinegar that I  added are essentially there to thicken it and make more ketchup for me to work with before I start seasoning.

The cayenne and chili garlic sauce provide heat to the sauce. The Worcestershire and smoked paprika give the sauce some smokey, barbecue-like qualities and enhance the umami. Sweet paprika is a unique spice that I really love. I used it here to cut the spice but also to enhance the color. By this point, the sauce was looking a dull dark red. Sweet paprika is a vibrant orange, so it brightened the sauce while providing a contrast to the flavor. The corn syrup is mainly there to make the sauce glossier and give it a more artificial, highly processed look. Same with the food coloring.

In total, this made about 300 mL of sauce.

Alien Goo (Mars Burger Relish Sauce)

The second sauce provide many more challenges than the first. I wanted this sauce to act as a replacement for many of the vegetable ingredients that someone might normally put on a burger. I also wanted it to be vibrant and artificial in appearance. Getting the flavors where I wanted was not challenging, but getting the consistency where I wanted was.

Ingredients:

• 2 cups of Chicago style neon sweet relish
• 8 tbsp of dill pickle juice
• 6 tsp yellow mustard
• 2 tsp onion powder
• 2 tsp corn syrup
• 4 to 6 drops green coloring
• 2 tsp cornstarch dissolved in 4 tsp water (added last)

Directions:

1. Combine all of the ingredients except the constarch slush into a blender.
2. Blend as fine as you can.
3. Using a mesh strainer, strain the liquid into a pot and discard the thicker chunks.
4. Stir in the cornstarch with water and bring the liquid to a light boil.
5. Stir regularly. The sauce should reduce slightly as some of the water in it evaporates, but it should also thicken from the cornstarch. If you have a candy thermometer, use it to monitor the temperature. Your goal is to get the sauce temp between 85°F - 95°F. Be careful, as the sauce will likely spit at you when reaching those higher temperatures.
6. Remove from heat and allow to cool some before moving it to a squeeze bottle and storing in the fridge.

I have to say that I am really proud of the way this sauce came out. Lord knows it took a lot of time and work for me to get it right. Initially, I tried to move it to the squeeze bottle after blending and hadn't strained it or thickened it with the cornstarch. My result is that the thicker chunks kept clogging the bottle and when it did come out, it was a runny liquid and nothing like the squeeze bottle gel I was hoping for.

Straining and then thickening with the cornstarch was the solution I was looking for. You do lose a lot of sauce through the straining and reducing process, which is why this recipe seems like it would make twice as much sauce as the ketchup did, but it only came out to 200mL when I was done.

After it cooled and thickened in the fridge, the final result was a shiny green gel that tasted like pickles, onion, and mustard and was the perfect squeeze bottle consistency.

The sauces will stay good for several days, so they were the first food item that I made ahead if time. The second was my fries, which I started about three days before the party.

Cheese Sauce

In addition to those two burger sauces that I made, I also needed a cheese sauce. For our burgers, I didn't want them to have regular sliced cheese. Because I was going for the highly processed / artificial theme, it only made sense that our cheese would come from a can.

I bought this can of liquid cheddar cheese at my local grocery store. The flavor was pretty bland, so I enhanced it with some paprika. This does not need to be made in advance, because it's already pretty liquidy. All I had to do was heat it up before dinner and stir in the paprika. This cheese worked good on the burgers, but it also worked good on the fries.

Mars Potato-Free Fries

As I mentioned earlier, my goal for this meal was to make a meal that looked artificial, as if it was made without any fresh ingredients. Assuming there are no potatoes on Mars and shipping frozen potato fries would be difficult and expensive, I decided to go a different direction with my fries.

The fries are made from polenta instead of potato. Polenta is essentially dried cornmeal. To make these fries, I had make a slab of ploenta first, then cut it into fry shapes, season it, and bake it. I will go through these steps below.

Ingredients:

• 5 cups water
• 2 tsp salt
• 2 tbsp butter
• 2 cups polenta
• 1/2 tsp tumeric
• 1/2 cup grated Parmesan
• 1 tbsp nutritional yeast
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• 1/2 tsp onion powder
• 2 tsp cornstarch
• 3 tbsp peanut oil or other neutral oil
• fry seasoning, like salt and pepper or paprika and cayenne

Directions:

1. Bring water to boil with salt and butter.
2. Whisk in polenta and set heat to low.
3. Stir until thick. When done it should have the consistency of a thick mashed potato.
4. While thickening, slowly stir in tumeric, Parmesan, nutritional yeast, garlic powder, and onion powder. Taste it and add more salt as necessary.
5. Empty contents onto a large baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Spread it out as best as you can to make a sheet of polenta about 1/2 inch thick. To help flatten it, you can put another sheet of parchment paper over the polenta and press down on it with another baking sheet or roll over it with a rolling pin.
   
   
   
6. Refrigerator overnight to let it harden.
7. Move slab to a cutting board and slice into fry sized strips.
8. Move fries to a drying rack and let them dry out for a half hour or more.
   
   
   
9. In an air tight container, add cornstarch and give it a toss, so it dusts the inside walls of the container.
10. Once the fries have dried out, move them to the container and gently toss them so that the fries can get a moee or less even coating or corn starch.
11. Return to fridge to cool and harden until about an hour or two before dinner.
12. As dinner appoaches, preheat oven to 425°F.
13. Gently toss fries with peanut oil and whatever fry seasoning you choose. I did one with salt & pepper and one with cayenne & paprika.
14. Dump half of your oiled and seasoned fries onto the baking sheet. If you have a second baking sheet, cook the rest on that. Otherwise, you will have to alternate. Do not attempt to cook all the fries on the one baking sheet. If the baking sheet is overcrowded, the fries will not crisp up like you need them to. 
15. Bake your fries, checking on them and flipping them every 20 minutes. They may be finished after 40 minutes or you may have to go a little longer. You want your fries to be crispy, but not overcooked.
16. Serve with the burger sauces that we made earlier, or with a cheese sauce.

My guests seemed very impressed with these fries. They were shocked when I told them that they weren't made with potato. I made one batch with salt and pepper seasoning and one batch with cayenne and paprika. My guests ate more of the spicy fries than the sakt and pepper ones. They really did pair well with the ketchup sauce from earlier. They also pair well with a cheese sauce.

Mars "Sealed" Burger Buns

For the buns, making them seem processed or artificial posed a challenge. I decided that this would be best done by making them shiny and crispy.

Ingredients:

• smooth potato buns
• mayonnaise
• eggs
• water
• paprika

Instructions:

1. Begin prepping the buns a few hours before dinner. Preheat the flat top that you will be using for grilling the burgers. If you don't have one, use a large frying pan.
2. Coat the top and bottom insides of each bun with a layer of mayonnaise.
3. Toast them mayonnaise side down until that side becomes golden, toasted, and crispy. You do not need to oil or butter the pan before toasting, because mayonnaise has oil in it.
4. Once toasted, let cool on a drying rack.
5. Prep an egg wash by whisking egg whites with water: 1 tbsp of water per egg.
6. Preheat oven to 350°F.
7. Move the toasted bun tops to a baking sheet, flat side down.
8. Gently brush egg wash over each bun using a basting or pastry brush.
9. Sprinkle a dash paprika over the top of the buns as "Mars dust." This is more for flair than flavor.
10. Bake for 5 minutes.
11. Move bun tops back to cooling rack and leave them there until dinner time.

The egg wash and mayonnaise served two purposes. First, they changed the look of the buns, so it didn't look like fresh potato bread. Second, it added richness and fresh flavors to the overall dish. This would be important because one of the first things I decided when planning this meal is that burger patties would not be made with meat.

Mars Cruelty-Free Meat-Free Burger Patties

Going back to my theme of artificial and processed ingredients, I knew that it wouldn't make sense for a fast food burger place on Mars to have access to fresh beef. I decided to use some premade veggie patties for this meal. I chose Dr. Praeger's Drive-Thru Burgers because some of my guests have soy allergies, and it is soy free. Also, I assumed that they would be closest to a fast food burger. I was pretty accurate in that guess. I will say that the patties are definitely on the small side, but so were my buns, so it all worked out.

Even though I was using pre-made veggie patties, I didn't want them to taste like veggie patties. The goal was to make a patty that looked and tasted like cheap processed artificial meat. To give these veggie patties more of a meaty taste, I made a basting sauce out of Worcestershire sauce, garlic powder, and onion powder. While the burgers were grilling on the flat top, we basted them in this Worcestershire sauce mix, which gave them a more meaty flavor and a darker beef-like color.

Overall, the burgers were a hit. Because the patties were small, most people used two or three patties per burger. All the components pretty much did what I expected them to do, so even though there were no fresh vegetables, they weren't really missed. Guests seemed to appreciate my homemade sauces the most.

Blonde Blondies

Dessert for this meal was not connected to the Mars Burger concept. Instead the dessert was inspired by this brief scene in the film:

He responds with "Blondes." For that reason, I decided to make our dessert a form of blondies. I chose to enhance it with a blonde frosting and "hair."

Blondie Ingredients:

• 3/4 cup white sugar
• 3/4 cup light brown sugar
• 1 cup (2 sticks) melted butter
• 2 whole eggs + 1 extra yolk
• 1 tbsp vanilla
• 2 cups flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 cup white chocolate chips

Blondie Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350°F.
2. Line 9x13 baking pan with parchment. 
3. Melt butter in microwave in multiple 10 second increments. We don't want the butter to spit or brown.
4. In an electric mixer, whisk butter and both sugars.
5. Once combined, add eggs and vanilla.
6. Once thoroughly mixed, reduce speed and slowly add in flour, baking powder, and salt.
7. Once that is combined, mix in chocolate chips.
8. Spread in pan and bake for 25 minutes.
9. Test with toothpick to ensure it is baked through before removing. Don't overcook it or it may darken and loose that that blonde color we're going for.
10. Cover and store at room temperature overnight.

Frosting Ingredients:

• 1/2 butter
• 3/4 light brown sugar
• 3 tbsp heavy cream
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 cup powdered sugar
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp lemon juice

Frosting Directions:

1. Before we begin, cut the blondie into individual squares or rectangles .
2. On low heat, melt butter in a small pot.
3. With a whisk, stir in sugar, cream, and vanilla.
4. Increase the heat and let simmer for 1 minute. This will essentially create butterscotch.
5. Remove from heat and let cool for 5 minutes.
6. Whisk in powdered sugar. Stir until smooth and lumps are gone.
7. Spread butterscotch frosting onto blondie pieces, then use a fork to create hair-like streaks.
8. Lastly, sprinkle some salt over them to cut down on the sweetness.

I was really worried that this dessert would be too sweet, but everyone really enjoyed it. The salt at the end really helped.

"Blue Sky On Mars" Cocktail

In addition to the food and dessert, I decided to also make a themed cocktail for the night. I called the drink "Blue Sky On Mars" based on a blink-and-you-miss-it throwaway line that becomes more relevant later in the film.

I have some friends who drink and some that don't, so I want to make something that could be served as a cocktail or mocktail. The drink I came up with worked pretty well for both, and it was also pretty easy to make.

Directions:

1. Pour a glass about a quarter to a third of the way with cranberry juice.
2. Add ice to the glass.
3. Gently add Sprite or 7-Up until the glass is almost full. If you want to include alcohol, you will be adding coconut rum during this step as well.
4. Lastly, finish the drink with some blue Powerade over the top.

The end results, is a drink that is sweets but not overpowering. Everyone at the party seem to really enjoy it. Most of us had two or three glasses. I had some soda and other fizzy drinks available, but none of them were even opened because everyone enjoyed the cocktail so much.

The last snack that I provided was some lollipops that I bought for this event. I wanted to have some large round lollipops as an homage to the red tracking device that Arnold pulls out of his nose in the film. I handed these out as soon as that scene was over. The party guests got a kick out of that.

Overall, the entire evening was a huge success. It was a lot of work though. I was lucky to have had a lot of free time on my hands on the few days leading up to this event, which is why I was able to go a little overboard with it.

Before I go I will leave you with a couple other fun things that I made. Because I was essentially creating a fast food Martian empire, I decided just for fun to use AI to make some ads for it. I will share them with you here.