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We recently paid a visit to the Pikachu Café in Roppongi, where we dined on, among other dishes, a hamburger shaped like the electrically charged Pokémon mascot. But while we found ourselves craving seconds, we weren’t sure we felt like waiting in the restaurant’s long line again.

So instead, we decided to make our own Pikachu Burger by reverse engineering and remixing what we ate in Roppongi, and today we’re sharing our recipe with you. So join us after the break for this easy recipe and a step-by-step guide to building your own pika-tastic burgers!

Even with its playful artistic touches, the Pikachu Burger really isn’t that hard to replicate. As a matter of fact, as soon as I saw the Pikachu Café’s version, I said, “I could make that!”

Or, more accurately, my wife said, “I could make that!” and I said, “I could take pictures and wash the dishes afterwards!”

Let’s get right into it, shall we?

Ingredients (makes two Pikachu Burgers)
Ground beef (300 g / 10.6 oz.)
Egg (1)
Onion (1/2)
Bread crumbs (3 tablespoons)
Milk (4 tablespoons)
Salt
Pepper
Lettuce
Tomato (1)
Cherry tomatoes (2)
Uncooked spaghetti (1 stick)
Tortilla chips
Chocolate decorating pen
Buns (2)

Our 300 grams of beef will give us enough for two large burgers. We actually used a Japanese recipe for hamburger steak, which lets the bread crumbs and onions play a pretty important role in the flavor.

First, slice an onion in half, then peel and rinse it. Next, you’ll need to dice the half-onion, either with a food processor or some fancy knife-handling skills and the finest knife you can buy for 100 yen.

▼ I’m not crying because of the onions. I was just thinking about Bambi’s mom and…oh wait, I got that backwards.

Once you’ve got them chopped nice and fine, toss the pieces into a frying pan with a little olive oil, and sauté them over medium heat them until they’re a light golden brown.

▼ Good to go

Place the ground meat in a bowl, and add the sautéed onions. In a separate bowl mix the bread crumbs and milk together, then add this mixture, along with the egg and a few dashes of salt and pepper, to the beef and onions.

Mix everything together until it’s a uniform consistency. Ideally at this point you’d toss the patties on a grill over an open flame, but since our apartment doesn’t have space for a barbeque, we cooked ours in a frying pan. We started with the heat on medium for about four minutes, then flipped the patties, covered the pan with aluminum foil, and turned the heat down to low. Altogether, it took us a little over 15 minutes, but you can cut that time if you use thinner patties or want to eat them rare.

With the patties ready, we washed our other veggies, tore off a few leaves of lettuce, and sliced the tomato.

Now, it’s time to start making Pikachu himself. Our cooking project being based in Japan meant we hit a snag when our local grocery store didn’t have any genuine hamburger buns. So instead, we swung by the Little Mermaid bakery (the same chain behind the Kiki’s Delivery Service pastries) and picked up two bun-shaped substitutes: salt butter bread, and a roll with little kernels of corn in it.

Decorating pens are usually used to add fine lines of frosting to a cake, but they’re also extremely helpful for when you want to add Pokémon faces to a bun. We recommend running the pen under warm tap water for a few seconds to soften its contents up and make it easier to work with.

Once you’re ready, go ahead and draw Pikachu’s eyes, tiny little nose, and mouth. Don’t worry about his rosy cheeks: we’ve got something else planned for them.

▼ Practice run

Without his pointy ears, though, Pikachu looks a little a little more like a puppy dog or baby seal than a proper pocket monster. To fix this problem, tear open the bag of tortilla chips.

▼ You know you’re in Japan when you have less trouble finding Don Tacos teriyaki chicken flavor tortilla chips than hamburger buns. Odd as they may sound, they’re actually pretty tasty, with a sweet, sort of caramel-like flavor.

If you’re in a rush, you could use the chips whole, but to really get the proper effect, a little reshaping is in order. Using a pair of kitchen shears, we cut away everything that didn’t look like a Pikachu ear.

Depending on the consistency of the buns you’re using, the chips might break if you just try to stick them in. To prevent this, use kitchen shears or a knife to make small cuts in the top of the bun into which you can gently insert Pikachu’s ears.

The upside to using tortilla chips is that they’re already pretty close to the yellow shade of Pikachu’s fur. Still, you’ll need to add some black to the tips. The Pikachu Café in Roppongi did this by singing the chips, but since chocolate generally tastes better than fire, we opted to bust out our decorating pen again for the task.

Now all Pikachu needs are his cheeks, which we made with cherry tomatoes.

▼ There’s really nothing in Japan that you can’t buy in a cute package.

 

To get the most expressive shapes, we recommend using slivers from the outermost edge of the cherry tomatoes, which means using one tomato for each burger.

Of course, there’s one last problem to solve: How do you keep those slices from falling off the bun? There’re a couple ways you could go about this, but we settled on using a stick of uncooked spaghetti. We snapped off four short lengths, skewered a cherry tomato slice on each, and then inserted them into the buns.

▼ Be careful not to chomp down on the raw pasta once you start eating, though, since it’s obviously pretty hard.

▼ The finished buns

With all the components prepared, it’s finally time to put everything together.

▼ Awwwww!

▼ We’re still gonna eat him, though.

▼ Both of them, actually.

With burgers this unique looking, ordinary ketchup seemed a little too boring of a condiment. Since the official Pikachu Café burger’s teriyaki sauce was a little on the bland side, we decided to spice things up a bit with some honey barbecue sauce.

With two adorable burgers on our plates (and soon after in our stomachs), it was good to know that even after the Pikachu Café closes down on August 31, we can whip up our own Pikachu Burgers (RocketNews24-Style) anytime we want, and so can you!

In fact, we’ve even put all of this into a handy video for you to love and keep forever! Happy cooking, Rocketeers!

Photos, video © RocketNews24