It turns out there are different styles of burger. Who knew, right? And surprise they picked the photogenic one for the banner.
Here's the beauty of reading an article on cooking, and subsequently of cooking for yourself: you can take what you learned and then make your burger however you like. And how you like your burger might not be how someone else likes theirs.
Yes. I've totally bought into the smash burgers meme and they've never let me down once. I'm also a pretty terrible cook and don't follow the instructions too closely (e.g. I smash them before putting them into the frying pan since I don't have a big/flat enough pan). Delicious every time.
I used to press burgers in patties and take a lot of care to not over massage the ground meat together. Learned about smashburgers, and it's just the most effective way to make a burger. You make small balls of ground beef, press it on a hot metal surface and let it cook (rapidly). You build it up to the given weight you want (2 2.5 oz patties produce about a quarter pound burger after the water cooks off and fat renders). Top each pattie with cheese, dress the buns, put the burger between dressed buns and you have a pretty good sandwich.
I agree! I was recently musing with a relative that the short-lived large-single-patty Big Mac a couple years ago was more appealing to me than the typical version. She mentioned reading that it may be coming back?
But at that point maybe just get a Whopper from Burger King, or almost anything else.
> Modern American cheese is a type of processed cheese [...] It is typically yellow or white in color; yellow American cheese is seasoned and colored with annatto. [Image: an individually wrapped slice of American cheese, also known as a single]
Maybe 'processed' (not a good term I know, but we sort of know what we mean), coloured, sliced and individually wrapped cheese is 'normal' to you, it certainly isn't to me.
> Manufacturing process
> Traditional cheese is ground, combined with emulsifying agents and other ingredients, mixed and heated until it forms a "melted homogeneous" mixture. To pasteurize it, [...]
> Processed American cheese is packaged in individually wrapped slices, as unwrapped slices sold in stacks, or in unsliced blocks. Individually wrapped slices are formed from processed cheese which solidifies only between the wrapping medium; these slices, sold as 'singles', are typically the least like traditional cheese. Blocks of American cheese are more similar to traditional cheese, and are sliced to order at deli counters.
I didn't know how it was made until I read this, but I think that settles it? It 'contains' 'normal cheese', but the manufacturing process specifically starts with that as input.
If I ground some assorted meats, pasteurised them, seasoned them, and then shaped it - is that 'normal steak'? No, it's basically a burger (albeit multi-meat & steak-shaped), a distinct thing.
Or a better example because it actually exists: 'fish fingers' can be called 'fish' because they're a blend of multiple normal fish, but the resultant processed blend isn't 'normal fish' or 'a fish'.
Here’s the problem: you’ve confused Kraft Singles (a “prepared cheese product” that can’t legally be called “cheese”) with American cheese, which is a blend of cheeses.
If you want a better burger then don’t grill them. Unless you want old-timey dad burgers. Which I do fairly often in the summer. But I know it’s inferior to many variety of smash burgers sautés in butter and tallow.
If you are cooking your burger in a skillet or a flat top, you want a 70/30 ratio, not 80/20. A 70/30 ratio increases the fat content enough that the grease released from the burger will essentially fry the burger in its own fat instead of steaming it in the pan.
I also do not fully agree with their idea of not salting the meat at all before forming the patties. I do not want a hamburger with the consistency of meat loaf. I want a bite to it. It's a burger, not a steak. The meat matters, but the bun and condiments matter just as much.
Can anyone explain how rare burgers can possibly be safe?
I've always understood that bacteria that causes food poisoning lives on the surface of a steak hence rare steak is no problem. Mincing a steak would cause that bacteria to be through out the burger.
I was surprised when I was in the USA and I was asked how I want my burger done. I love a rare steak but would never consider a rare burger. Maybe I'm wrong about the bacteria thing?
I don't know if restaurants use it, but irradiated ground beef is a thing[1]. It has been offered by Wegman's supermarkets[2] and Omaha Steaks[3].
Omaha Steaks says they use it (only) for ground beef because, "Unlike solid cuts of meat, the potential exists that surface bacteria may have been mixed within ground beef."
Wegmans has a cooking temperature page[4] that gives lower temperatures for irradiated ground beef than for regular ground beef.
So that's one way safe + rare is possible.
Another way is sous vide. It's a "low and slow" cooking technique, and germ-killing is a function of both time and temperature[5], so it can achieve safe + rare. It's definitely more trouble to cook your burgers for 1-2 hours, though.
IT's not 100% safe. Neither are oysters [1] or soft-boiled eggs [2]. But if you have it once in a while and no other health factors it might well be worth the risk.
You’re not wrong, but its the difference between restaurant rare and home rare. Restaurant rare typically comes from a giant pile of meat, many pounds mixed into a large recipe and then divvied out into patties to be cooked to order. This gives a significantly higher chance of getting bad bacteria, though still not particularly high chances from any given batch.
Cooking at home one is typically using a significantly smaller amount of ground beef from a smaller batch, so lower chances overall of some bacteria from one package of beef being distributed across a large number of burgers.
Additionally most bacteria that gets onto food prepared in reasonably clean environments doesn’t do much more than cause an upset stomach.
There’s liability at restaurants on the above for the reasons you mentioned, where those same liabilities don’t exist for steaks as highly. At home, all bets are off on liability from being undercooked.
It is, but they are probably more careful about cleaning the equipment than the typical restaurant.
When I'm at my supermarket meat counter near closing time, they are washing everything -- equipment, countertops, walls, floors with hot soapy water, brushes, and a hose. Everything goes down the floor drain.
When I worked in restaurants, equipment was mostly cleaned with rags and a bucket.
Do you eat tartare? It's not totally safe, but it's often low risk enough that people go for it.
I generally get med-rare burgers from places that ground their own meats recently, so streak houses that ground the steak trimmings from yesterday that morning. Else I'll order medium and not risk it, but everyone's risk profile is different.
How about if you sear a large cut of beef to kill the surface bacteria, then immediately slice off (with a sterilized knife) and grind (with a sterilized grinder) enough for tartare or a rare burger? I'd eat that! Do any restaurants do that?
I remember watching the new Top Gun and thinking it is basically a burger: there is the craft (making movies or making food), but sometimes, craft matters very little and it's more not messing up the ingredients (beef and jets).
The amount of salt in photo #6 is too much salt. Its very easy to over-salt anything and ruin it. Better to under-salt until you gain enough experience with judging how much you actually need.
As for putting the meat grinder in the freezer, I'd like to know if restaurants do that or not. Because I highly doubt it. Seems very silly.
> The amount of salt in photo #6 is too much salt.
Except that's not true. It's perfectly seasoned. Whenever you cook meat, especially if you're grilling it, you need to season well because half of your seasoning isn't going to remain on the meat.
1. Only true if there's copious amounts of oil to absorb the seasoning. Otherwise it might get absorbed by the rendered fat of the burger. Sometimes 50% or more of it gets lost, sometimes less.
2. It is better to underseason than overseason. If you overseason, you end up with an inedible salt mess. If you underseason, all it takes is a quick sprinkle before you eat it.
That being said, I think the picture in #6 looks perfectly fine. I'd use a dash more of pepper though.
I honestly don't understand seasoning a burger with pepper before grilling. By the time you're done, most of the flavor has been obliterated by the heat.
In a video on Kenji's YouTube channel, he and his sous chef at Wursthall went through their sausage-making process, and they talked about how when they grind meat for sausages, they make sure the grinder parts and plates are in the freezer for at least an hour before grinding. (The video is entitled "Let Me Show You Erik's Sausage Room", at about 7:45.)
Just one anecdotal data point, but when I worked in a kitchen a very long time ago we would wheel the meat grinder and it's attached table into the walk-in in between uses, after cleaning. We only used it a few times a day so this was no great chore.
It is not, for all the reasons listed. You get much better texture when everything is cold, because you are actually grinding/cutting the meat, rather than squeezing and smearing it.
When he refused to call kaffir lime by its widely accepted name because it might potentially offend someone, I had about enough. What silliness, especially when the etymology of the term remains undecided.
Are we also going to stop called puttanesca dishes by their name because sex workers might be offended because it includes a profane term? Can we finally say enough to the constant quest for purity typified by a food critic penning a column on what words she won't use?[0] She won't even write "guilty" because that might trigger someone, even though I think nearly anyone would agree that an Animal Style 3x3 from In-N-Out is indeed a guilty pleasure.
I just want to cook and eat good food, not play these kinds of nonsense games that cater to a certain rather noisy (and politically homogeneous) audience.
[0]: "The trouble comes from the fact that the word is a cognate for a slur used by white colonists to refer to Black Africans in South Africa. Though the spirit of the word likely has very little to do with the latter context, my reasoning is the same as the reason why you’re never going to catch me casually saying or writing the word “niggardly.”"
https://www.sfchronicle.com/restaurants/article/Words-you-ll...
Yes and no. Yes, he does a great run-though of a variety of dishes. No, in that he has the camera affixed to his head or hand and bouncing around and the result is highly vertigo-inducing. Is the informative nature of a food channel worth the intense nausea caused from watching it?
I love the POV style, especially paired with the lack of cuts. Gives me a better sense of everything he's doing in the kitchen - when else would you see how he keeps his fridge or spice cabinet organized?
I eat a pound of ground whatever three or four times a week, be it elk, wild boar, venison, and sometimes 'burger.'
Always ground. I can incorporate other things to make it be whatever I want, and there's no issue with rare-not rare. Outright burgers aren't worth the hassle to me. Anyway, I couldn't eat a 1 pound burger most days, but have no issue with ground for some reason.
There's basically two tips here. The first is to throw money at the problem, nice beef, nice bun, etc, etc and the second is to actually season your burger.
Cooking a burger isn't rocket science. All the typical tips and tricks that you'd apply to most other beef dishes apply to it. But slaving over a fucking burger kinda defeats the point. It's a dish that's very tolerant of loose cooking procedure and you'd be a fool to not take advantage of that.
If your burgers aren't coming out how you want try cooking them slower or making them much thinner.
I grew up eating meatloaf style burgers with a bunch of stuff - onions, mustard and seasoning - stirred through the ground beef. Learning to just season the outside was a game changer. I never really cared for homemade burgers before then. But that tip makes the burgers less effort not more.
> But slaving over a fucking burger kinda defeats the point. It's a dish that's very tolerant of loose cooking procedure and you'd be a fool to not take advantage of that.
Sure but that doesn't mean that it's not worth talking about complete optimization. If you know the absolute best technique then you can decide which parts are worth the extra time for you. Or sometimes you feel like a burger and you have a lot of time, so it's worth knowing the optimal way to do it all.
I think of it more like... a bad burger is still good, but that doesn't mean it can't be better.
Kenji is the godhead for me. In fact, I'm making falafel his way again, today or tomorrow. The politics? I wish you hadn't told me that.
As for burgers, I've settled on using the broiler. I'm not convinced that a fry pan offers any advantages. And he's right about using salt. Adding more after it's cooked is NOT a substitute.
Ha, I fully appreciate never going past medium on a fine cut of steak but most hamburger meat I encounter is a far cry from being a fine cut. At most restaurants around here when I order a burger that rare I end up regretting it.
I thought the issue with rare/cooked-through burgers is that grinding distributes surface bacteria throughout the mass and it all needs to get hot enough, whereas on primal and sub-primal cuts you're safely cooking the bacteria that's on the surfaces.
You definitely don't want to flip a burger multiple times. There is a drastic difference in quality. They advocate it cooks the middle more, but the real trick is to move the burger to the side of grill that is off and close the lid to cook it like an oven.
It's a rule in many kitchens I've been in to only flip once, because you don't want to lose the juices from the fat.
It's really comically how many people here, including yourself, are just assuming they know more than then author. Kenji has done numerous studies debunking this and has dug into every single part of the burger making process and so much more to come up with these steps.
Flipping your burger less doesn't help. Yes, the salt level is correct. Yes, putting the grinder in the freezer is a good idea. Stop assuming you know more than experts without conducting studies your self, you arrogant people.
Kenji has done lots of testing about this, and his result was: flipping doesn't matter. I tend to trust him over old kitchen myths, although I cannot prove he's right.
It also doesn't matter because you're usually eating a burger with some kind of condiment or side.
Whether it's a mushroom/egg/tomato, coleslaw on the side, ketchup, tzatziki (lamb burger) or something else, most burgers will have juices enough to not make them dry.
You also might not want to eat 100% of the rendered fat from a burger. Some fat is good, but it's still a very high-calorie substance.
Big burgers should be wider, not taller.