When you ask two body types as dissimilar as a burger patty and a sausage to shack up together you count success not in years but in minutes. That may be help explain why Shake Shake has released its Brat Burger as a limited edition running only for the length of Shacktober.

You’re meant to confuse Shacktober with Oktober, only it’s shorter by six days. The Brat Burger’s smashed burger patty, Emmenthaler cheese bratwurst, beer-battered shallots and ShackSauce will only co-habitate under the roof of a soft potato bun for the ten days of Shake Shake’s Bavarian-themed Shacktoberfest, from 04/10/13 to 13/10/13.

The split bratwurst cooks on the flat-top giddle, cut sides down. Cheese oozing from its open pores turns brown and crusty, creating a second skin down the exposed flat middle. The tubular topping marks a new delivery system for cheese on a burger. The Brat Burger is a idea with the legs to carry it beyond Shacktober. I’d scratch out the sell-by date and replace it with a cook-by temperature. I’d like the burger patties at London’s Shake Shack to be more consistently pink and juicy. When they’re not you get more succulence from the quartet of Shacktoberfest menu sausages, ranging from the bratwurst with “spicy” (read: tingly) mustard to the “spicy” (read: tingly) garlic sausage with ShackSauce kraut. No sausage or sausage accessory packs enough heat to burn a hole through your stomach lining. (You decide if that’s a good or bad thing.) But the family-friendly flavours are fresh and bold, the snappy wursts pack a punch and there’s no beating that potato bun.

German Chocolate Pecan Concrete, a mashup of chocolate frozen custard, coconut, pecans, caramel and cubes of chocolate hazelnut brownie cubes from St John Bakery, is a sensational Shacktoberfest riff on German chocolate cake.
&nbsp

 

Its only not set in this concrete is its Bavarian credentials: You’re meant to confuse German chocolate cake with chocolate cake from Germany. But the classic layer cake with coconut filling and caramel topping is only as German as Sam German, the American chocolate maker after whom that American classic was named.

 
Shake Shack, 24 Market Building, The Piazza, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8RD (map)