What 'Made From Scratch' Actually Means at The Magic Food Bus

"Made from scratch" gets thrown around a lot. It's on chalkboards, in Instagram bios, on food truck menus across the Front Range. Most of the time it means the restaurant doesn't use pre-made patties. Sometimes it means even less than that.

At The Magic Food Bus, we use it because it's accurate. It describes a specific set of decisions we make every day that show up directly in the food. Here's what it actually means at our counter in Louisville, Colorado.

The burger patties

We don't use pre-formed patties. We take Colorado angus chuck, 80/20, never leaner, and form loose balls by hand before each service. That's intentional. Pre-formed patties are compressed, and compression works against the smash technique. A loose ball of beef, smashed hard against a 450°F flat-top, spreads further, makes more contact, and develops a better crust. We do this for every single order, not just when it's slow.

The veggie burger

Our Veggie Burger is a house-made chickpea patty built with quinoa, wild rice, flax, chia, and hemp seeds. We didn't buy it from a distributor and drop it on a brioche bun. We make it ourselves because a store-bought frozen patty and a from-scratch patty are not the same thing, and our guests can tell the difference. It holds together. It has texture. It tastes like food.

The sauces

The special sauce on the MFB Smashburger is ours. Not a branded condiment, not something we squeeze out of a gallon jug. The hot sauce on the Hot Chicken is our recipe. The tzatziki on the Gyro Wrap is made in-house. These things take more time than opening a bottle. They also taste like more than an open bottle.

The chicken prep

Our chicken strips are sous-vide before they're breaded and fried. Sous-vide means the chicken cooks in a temperature-controlled water bath to an exact internal temperature before it ever sees hot oil. The result is a strip that's been cooked perfectly on the inside before the outside gets fried. You get crunch on the outside and consistent, juicy texture on the inside. Not the dry, overcooked interior that happens when you're trying to cook raw chicken all the way through in a fryer. It takes longer. It's better.

The desserts

When we have desserts on the menu, we make them. Our raspberry pop tarts are hand-formed and baked. Our fruit tarts are assembled in-house. These aren't menu items we carry because they're easy. They're on because we like making them and our guests like eating them. When the weekly special includes a dessert component, same standard applies.

The weekly special

The weekly special is probably the clearest expression of what scratch cooking means for us. Every week we build a new dish from the ground up. We've done braised corned beef with house soda bread, steak with from-scratch chimichurri, chicken parmesan with house-made sauce over couscous, firecracker dogs with hand-formed toppings. Nothing on the special comes from a can or a prep bag. It comes from a recipe we worked out ourselves.

That's also why the special is worth checking every week. It reflects what we've been cooking, what ingredients we're excited about, and what technique we've been refining. Follow us on Instagram at @the_magic_food_bus to see what's on.

Why we do it this way

Between the two of us, we have 35 years of professional kitchen experience. Gary trained at Johnson & Wales and cooked under a chef who competed at the Culinary Olympics. We know what restaurant-quality cooking looks like because we've done it. Taking shortcuts to run a faster counter was never the point.

We also think guests deserve to know what they're eating. When you order the MFB Smashburger, you're eating Colorado beef we formed by hand, a sauce we make ourselves, and a brioche bun we butter and toast on the flat-top for every order. We'd rather charge a fair price for that than cut corners and charge a cheap one.

Come see for yourself

We're at Relish Food Hall & Pickleball, 550 McCaslin Blvd, Louisville, CO 80027. Open Monday to Thursday 11am to 8pm, Friday to Saturday 11am to 9pm, Sunday 11am to 8pm. Order ahead at gotab.io/loc/relishfoodhall or walk up to the counter.

If you want handmade food in Louisville, Colorado, food that's actually made from scratch and not just marketed that way, this is where we'd point you.