A Hamburger Today - The Burger Lab

The Burger Lab: A 60-Day Dry-Aged Home-Ground Prime Rib Burger (That You Will Probably Never Make At Home)

2013-05-13T20:15:00Z

VIEW SLIDESHOW: The Burger Lab: A 60-Day Dry-Aged Home-Ground Prime Rib Burger (That You Will Probably Never Make At Home)

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

It's time for another round of The Food Lab. Got a suggestion for an upcoming topic? Email Kenji here, and he'll do his best to answer your queries in a future post. Become a fan of The Food Lab on Facebook or follow it on Twitter for play-by-plays on future kitchen tests and recipe experiments.

Burgers made with aged meat are making big inroads into the New York burger scene (and I presume around the country as well). Places like, say, Minetta Tavern and their infamous Black Label Burger have not only introduced people to the power of a bit of aged funk in a good burger, but have actually created a fervor for it. Is it possible to recreate some of that magic at home?

The short answer is, unfortunately, no.

To get dry-aged flavor into your burger, you need to start with dry-aged meat. And I'm talking real dry aged meat; The kind that's been stored in the open air for at least 45 days or so to really develop some flavor. When dry-aging a steak, the purpose is twofold: to tenderize (which occurs within the first 21 to 28 days), and to intensify flavor (which doesn't really start happening until after 21 days and continues well into 8+ week territory).

A dry aged steak, about to be seared and torched.

With a burger, tenderization is not really an issue—the stuff gets ground up anyway. It's really only flavor you care about, which means that you need to start with meat that's been aged at least a few weeks, preferably longer.

This meat is expensive. At a standard New York butcher or high end supermarket, aged rib steaks, New York strips, or Porterhouse steaks (the three cuts typically sold aged) are in the $25 to $30/pound range, and somehow it just feels wrong to cut up a beautiful steak just to grind it.

So what do the fancy burger joints do? Well, when you trim a ton of meat the way, say, Pat LaFrieda does, you end up with a lot of trim that's actually still quite edible; it just happens to be in small pieces or come from muscle groups that aren't as desirable as those that come in a high end steak. This trim and muscle can then be collected and ground, packing dry-aged flavor into a burger without quite the sticker shock of a dry-aged steak.

That's all well and good, but it doesn't leave much hope for home cooks who don't have first dibs on Pat LaFrieda's prime rib trim.

So here's the truth: I'm not even going to pretend that anyone is going to actually make this recipe start to finish from scratch, or even from not-scratch. It's just not practical unless you own a restaurant or are planning on aging 80 pounds of beef yourself and saving the trim to make a half dozen or so burgers. So you can consider the slideshow above to pretty much be straight-up food porn.

How did I manage to do it, you ask? Well, I aged 80 pounds of beef myself and saved the trim.

The thing about aged beef is that the outer layers are the funkiest. The very exterior is generally inedible and must be discarded. But the creamy white fat in the fat cap should have a deep, rich, almost blue cheese-like aroma, and that aroma will get ground right through your burgers, flavoring them. Because trim comes from the fatty outer areas, the burgers you end up with are very rich. I'd guess upwards of 30 to 35%.

Cooking Method

I tried cooking the funky ground meat in a number of ways including grilling, smashing, and simply searing in a cast iron skillet and basting it with its own rendered fat.

I figured with the strong aroma of the meat that grilling, with its equally powerful smoky/singed flavors, would be the best bet, but it proved to be a method that was a bit too flavorful. Most of the funk of the aged beef was lost in the char of the grill.

Smashing was much more successful. Pressing thin patties down hard into a hot surface to give maximum browning and crispness brought out the flavor of the meat while leaving it nice and juicy.

But my favorite method was to cook the burger in a cast iron skillet. Perhaps it's because dry-aged flavor is something I associate so strongly with steaks that it seems wrong to treat a dry-aged burger as anything else. It comes out with a beautifully crisp crust with plenty of nooks and crannies left behind by rendering fat for gooey cheese to melt into.

Because of the amount of fat in the patty, the method makes a ton of smoke, so make sure you've got your fans on full blast, or, better yet, work outdoors by heating your cast iron skillet over a roaring hot coal fire.

I'm the kind of guy who likes to keep his toppings simple. Onions, pickles, American cheese, and special sauce are my jam. As are Martin's potato rolls.

Let the drooling commence...

Check out the play-by-play in the slideshow »

About the author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Chief Creative Officer of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at @thefoodlab on Twitter, or at The Food Lab on Facebook.

The Burger Lab: Smashed Burgers vs. Smashing Burgers

2012-09-17T17:30:00Z

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

"Never ever press down on your burger!"

How many times have you read that in a book or heard a TV chef say it? "It squeezes the juices out!" they cry. "It turns your lunch into a hockey puck!"they scream. Sometimes they'll try and appeal to your compassionate side. "Certainly there are some things that deserve crushing. Evil grapes. T-800 model Terminators. Rebel scum trapped in trash disposals. But what has that poor, defenseless little burger ever done to you to deserve such a fate?"

You've heard it so many times you can't help but believe it's true, right?

Well ok, Mr. Smarty-Chef, I'll believe you, but first! You must answer me these questions three:

Question the first: One of my favorite burgers in New York—the one that folks'll stand in line for an hour to get—is smashed. How does the Shake Shack burger still retain such abundant juiciness?
Question the second: The SmashBurger chain of fast-casual burger joints has built its reputation on its smashing technique. Are all of its fans (which are legion) deluded into enjoying the flavor of dry hockey pucks?
Question the third: I just had what was the finest burger I've tasted in recent memory at Off-Site Kitche in Dallas where—guess what?—the burgers are smashed. What gives?

Now, these questions are largely rhetorical, and anybody who's been making burgers for a while or has been reading The Burger Lab for long enough knows the answer: not smashing your burgers is always sometimes only sort of occasionally good advice.

When is it ok to smash your burgers and when is it not? Well first, let's consider the advantages of smashing a burger.

In Crust We Trust

There's really only one reason to do it, and it's the reason that all three of the burgers I mentioned above (as well as countless others) taste so good: The Maillard Reaction. The Maillard Reaction—also known as the browning reaction*—is a series of chemical reactions that take place when protein-rich foods are heated. Large proteins break into smaller compounds which react with others, recombining into new configurations. They break apart again, recombine, and on and on in a cascade of chemical reactions that creates hundreds of brand new compounds.

* This is not to be confused with caramelization, which is a reaction that takes place when sugar is heated—you can't caramelize a steak or a burger, no matter what any TV chef tells you!

It's what creates the crust on your steak or burger, the golden brown color on your toast, and the complex, pleasing aromas and flavors that accompany that browning. It's the smell of a steakhouse and fresh bread from the oven. And it's the smell of a good burger joint. It doesn't just make meat taste good, it actually makes it taste more meaty.

Most of the browning reactions don't take place until foods are heated to at least 300°F or so, and are greatly accelerated at temperatures higher than that, so if maximizing browning is your goal when cooking a burger (and it should be!), then it's plain to see why smashing a burger can improve its flavor: It maximizes contact with the pan, increasing the surface area directly in contact with the hot metal, and maximizing browning.

While it's true that given enough time you can brown even a non-smashed burger, there are a couple problems. If the heat is too high, the browning will be uneven—at worst, the bits of meat directly in contact with the skillet or griddle will burn before the bits elevated above it can even begin to brown properly. With lower heat, you can get more even browning, but it takes longer—long enough that your burger will end up overcooking in the middle (and overcooking is the real path to dry burgers).

Smashing allows you to get a deep brown crust before the interior overcooks, even with a relatively small patty.

The Juice is Loose

So when is it not a good idea to smash? Well there's the obvious: you can't smash a burger on a grill.

But what about in the skillet or griddle? I cooked through a couple dozen burgers smashing at various stages during cooking in order to make sure. The results? If you don't want to lose juices, you must smash within the first 30 seconds of cooking.

When ground beef is cold, its fat is still solid and its juices are still held firmly in place inside small, chopped up segments of muscle fibers. That's the reason why you can push and press on ground meat without squeezing out too much liquid, and the reason why you can smash a burger during the initial phases of cooking without fear of losing moisture.

But what happens after that initial cooking phase as the meat warms up?

This is what happens when you put a cooked burger patty in a citrus juicer.

When you look at a burger under a microscope, you basically see what amounts to an interconnected network of proteins interspersed with fat and water-based liquids. Like all meats, as a burger cooks, this protein network tightens, squeezing out liquids. Simultaneously, the fat begins to render and liquefy, allowing it to be squeezed out right along with the other juices.

In a properly formed burger—one that is made with meat that's been ground properly and kept chilled and minimally handled while shaping—the protein matrix is relatively loose. Even once fat has been liquefied and juices have been squeezed out, they can remain trapped in the patty, only getting released when you bite into the burger, in much the same way that liquids can be trapped in a sponge and only released by squeezing.

Press down on a burger during this phase, and the juices come gushing out into the skillet or onto your coals. You're left with what amounts to a meat patty with the texture of a sponge that's been run through a ringer.

All burgers will lose weight as you cook them—it's not possible to hold on to all liquefied fat and exuded juices. In my testing, four-ounce burgers that started as round pucks and were smashed down to a half-inch thickness any time before 30 seconds still lost a little over 20 percent of their weight while cooking. This was comparable to four-ounce burgers that were formed into 1/2-inch disks and cooked with no smashing at all. Both burgers tasted quite juicy, while the smashed burger had better flavor (obviously!).

Once you start smashing after the 1 minute mark, that's when juices really start to flow and you end up with a dramatically drier burger—a good 50 percent more moisture is lost in a burger smashed after 1 minute versus one smashed within 30 seconds.

Move into the territory of double or even triple smashing—that is, smashing once at the beginning, then getting impatient and smashing again and again during the middle and latter phases of cooking—and a burger can easily lose half of its weight to the evil griddle gods. I've seen more than one short order cook at a greasy spoon with a backup of orders resort to this dastardly method, and not once have I ever taken more than one bite of a burger that's been exposed to it.

A burger at Good Stuff Eatery being annihilated.

If you've read my breakdown of the Fake Shackburger, you already know the best way to cook a smashed burger at home, but I realized that I've never produced a more generic recipe for one.

Three Rules For Smashing Success

Other than the basic rules of burgers (use meat with at least 20 percent fat, a good blend of cuts or straight ground chuck, preferably freshly ground, don't add salt or other seasonings until after the patties are formed), making a smashed burger is simple. Just follow these basic rules:

Rule 1: Use a good stainless steel or cast iron skillet.

The goal is steady, even heat, so you want to use a relatively thick pan and allow it to preheat for long enough that there are no hot or cool spots. I let my pans preheat over medium heat for a few minutes, pumping them up to high just before I add the meat. Don't use a non-stick pan, as the high heat required for a good crust is damaging to non-stick coatings and can cause them to vaporize. You don't want to breathe that junk in.

Rule 2: Smash early and smash firmly.

I have a thick, flat, sturdy metal spatula specially devoted to the task of smashing burgers. You'll need one to do this properly. Form four to five ounces of meat into a puck about 2-inches high, season liberally with salt and pepper, and place it on the preheated skillet, then smash down on it with the spatula, using a second spatula to add pressure if necessary. Then just cook without moving until a deep brown crust develops. This'll take about a minute and a half.

Rule 3: Leave no crust behind.

The whole goal of smashing is to develop a nice browned crust, so it's important that you scrape it all up intact. Once again, a sturdy metal spatula is your friend. I find that flipping the spatula upside down to help scrape the crust off is pretty effective. If you crust is properly developed and your burger properly smashed, it should spend very little time on its second side—just enough to finish cooking through and to allow cheese to melt (if added). 30 seconds or so.

And, well, that's it. So simple, so fast, so freaking delicious. Do it.

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Smashed Burgers »

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The Burger Lab: What's the Best Way To Slice Onions For Burgers?

2012-08-21T14:00:00Z

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

Onions are a burger's best friend. They have a natural sweetness that brings out the savoriness of good quality beef. They throw out chemicals called lachrymators (yes, the same chemicals that make you tear up when cutting them—the root is from the Latin for tears) that open up your nasal passages and prime your taste buds to make your meat taste more, well, meaty.

A world of burgers with no onions is like a world of movies with no popcorn: You'd still indulge and perhaps even enjoy yourself, but deep down you'd know that there's something missing, some vital element that prevents the experience from living up to its full potential.

This post is about helping your burgers and your onions achieve a succesful, beautiful union.

For the interest of the whole brevity thing (which, by the way, this post will not achieve despite my best efforts), we're only going to deal with plain old yellow onions today, and for the most part, we're talking raw onions here.

Slice Advice

A lot of folks and many, many restaurants will do whole rings, like this:

This is not my slice of choice. Sure, it looks pretty, but looks ain't everything, babe. First off, it's the most difficult slicing option in terms of knife skills. With no flat base to sit on, cutting slices off of a round onion is asking for injury. A mandoline or a deli-style slicer is a much safer way to do it, but who has time to mess around with special equipment?

Not only that, but onion rounds are unwieldy. They don't fit your burger, requiring you to disassemble them and try and stack them unevenly over the surface. The only exception to my no-raw-onion-rings rule is if I happen to find an onion big enough or a burger small enough, and I'm in a very particular mood. But the onion must cover the entire surface of the burger such that disassembly is not required.

This rarely happens, so moving on.

Orbital Slices Vs. Pole-To-Pole Slices

So we've agreed that it's better to split an onion in half to make slicing easier and to make slices more burger-friendly. Which direction do you cut them?

If we call the stem and root end of an onion its north and south poles, then an orbital slice looks like this...

...while a pole-to-pole slice looks like this:

At first glance, you may think, what's the big difference? Who gives a rat's a&s which way I slice them?

Good point. I'd like to answer your rudely phrased question with a rudely phrased question of my own: Do you care one whit about the flavors and texture you are shoveling into your philistine pie-hole?

If the answer is no, then by all means slice your onions any which way. But if the answer is yes, consider this: The direction you slice your onions will affect the number of cells you ruptere.

So how does this matter? Well remember those lachrymators we talked about earlier? Those pungent compounds that make you tear up and make an onion smell like an onion? They don't actually exist in onions. That's right. Onion cells contain precursors to those lachrymators inside different cellular compartments. It's only after the cells have been ruptured and these precursors escape that they can react with each other, become airborne, and jump up into your face.

We know that some amount of this stuff is desirable. It makes your onion taste onion-y, and your burger taste more meaty. But too much can be overwhelming, leading to burgers that can best be described as indecent.

Simply judging by the grain of an onion and the way it looks after sliced, you can guess that the orbitally sliced onion (on the right in the photo above) has had more intense cellular damage than the pole-to-pole sliced onion (on the left in the photo above). But just to be sure, I split an onion in half, slicing each of the two halves in different ways, then placed the onion slices in identical covered containers where I let them sit for ten minutes on the counter.

I opened the containers and took a whiff; There's no doubt that the orbitally sliced onion is stronger, giving off a powerful stench of White Castle dumpsters and bad dates.

Even worse is when you dice the onions first, which leads to maximum cell-damage.

The moral? For the best tasting, best-textured raw onion for a burger, go for pole-to-pole slices.

Odor Eliminator

Let's say you happen to have an extra pungent onion—it happens to the best of us—is there a way to tame them?

I tried out a few different methods, from submerging them in cold water for times ranging from 10 minutes to two hours, to chilling them, to letting them air out on the counter.

Soaking the onions in a container just led to onion-scented liquid in the container, without much of a decrease in the aroma in the onions themselves—perhaps if I'd used an unreasonably small amount of onion in an unreasonably large container it would have diluted it more efficiently. Air-drying led to milder flavor, but dried out onions and a papery texture.

The best method turned out to be the fastest and easiest: just rinse away all those extra pungent compounds under running water, and not just that, but use warm water. The speed of chemical and physical reactions increase with temperature. Using warm water causes onions to release their volatile compounds faster—about 45 seconds is enough to rid even the the most pungent onions of their kick.

The next question on your mind might be, but doesn't hot water turn the texture of an onion as limp as your intellect or perhaps other parts of your body?

Jeez, you guys are really digging in today, aren't you? The answer, by the way, is no, it doesn't. Even if you use pure hot tap water, it generally comes out at around 140 to 150°F or so, while pectin, the main carbohydrate "glue" that holds plant cells together doesn't break down until around 183°F. There are other bits of the onion that, given enough time, will begin to soften at hot tap water temperatures, but it takes a long time.

Don't worry, your onions are safe here.

Dice Advice

The only real exception I have to my always-use-pole-to-pole-sliced-onions rule is for sliders—that is, true sliders in which the onions are pushed into the meat, then flipped so the burgers cook on top of the onions and the onions gently steam until soft. In those cases, you technically aren't using raw onions anymore, so really anything goes.

Well, almost anything.

Diced onions will press into the meat messily, breaking it up and turning it into a loose, glorious mess on the steamed bun. The onions and meat will spill out of the sides, requiring finger licking and utensil-less meat grabbing. That's something I'm often up for.

Pole-to-pole sliced onions are more demure, keeping solid and softening gently, leading to a more compact, lady-like burger package. This I can also deal with.

The odd-man-out is orbitally sliced onions, once again, which I find to be too messy, pulling out of the burger as you bite, leading to your first bite with a mouthful of onions and the rest of the burger completely onion-less.

The only reason I give orbital onions the time of day is because the awesome sliders at White Manna in Hackensack, New Jersey uses them. Respect.

A Word on Placement

The classic onion positioning is on top of the burger. This is the positioning of choice for top-it-yourselfers, who grab their toppings from a bar or a platter. Others advocate putting the toppings underneath. A fine choice for gentlemen and ladies with more refined tastes.

But may I be so bold as to offer a third, and vastly superior option?

Under the cheese.

I hope the photograph and resulting mental image of biting into that neat, tidy, onion-and-cheese-topped package makes my case for me.

And we haven't even gotten into things like, dehydrated onions...

...or caramelized...

(...which can lead to this...)

...or grated for sliders...

...or grilled...

...you get the picture. It's a wide, wide world of onions out there, burger ol' buddy. Let's get peeling.

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Burger Topping Week: Muffaletta Burgers

2012-07-20T14:30:00Z

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

I remember a time about six years ago when I was asked to name my favorite condiment (not necessarily just for burgers). Back then it was a toss-up between miso paste* and dijon mustard. For the last few years, it's been mayonnaise (homemade, that is, with plenty of garlic). These days, mayonnaise is seeing some very stiff competition from New Orleans-style olive salad.

* Does miso paste count as a condiment?

Now it could just be that my olive salad cravings are a byproduct of the fact that I have six quarts of the stuff leftover from the Sweetlife Food and Music Festival. The entire bottom shelf of my fridge is devoted to it, much to the chagrin of my lovely wife.

But I like to believe it's more. I like to believe that when an olive salad is good—when it's packed with intense black and green olives, salty capers, a healthy dose of hot pepperoncini, finely chopped giardiniera, a splash of red wine vinegar, and the very best olive oil you can get your hands on—it becomes far more than a simple sandwich topping; it becomes a catch-all condiment that you can use to add flavor to pretty much any savory dish you can think of.

In the last several months I've served it as a sauce for grilled chicken and for fish. I've spread it on my pizzas. I puréed it and used it as a rub for a roasted leg of lamb. I've made tomato sauces based on it for a kind of instant puttanesca.

It was only a matter of time before it made it onto a burger, and all I can say is: It's a pity that time didn't come sooner.

You can go the simple route and go with just a grilled burger patty, topped with a slice of Provolone and a whole lot of olive salad on top, or you can go all out: top your burger with a stack of cold cuts (I used sopressata, mortadella, and salami). Throw them on top for the last minute or two as your burger finished cooking, put a lid on it, and if all goes well, the edges will render and crisp up as the center of the cold cuts soften and melt into the meat and cheese.

There's no two ways about it: this guy is a fatty meat-bomb. But that's the beauty of the olive salad—it's got enough briny, salty, pickled flavors in it that it brightens up even the heaviest of meals. You can tell yourself it does the same for your waistline.

Come get your Muffaletta Burgers this way! »

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Burger Topping Week: Barbecue Bacon Burgers

2012-07-19T14:00:00Z

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

I know, I know—bacon on a cheeseburger. And oh, what's that other super original topping you've got? Grilled onions, and, and barbecue sauce? Could you get more predictable? Even The Clown and The King would roll their eyes at you if you brought a barbecue-sauced bacon cheeseburger into their August presences.

But the flavors have got to be classic for a reason, right? And it's not just because someone had the bright idea that salty bacon and plenty of sweet, smoky sauce can rescue even a mediocre hamburger. No, it's because when each of the elements is perfect—the burger juicy and medium rare with a smoky char from the grill, the bacon thick cut, crisp, and lacquered in tangy sauce, the onion softened to a sweet, sweet tenderness—it's a flavor combination that's tough to beat.

Thing is, we rarely ever receive a perfect barbecue bacon cheeseburger. Here's how to do it.

The patty needs to be plenty thick to stand up to the robust flavor of the bacon and barbecue sauce. For burgers like this I like to go a full eight ounces (and share it with somebody if necessary). The best meat is a home-ground blend, but freshly ground chuck from the butcher counter will do.

The bacon must be ultra-thick cut. Ideally I'm talking 1/4-inch-thick, which means that if at all possible, you should start with whole slab bacon and have your butcher cut it for you (or just cut it yourself—bacon is remarkably easy to slice with a knife so long as it's well-chilled. Just make sure to remove the rind (that's the part with the nipples on it) if it's present.

Cooking the bacon low and slow is key to rendering all the fat out of it and getting it nice and crisp. I build a two-zone fire and cook the bacon over the cool side for a good 15 minutes or so to get the rendering process going. When my burger is a few moments away from finishing, I'll transfer the bacon over to the hot side to crisp up. The result is juicy, shatteringly crisp porky slices that you can bite off with your burger, instead of having the whole thing drag out with each bite.

Onions need low, slow heat and attention just like the bacon. They lose lots of moisture and structure as they cook so using thick slices is key. I go about 1/3rd of an inch thick, placing them right in the middle of the hot and cool sections of the grill and letting them cook for as long as the bacon, slowly softening and caramelizing, releasing sugars onto their surface that rapidly brown when you shift the onion over to direct heat right at the end.

The sauce can be whatever you'd like—either a homemade barbecue sauce, or your favorite store-bought brand (see our tasting here). The important part is application: just like with barbecued chicken or ribs, you should brush it onto the burger patty (and the bacon slices!) only for the last few moments of cooking.

And fine, if you want to go extra crazy: add some avocado and fried pork rinds up in there. But don't say I didn't warn you.

Come get your Barbecue Bacon Burgers this way! »

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Burger Topping Week: Sweet Barbecue Kim-cheese Burgers

2012-07-18T15:00:00Z

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

The combination of grilled beef in a sweet and salty marinade and kimchi is about as classic as it gets. Think: kalbi or bulgogi. Even the combination of marinated beef, kimchi, and cheese is not unprecedented. Just take a look at the Korean taco craze. Koreans will take slices of American cheese and melt them into their kimchi jjigae. I had an awesome bulgogi hoagie at Broadway Cafe in Ann Arbor last year. Even the Serious Eats book has a recipe for kimchi quesadillas.

So to put kimchi on a burger seems only natural. Once upon a hangover, I made myself a burger that combined not just kimchi, but pickled jalapeños, cheese, and eggs fried in duck fat. That monstrosity managed to allay my headache for a few hours, but it certainly broke most if not all of my Principles of Burger Topping.

With a clear mind, we can do better.

For starters, chopped kimchi and American cheese are a must for any kim-cheeseburger. After that? I decided to go with a quick pickled sweet-and-salty slaw of carrots and cucumbers. They add a nice crunch (which my go-to super-fermented kimchi lacks), and a sweetness that pairs nicely with the heat and garlic of the kimchi. I make it the way I'd make quick pickles for a Vietnamese bành mí: rub some sugar and salt into vegetables cut into matchsticks (disks work just fine), add a touch of vinegar, and let it sit for half an hour or so—just about the time it takes to light up the grill and cook off my burgers.

For the patties themselves, thick and beefy is the way to go. I generally like to grind my own beef blend, but for a burger with many toppings, fresh ground chuck works fine (just make sure it's got enough fat!).

And for that sweet glaze? Sweet kalbi-style marinade made with soy sauce, sugar, sesame oil, and plenty of garlic and ginger is the way to go. (You can also use store-bought bulgogi or kalbi marinade if you'd like.) Painting it onto the burger at the start of grilling leads to acrid burnt flavors. Instead, I find that applying it in a few coats just for the last few moments gives you a beautiful lacquer-like finish with just a hint of caramelization.

Come get your Sweet Barbecue Kim-cheese Burgers this way! »

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Burger Topping Week: The Quadruple Chili Cheeseburger

2012-07-17T17:30:00Z

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

While I've never been to Santa Fe or experienced the world-renowned Green Chile Cheeseburger at the Bobcat Bite, I have had roasted Hatch chilis* sent to me in the mail and have enjoyed a homegrown green chile cheeseburger on more than one occasion. It's a popular enough dish that it even made it onto our Burger Style Guide.

* Before anyone jumps on me for spelling, Serious Eats house-style is to spell both the dish and the vegetable as "chili" in all contexts, except when spelling it out in a different language or as part of an accepted dish, such as chile verde or Green Chile Cheeseburger. So the Bobcat Bite's Green Chile Cheeseburger is made with green chilis, got it?

If you want the classic, we have a recipe here, or you can even go for the turkey version.

But I'm a man who likes a bit of pickles in his burgers, not to mention a bit of creamy sauce. So I wondered what would happen if you took the green chile cheeseburger to the extreme by adding not one, not two, not three, but four distinct sources of chili heat, each different from the last.

And thus the Quadruple Chili Cheeseburger was born.** A fat patty of grilled beef draped with a melty, oozy slice of pepperjack cheese, topped with roasted green chilis (preferable Hatch, though poblanos or cubanelles will do just fine) and a handful of pickled jalapeños, served on a hearty bun with a generous swipe of chipotle mayonnaise.

** Note that as this is a new burger, I'm opting to switch to our standard "chili" spelling.

Convinced yet? Come get your Quadruple Chili Cheeseburgers this way! »

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The Burger Lab: The Principles of Topping Burgers

2012-07-16T14:00:00Z

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

I'm a burger purist at heart, but I rank purity for purity's sake down there with undressed salad and half price sushi. Just because I usually prefer my wife clothed and my burger naked doesn't mean that I'm averse to giving in to the occasional bout of well-organized hedonism and reversing the two.

Mind you—when I speak of despoiling my burger, I'm not talking about adding Worcestershire sauce or herbs to the meat or folding in chopped onions and cheese, or even—god forbid—adding breadcrumbs or eggs to the mix. We've gone through all this enough times in the past that there's no reason to expound on exactly why you shouldn't do such things. Suffice it to say, the act of adding anything to a burger patty pushes it from burger territory to meatloaf-sandwich-land.

There is, however, nothing stopping us from putting things on top of or underneath our preferably-fresh-ground-if-not-hand-chopped-from-a-custom-mixed-beef-blend-with-30-percent-fat-and-a-lot-of-short-rib patties. Or even our regular old ground chuck patties for that matter.

At The Burger Lab, I spend a lot of time playing around with how to form, blend, and cook patties for the optimal burger experience, but I've only rarely delved into the wild world of toppings. So this week, we'll be featuring a custom-topped burger every single day.

The Principles of Topping

Selecting toppings that go well together on a burger is much like constructing any sandwich. I like to go for a mix of contrasting flavors and textures, while maintaining some sort of thematic integrity. Here's how I think of my toppings when categorizing them:

Flavor Categories

Bear in mind that many ingredients can fall under multiple categories. A Thousand-Island dressing, for instance, straddles across rich, tart, and sweet, which is what makes it such a popular condiment.

Sharp/Spicy: This category includes pungent elements like raw onions, scallions, garlic, or shallots—either raw or cooked. A spicy slaw, chopped kimchi, or spicy mayonnaise and pepper-loaded cheeses also belong.
Fresh: Fresh vegetables like lettuce or tomatoes, sliced peppers or cucumbers. Raw and clean tasting.
Rich/Meaty: Gooey melted cheeses or mayo-based spreads, sliced deli meats like ham or pepperoni, bacon, avocado
Tart/Pickled: Pickled cucumbers, carrots, jalapeños, sauerkraut—pickled anything, really. I'd also include tart salads like cole slaw, or certain types of sauces, like vinegary barbecue sauce or a relish-based Thousand-Island
Sweet: Kansas city-style barbecue sauce, sweet Asian-style glazes, ketchup.

Texture Categories

Crunchy/Crisp : Fresh crisp vegetables like iceberg or romaine lettuce and cucumbers, properly cooked bacon, pork rinds, cole slaw.
Gooey: Cheese! Mayo-based spreads!
Moist: Tender fresh vegetables tomatoes or cooked eggplants, grilled onions or roasted peppers.

A Quick Note on Sauces
For fat-based sauces like mayo, I wait until after the burger is cooked and apply the sauce directly to the toasted bun. With water-based sauces such as a mustard sauce, barbecue sauce, a soy glaze, or a ketchup-based sauce, I'll either apply to the bun after cooking the burger, or sometimes I'll paint it right onto the patty as it cooks. The key is to treat it just like you would ribs or barbecued chicken: apply the sauce at the very end.

Try coating the raw patty with sauce before grilling and you end up burning the sauce. Rather, cook the patty until it's almost cooked through and has developed a nice char on both sides, then paint it with the sauce just for the last few moments. The sauce will reduce and coat the patty, giving you good flavor without acridness.

Selecting Toppings

With these profiles in mind, I then try and make sure to include at least two contrasting flavors and two contrasting textures when I top a burger. When talking classic combos, they can be as simple as the rich/tart flavor combo and gooey/crunchy texture combo of a cheeseburger topped with pickles, or can be as elaborate as the sharp/fresh/rich/tart/sweet five-way flavor mouth-punch and crunchy/gooey/moist textural explosion that is an In-N-Out Double Double Animal Style with onions, lettuce, tomato, cheese, pickles, and a sweet-tart mayo-based sauce.

What I try to avoid is doubling or tripling up on a single category either flavor or texture-wise without adding another element to complement it. The rich-rich tag team of a bacon cheeseburger needs fresh, sharp onions, tart pickles, or a sweet-tart sauce to balance it out.

For our first burger of the week, we board a small charter flight to Polynesia, the land of Spam and pineapples. Why Spam and pineapple? Mostly because it's a delicious combo that hits the rich/fresh/sweet flavors and the crisp/moist textures, and only secondarily because I happened to have a massive amount leftover after our Spam tasting last week.

Adding a couple of slices of Swiss cheese along with a nice spoonful of sriracha-mayonnaise add spicy and gooey to the bag. (Some pickled red onions wouldn't hurt either).

You can use a regular burger bun, but I like the pineapple-juice-catching nooks and crannies of a toasted English muffin for this one, and it seems to go well with the whole Spam-and-cheese sandwich theme.

Stay tuned the rest of the week for four more burger topping combos (follow@thefoodlab or @seriousrecipes on Twitter to make sure you don't miss'em!), and in the meantime, let us know what your personal favorites are!

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Hot Hawaiian Burgers (With Spam, Pineapple, Swiss, and Sriracha Mayo) »

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The Burger Lab: In Search Of The Best Lamb Burgers

2012-06-25T17:45:00Z

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

Lamb burgers are like the Super Mario Bros. 2 of the burger world. They're kind of strange and funky and it's not entirely clear how they fit into the canon of their brethren, but they're awesome in their own way, and a great change from the norm. I wouldn't eat a lamb burger every day, but when I do, I want it to be the best damned lamb burger it can be.

All too often, lamb burgers fall victim to the same fate that tend to befall turkey burgers: they come so jam-packed with herbs, spices, aromatics, and condiments that they cease to be burgers and end up as lamb meatloaf sandwiches. The very best examples of the form (say, the awesome ones from Balaboosta, The Breslin, or Prune in New York) are first and foremost about the lamb. Funky, minerally, sweet, and dripping with juice, lamb is flavorful enough on its own that you don't need to add anything to it to have a great burger experience.

Still, after grinding and grilling my way through nearly 32 pounds of the stuff, there's a thing or two I learned about the process.

Where's That Lamb From

"Pardon me, good sir, would you perchance divulge the provenance of these fine ovine comestibles?" should be the first question you ask your butcher. Most of the lamb sold in the U.S. comes from three locations: Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S.A. Australian and New Zealand lamb tends to be smaller, leaner, and more mildly flavored, making it a good choice for folks who find lamb to be generally too gamey or barnyard-y tasting.

Personally, when I eat a lamb burger (or a nice rack), I want the full-on, musky, grassy flavor assault you get from larger, fattier American lambs. If you want to be sure he's not—ahem—pulling the wool over your eyes, you can generally (but not always) tell by the size of the racks or legs he's selling. NZ/AUS racks will have an eye of meat about as big as a 50¢ piece, while an American rack will be more like the size of, say, half an iPhone. NZ/AUS legs will be small, like the rear leg of a medium-sized dog, while an American lamb leg will be larger, about the size of Arnold Schwarzenegger's shoulder and bicep, if you know what I mean.

Pre-Ground Lamb ($5 - $8/pound)

Location: Varies. Typically trimmings from shoulder and breast.
Fat Content: Varies depending on where the meat is taken from. Because of the way lamb is butchered and sold in this country, there tends to be a higher ratio of fat-to-meat in a typical batch of ground lamb.*
Flavor: Varies depending on where the meat is taken from. In my experience, however, the variation in flavor of pre-ground lamb is far less than that of pre-ground beef. When shopping for pre-ground lamb, I look for mince with plenty of fat in it, as fat is largely what gives different types of meat their distinctive flavor. Also look for meat that is not packed too tightly. If it looks like a dense, wet, solid block in its packaging, it'll come out dense, wet, and solid in your burger. Good minced meat should be in loose packaging with an almost fluffy appearance.

* I'm not positive of the reason why, but my guess is simply consumer knowledge and demand—everyone uses ground beef, and many people like their ground beef lean, so fat gets trimmed away and it's sold that way. Ground lamb users, on the other hand, place no such demands on butchers, so more fat makes it into the mix. Just a theory. Any meat packers out there know for sure? Meat guy?

Leg of Lamb ($10 - $15/pound)

Location: The hind legs.
Fat Content: Moderate. Depending on how well it's trimmed, it can range from virtually fat free to moderately fatty.
Flavor: Clean, mild, and rich. It's the most popular relatively inexpensive cut for roasting, and boasts a clean, meaty flavor without being over-assertively lamb-y. The meat is quite tender, so when ground has the tendency to come across as a bit mushy.

Sirloin and/or Round ($10 - $15/pound)

Location: The sirloin comes from the back half of the animal, in front of where the rear thigh meets the body. The round is a large muscle group in the rear thigh. I've grouped them together here because when ground and tasted, they have very similar flavor profiles.
Fat Content: Very low.
Flavor: The least lamb-y cut I tested. It tastes of minerals with a very light, almost sour flavor to it. A bit of liveriness as well. Similar in that respect to beef sirloin or brisket.

Shank ($5 - $10/pound)

Location: The bottom joint of the legs.
Fat Content: Moderate to high.
Flavor: Very robust and rich, the funkiest cut on the animal. It's generally used for braising, where its large amount of connective tissue is an advantage, slowly transforming into rich gelatin. When ground for mince, it requires a large amount of meticulous trimming so as to avoid tough, inedible bits in the final mix.

Shoulder ($6 to $10/pound)

Location: The front shoulder of the lamb.
Fat Content: High.
Flavor: Very well balanced with a large amount of fat, a bit of sour grassiness, and plenty or rich, deep lamb flavor. The equivalent of the beef chuck, it similarly is the best single-cut piece for making burger meat out of.

The Best Blend

When I explored blending beef cuts (in my first ever Burger Lab post!), I found that the best way to make a well-balanced blend was to mix a few different cuts to make sure to hit the right balance of nutty/grassy/rich/game-y flavors. With lamb, it was no different. The very best blend I could come up with was a mixture of leg meat (with as much fat as possible trimmed into it) for a neutral background, some shank meat for its umami-rich funkiness, and a bit of round to hit those higher metallic, livery notes.*

* For the record, asides from the ratio, this is pretty close to the blend used for the awesome lamb burger at The Breslin, which is a mixture of sirloin, shoulder, and leg.

That said, unlike with beef, in a side-by-side taste test between straight up ground shoulder and my best-effort blend (which, considering how annoying shank it so trim was quite an effort indeed), the shoulder fared quite well, so for the ease of it, I'm going to stick with shoulder 95 percent of the time. The other 5 percent? I'll go for a good quality pre-ground lamb. The stuff I tested here was Pat LaFrieda ground lamb sold at Eataly.

Grinding and Forming The Patties

There are a few keys to good grinding, and depending on your equipment and needs, you can grind in a meat grinder, a food processor, or even by hand (check out this complete guide to grinding here. But whatever method you use, there's really only a few things you have to remember:

#1: Keep Everything Cold

That means place the meat grinder in the freezer before using it (I store mine there all the time), and place the cubed, trimmed meat into the freezer for about 15 minutes before grinding, making sure the cubes are spread out and separated from each other on a tray. The exteriors of the cubed meat should be just beginning to harden up.

#2: Handle Gently

The worst thing you can do to freshly ground meat is massage it or press on it too firmly. That said, if you plan on cooking your burgers on a grill instead of a skillet (and for lamb, I generally prefer the grill), you'll have to at least pack it hard enough that it doesn't fall apart when you lay it down or flip it. I form patties by weighing out the meat onto a plate (six to eight ounce patties are a good size for the grill, where I want to have plenty of pink meat in the center), then gently pressing and shaping them with my hands, using a spatula to lift the finished patties onto a separate plate for seasoning.

#3: Dimple'em

Meat contracts as it cooks, and burgers cook more around their perimeter than they do in their center. Just like a corset being cinched around the waist of a Victorian lady, whatever's in the middle gets pushed up. At least in the case of a burger, this is not a good thing, resulting in the dreaded "golf-ball-syndrome," a all-too-familiar affliction that results in round, bulgy burgers.

To combat this, pre-shape your patties with a slight dimple in the center (like the patty on the right in the image above).

#4: Season Well, On The Exterior Only

The relationship between salt and meat is not one-dimensional, nor is it extremely complex. More like, say Harry Potter and Hermione rather than Bella and Edward. It not only affects flavor, but it can drastically affect texture, depending on how it is applied. If you, for example, were to season your meat before grinding it, or were to season your meat after grinding, then massage the salt into it, you end up with a dense, springy texture as the salt begins to dissolve proteins in the meat and cause them to cross-link with each other. For a sausage, this is a good thing. For a burger, where a looser, more tender texture is desired, it's not.

In other words, try and keep the relationship between salt and meat in your burgers as simple as possible by only seasoning the exterior of the patty, though do season it generously. Remember, just like with a steak, you need to add enough salt to compensate for the fact that the interior of the burger will remain completely unseasoned.

And what about other flavorings?

Ok, fine. So you want to add other things to your lamb burger besides lamb? Go ahead, I won't stop you. Cumin, garlic, rosemary, mint—whatever you'd like. But if you're going to do it, do it right! Rather than adding the flavorings to the already-been-ground meat thereby forcing you to massage and overwork it, you're far better off starting with cubed chunks of lamb, seasoning them with your mix-ins, then grinding them all together. This'll get them evenly incorporated while still maintaining a nice, loose texture.

Grilling Technique

With grilling burgers, it's all about getting maximum charred crust, while maintaining a nice, pink, juicy core, which means in most respects, grilling a thick burger is exactly like grilling a thick steak. When I'm feeling lazy, I'll cook my burgers directly over the hot side of a two-zone fire, all while flipping multiple times to get fast, even cooking.*

* You do know that those "flip only once folks" are lying or at least sadly misinformed, right?

If I want absolute perfect results, I'll start the burgers over the cooler side until they get up to around 90 to 100°F, then finish them off on the hot side until they hit 125 to 130°F for a nice, pink, medium rare.

Lamb fat, by the way, is a hard, waxy fat that—at least for my taste—is best when hot enough to melt and drip, which means that a rare lamb burger is right out for me.

Here's one thing you never want to see happening on your grill:

I mean, it looks cool and all, but what's really going on there is that your lamb fat is dripping off your burger, hitting the hot coals below, vaporizing, then igniting. Unlike coal, which is a clean burning fuel, lamb fat burns dirty. Rather than simply heating your burger, it ends up depositing nasty, sooty, black/gray crap on your patty. Small flare-ups are ok. Food-engulfing flare-ups should be avoided.

The best way I know of to control flare-ups is to starve them of oxygen. Cover up the grill and close all the vents. The fire should die down within seconds. Moving the food away briefly should also help.

The thing not to do is squirt at the coals with a water bottle, as the chances that you'll disturb sooty ash and have it fly up into your food is too great a risk.

Size Matters

Even after years and years of burger making, I still pull this one occasionally:

Oops. Yeah, that's what happens when you size your patty according to the raw meat-to-bun ratio, which is totally different from the cooked-meat-to-bun ratio. If you want your burger to fit your bun, make sure that when you form it raw, it overhangs the edges by about half an inch on all sides so that it'll shrink down to the right size as it cooks.

Condiments and Construction

If everything has gone right so far, you've managed to produce the Cadillac of lamb burgers. The last thing you want to do is mess it all up with a gaudy paint job. I like to apply condiments wisely, and sparingly.

The lamb burger at the Breslin comes with a thin slab of feta cheese, thinly sliced red onions, and a cumin mayonnaise. I like that combo up to the cumin bit, which to me is a bit over-aggressive, like the fuzzy dice of the burger world. Rather, I used plain old homemade Two-Minute Mayonnaise with a bit of garlic thrown in.

I'm almost never a fan of ketchup on a burger,* and doubly so with a lamb burger.

* Nick Solares makes a good case against ketchup here.

Still not convinced lamb burgers can be every bit as tasty as a regular hamburger? All I can say is... baa.

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The Best Lamb Burgers »

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The Food Lab: Vegan Burgers That Don't Suck

2012-03-26T14:00:00Z

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

I like to think of Serious Eats and A Hamburger Today as more than just a food blog. It's really a relationship between the editors and contributors, and you guys: the Serious Eats Community-At-Large. A like with any relationship, occasionally the routine can hit a rut.

I've tinkered with and written about burgers a whole lot in the last couple of years. So much so that there are, in fact, times when I'm simply at a loss as to what to tinker with and write about next. But if there's one thing that being married has taught me, it's that whenever your relationship hits a holding pattern, it's always best to turn to your spouse to seek for ways in which to liven it up. You see that way, if it works out, everyone's happy. And if it doesn't? Well it makes it a heck of a lot easier to blame the other person. This is valuable relationship advice. Take note.

So when it came time for me to write another burger-based installment of The Food Lab, I decided to take my own advice to heart and went searching for ideas on my Facebook page, through my Twitter feed, and via our message boards. The overwhelming response? Veggie burgers.

Don't like that idea? You've got nobody to blame but yourselves.

Personally, I do like a good veggie burger. And I'm not talking one of those hockey puck, soy protein, faux-meat, painted-on-grill-mark atrocities aimed at vegetarians who secretly (or publicly) miss meat (more on my stance on faux meat here). I'm talking a veggie burger that actually tastes of grains and vegetables. A veggie burger that celebrates its veggie-ness yet can stand up to and be complemented by the typical toppings and condiments you'd find at a backyard cookout. I'm talking a veggie burger that even a meat-eater would happily eat—topped with cheese and bacon, if they want.

And heck, just for the fun of it, why not add an extra challenge here and make the burgers 100 percent vegan as well?

The Perfect Veggie Burger

There are a few key characteristics that I look for in a great veggie patty.

The burger must be structurally sound. I want a veggie burger that holds its shape and doesn't have the texture of mashed potatoes, squishing out the back of the bun as I bite down.
The burger must have good textural contrast. All lumps or all smooth is no good. I want the patty to be soft and tender, but have little bits and bites of crunch and chew.
The burger's flavor must be good, but not overly assertive. I want my burger to have a good balance of savory flavors. What I don't is for a single flavor—say a spice or an herb—to dominate, restricting my topping choices.
The burger must hold together on a griddle or grill. A veggie burger that cracks or crumbles and falls into the grill grates when you cook it may as well not ever have existed int he first place.
The burger must not suck.*

*Note: The same rule applied to my Turkey Burgers That Don't Suck, and, well, pretty much any food that doesn't suck.

With that in mind, I stepped into the kitchen.

Part 1: The Veggies

Working with a very basic recipe of dried mashed lentils as my base, I decided to test each and every component to work towards my final recipe.

The main flavor base for a good veggie burger should be—surprise—the veggies, and I knew that some member of the onion family would play a crucial role in that flavorful backbone. Members of the onion family (aka alliums) are unique amongst the vegetable world in that when used properly, they have an innate ability to bring out the savory qualities of the other ingredients they are cooked with. A burger topped with a slice of onion or a mushroom sautéed with a brunoise of shallots doesn't taste onion-y per se, but they do taste more savory.

I tried adding shallots, regular onions (of the red, yellow, white, and sweet variety), and scallions to the mix before finally settling on a combination of leeks and a little bit of garlic. Known as the "soup onion," leeks more than any other type of onion have the ability to meld into the background.

I sautéed my leeks and garlic in a bit of oil to soften them before chopping them and adding them to the mix. A stalk of celery sautéed alongside them also added flavor without overwhelming the palate.

I knew that if I wanted my burgers to taste extra savory and moist, I'd need to use a couple of glutamate-rich powerhouses in my mix. Glutamates are the chemical compounds that are largely responsible for our sense of savoriness in a dish. Meat is packed with them, as are a number of vegetables. Mushrooms are high up on that list.

In order to concentrate the flavor of my shrooms and drive off some excess moisture, I roasted them right alongside the eggplant until they were deeply browned and had lost about half of their weight in water.

Roughly chopped in the food processor, the mushrooms are a good first step towards adding the texture I'm looking for.

Part 2: The Beans

Nobody says that veggie burgers always have to contain beans, but there's a good reason they almost always do. Beans are a great way to add texture and their starchiness makes them ideal binders. I experimented with a whole slew of options—black beans, cannellini, kidney, fava, pinto—but most of them turned out to be far too flavorful on their own. No matter what you do, a veggie burger made with black beans turns into, well, a black bean burger. That's not a bad thing, but not what I was after.

I ended up narrowing my choices down to two: lentils and chickpeas. Both were flavorful but mild enough to complement the other elements nicely. Really, either would have done, but as I found with my vegetarian chili recipe, chickpeas are great for adding texture when you roughly chop them in the food processor.

Part 3: You're Gonna Love My Nuts

My new chickpea and vegetable-based patties were good, but they were still lacking in both texture and flavor. As is often the case, I happened to have Vince of Slap Chop fame's nuts on my mind during this iteration and figured that chopped nuts should be the way to go.

As with the beans, most nuts were a no-go. Peanuts, walnuts, pecans, and hazelnuts were all far too assertive. Macadamia nuts worked flavor-wise, but got a little soft in the mix with a strange, off-putting texture. This left cashews and pine nuts, and both worked wonderfully, adding a bit of soft crunch, as well as what can only be described as nuttiness to the mix.

Into the food processor they went.

Part 4: The Grains

With most of my flavoring and textural elements in place, I was honing in on some patties that I was happy with. Next ingredient: some form of grain to tie the whole thing together.

After trying (and failing) with wheat berries, oats, cooked rice, and cooked pasta, it came down to barley and bulgur wheat. While the latter was a bit easier to cook (all you have to do is soak it in boiling water until it hydrates), the finished patties were far too reminiscent of falafel. That's not a bad thing if falafel's your bag, but I don't want people eating my veggie burgers to pigeonhole them into one category of ethnic foodstuffs. I preferred the far more cuisine-neutral character of barley. Think of it as the Switzerland of grains.

The texture was nearly there, but the patties were a bit mushy, lacking structure. Some breadcrumbs added to the mix solved this problem nicely. I went with Japanese-style panko for their heartier texture. I found that cooking the patties right after the breadcrumbs were incorporated was absolutely essential to good texture. Let the mixture sit too long, and the breadcrumbs absorb too much liquid and the patty once again returns to mush.

Now how's that for some textural contrast?

Amping Up Flavor and Moisture

At this point, I was pretty darn happy with my burger. It was certainly more flavorful than anything you could get in the store, but it still wasn't quite at the level of competing with an actual hamburger. I wanted a veggie burger that a meat eater would realistically choose even when there was actual ground chuck staring them in the face. This meant more flavor and even juicier texture.

The one major advantage that meat has over vegetables in terms of delivering juice to a burger patty is in its fat. Animal fat is tends to be more highly saturated then vegetable-based fats. Because saturated fats stack together more tightly and easily, they tend to be firmer at a given temperature. Most animal fats don't melt until well above room temperature, while most plant-based fats are liquid at room temperature.

What does this mean? It means that with a well-made beef-based burger patty, your fat stays in discrete firm chunks that melt only as the patty starts to cook, basting the meat in fat and creating little pockets of chin-dripping juiciness that show themselves only when you bite down on the burger. Vegetable-based patties, on the other hand, don't have this advantage, which means that you have to build the extra moisture directly into them if you want them to have any chance at survival.

In my previous adventures with non-beef burgers, I discovered the secret to adding moisture to a lean turkey burger without overwhelming it or ruining its texture: roasted puréed eggplant.

I decided that since I was roasting some mushrooms already, I may as well throw an eggplant in there with them. Roasted eggplant is some really magical stuff. Not only does it taste great on its own (just throw in a bit of good olive oil and lemon juice), but it has the characteristic of being able to carry many other flavors along for the ride, all while adding a subtle sweet meatiness.

When combined with my chopped mushrooms, it added exactly the moisture that my patties needed, even helping them to brown a bit better in the pan.

Taking another queue from that Turkey Burger recipe, I decided to add a bit of Marmite to my patties to help boost up their savoriness. A product made from the spent yeast leftover after fermenting alcohol, Marmite (or the Australian equivalent Vegemite) is a concentrated source of glutamates. I use it in everything from soups and stews to, well, veggie burgers.*

* And if you're a Kiwi, better act fast, because there's a shortage of Marmite this year!

That little dab of marmite was all that the burgers needed to send them into rocket-boosted, escape-velocity-achieved, 1.21 gigawatt flavor orbit.

Ok, the Marmite and an onion cooked directly into them.

Fine, and some cheese, just to tie the whole thing together.

The best part of the recipe? It behaves almost exactly like ground meat when you're handling or cooking it. That means that whatever you can do to a normal patty—griddle it, throw it on the grill, press an onion into it, smash it with a spatula, shape it into a loaf, make a Jucy Lucy—whatever—you can do with this mix.

Is it the easiest stuff in the world to make? Admittedly no. It requires roasting vegetables, sautéeing leeks, boiling barley, and chopping nuts and chickpeas, and that's all before you even form it into patties. But believe me when I tell you that you'll never look at veggie burgers the same way again.

That's good news for vegans, and heck. I'd even say it's good news for burger lovers who are just out for something a little bit different (don't forget to add the bacon).

UPDATE 4/3/2012: Some folks were having issues with the patties holding together or being too mushy. After more testing, I've pintpointed the problem to be with the chickpeas and the degree to which they get processed (underprocessed and your patties fall apart. Overprocessed and they get mushy). To alleviate this problem, the best thing to do is separate the chickpeas into two batches, puréeing one with a bit of flour and baking powder (to act as binder and leavener), and roughly chopping the second batch. This ensures good texture and good binding in a more consistent manner. The recipe has been updated to reflect these changes.

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Homemade Vegan Burgers That Don't Suck! »

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The Burger Lab: An Even Better Way To Make Any Cheese Melt Like American (This Time in Slices!)

2011-09-26T13:30:00Z

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

You know what the greatest thing about recipes is? There's always a better one to come along. I mean, I've already posted recipes for the so-called Ultimate Sliders, only to have them quickly supplanted by the (more) Ultimate(est) Perfect Sliders and most recently the In-N-Out, Telway, White Mann Ultimate Animal-Style Slider Mashup, and those are just tiny burgers we're talking about.

Point is, my cooking is constantly evolving and improving, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Just as humans evolve much faster in certain ways than others (I mean, we've got the opposable thumbs but are still stuck with good-for-nothing earlobes, appendices, and vestigial tail structures), certain types of foods tend to go through faster development cycles in my repertoire. Burgers in the summertime are one of em.

Just a couple weeks back, I wrote about a quick and easy method for getting any type of cheese to melt like American, the idea being that the gooeyness and meltability of American cheese are awesome, but it lacks real flavor.

I achieved this goal by steaming real cheese (Comté or really sharp cheddar are my favorite) in a bowl with a bit of Wondra flour and milk. It's a good recipe, it uses pantry staples, and it works, but know what? It still had some problems. I mean, the cheese gets gooey and stretchy, but it doesn't quite achieve the glossy sheen or lava-flow of real American cheese. I was content with it, and on a burger it worked great. But in my heart of hearts, I knew there must be a better way. (Preferably a way that doesn't involve the sodium citrate prescribed by most books espousing modernist-style cooking (Heston Blumenthal, Nathan Myhrvold, et al.))

The steamed cheese recipe works when it's hot, but let it cool down and try to reheat it, and it separates just like any real cheese does:

Definitely not ideal.

To be precise: I wanted full-flavored American cheese that not only behaves like American cheese once it's melted on a burger, but I wanted cheese that behaves just like American in every other way. American cheese that you can double stack inside a grilled cheese sandwich that oozes out into gooey puddles when you bite into it. American cheese that you can melt on the stovetop with a can or Ro*Tel for the ultimate upscale-trashy cheese dip. American cheese that you can pick up cold from the fridge, stack with a pile of bologna, and roll up into the best-ever midnight snack (don't other people do this?). Luckily, someone else has already done most of the hard work for me.

As it happens, just a couple weeks ago, my good friend, former colleague, ex-roommate, best-pastry-chef-I-know, soon-to-be-Serious-Eats-writer Yvonne revealed this sweet recipe after a summer's worth of hard work over on the America's Test Kitchen Feed: a method for making your very own American Cheese Slices.

Here's what she had to say:

I'm not afraid to admit that I love American cheese—by itself, on a grilled cheese sandwich, on a cheeseburger, or even just slapped on a plate and microwaved until it's nice and gooey (a childhood pleasure that I never grew out of). But what exactly is American cheese? I suppose it's that exact question that gives it such a bad rap. The American cheese that you find on supermarket shelves isn't cheese made in the traditional way (milk that's formed into curds and pressed). Instead, it's either a blend of cheese and additives, or it's a highly processed mixture of ingredients such as water, milk, milkfat, milk protein, whey, food coloring, flavorings, and emulsifiers. I wanted to get as close as possible to the taste and texture of American cheese using only pantry ingredients and a food processor. By making your own American cheese, not only will you know exactly what went into it.

How does she accomplish this goal? She starts with grated Colby cheese—a very mild yellow cheese that forms the base of most American-style cheese slices. (I used a young white cheddar instead.) After pulsing it in the blender with a bit of salt, cream of tartar (for its tang), and whole dry milk powder (for a rich, milky flavor), she pours in hot milk to which some bloomed gelatin has been added before pouring the whole thing into a mold to chill and slice.

Following her recipe yields an end product that is exactly as she promises: Homemade American cheese, no better and no worse. It's made with Colby, so has the same mildly salty, vaguely cheesy flavor. A pretty noble goal, though I'm personally not very squeamish about those hard-to-pronounce words on the packaging. Most of them are found in nature anyway, without the scary names.

See, if I'm going to make my own cheese slices, it's because I want to use a more flavorful cheese in order to get an end product that melts like American but tastes like something better. I wondered to myself whether or not I'd be able to tweak her recipe to meet my own goals.

Milk Matters

First off, the gelatin trick is genius. It not only acts as an emulsifier, helping fat and liquid to keep from separating as the cheese cooks, but it also has the unique characteristic of forming a stable matrix at room or fridge temperatures while also melting into a liquid at temperatures not too far above body temp. (The precise temperature depends on the type of gelatin and the amount used.) This is exactly what you want for cheese slices.

Starch-thickened cheese recipes like a bechamel-based cheese sauce show melting characteristics that soften pretty much linearly with temperature. With gelatin, on the other hand, your cheese goes very rapidly from being solid and handle-able to melty and gooey.

Here's a quick and dirty completely imprecise but pretty accurate picture of what's going on:

What this means is that you have a large window where your cheese is still solid and handleable, but once you heat it up just a little bit, it quickly turns gooey and stretchy. Nice, right?

Now to add some flavor. Simply replacing the soft, easily meltable Colby in her recipe with a stronger cheese—I used a two-year old cheddar for mine—didn't work. The cheese never came together in the food processor and turned greasy when it was subsequently melted. I tried whisking it up in the pot, but that was a bust too.

Problem is, older cheeses are lower in moisture and higher in fat, and emulsions—the difficult-to-achieve stable marriage between two liquids that don't normally get along—require either the perfect ratio of fat to water, or a heck of a lot of emulsifiers—agents that act as liaisons between fat and water, allowing them to play nicely with each other.

When working on my recipe for cheese sauce for nachos or fries almost exactly a year ago, I discovered that the best liquid for accomplishing both of these goals is this:

Evaporated milk. Because it's had both water and fat content removed from it, evaporated milk is extremely high in protein, and these proteins are great emulsifiers. It's also got an extra-concentrated, slightly sweet, slightly cooked milky flavor—I figured replacing the combination of regular milk and dry whole milk powder* called for in Yvonne's recipe would kill two birds with one ingredient.

* Despite the eminent availability of powdered skim milk powder, I had to try three different supermarkets before locating whole milk powder.

I gave it a shot, following her proportions exactly (1 cup plus 2 tablespoons of evaporated milk for 12 ounces of cheese). It worked. With the boosted emulsifying properties of evaporated milk, I was able to make smooth cheese sauce that hardened into sliceable chunks even with my two-year old cheddar. When cooked into a well-contained grilled cheese sandwich, it worked great. On a burger, however, it was a tad bit meltier than I would have liked it to be (and by "tad" I mean I ended up with a nice serving of cheeseburger soup):

I mean, gooey is one thing, but ...

(I may have just found a replacement for my cheese sauce recipe.)

Reducing the amount of evaporated milk down to 4 ounces solved this problem, yielding a cheese with close to ideal melting characteristics, though I found that with the reduced amount of liquid, I could no longer simply blend everything together in the food processor (4 ounces of hot milk just isn't enough to melt 12 ounces of cheese), resorting instead to whisking everything together in the pot over low heat.

Now we're getting close. Only one problem remained:

Older cheese are tastier, but a large part of that tastiness has to do with their higher concentration of flavorful amino acids (the building blocks of proteins). In particular, the amino acid tyrosine has a tendency to form small, crunchy crystals inside an old, dry cheese like my cheddar. Simply whisking it on the stove top yields melty cheese that's gooey enough, but it's still got discernible chunks of crystallized tyrosine in it, giving it a slightly grainy texture and appearance.

Like the annoying kids in school who end up disrupting the whole class, there are probably chemical solutions to the problem—something or other I could add to make the tyrosine crystals behave and the whole thing run smoothly, but I'm an old fashioned guy, so my gut reaction was just to administer some good old mechanical beating* with the blender. I mean, it made the fat kid from The Goonies get back in line, didn't it?

The regular blender or food processor worked, but a handheld immersion blender was even easier.

* Note: I do not condone solving real life behavioral problems with immersion blenders!

You'll see it magically transform from grainy to glossy right before your eyes. All that was left now was to form it into slices, and that's easier than you think.

Slice'd!

You could, at this point, pour the melted cheese into a cup or a loaf pan to form into a block that you can slice and use at will, but the slices you get won't have that distinct perfectly square shape that drapes so nicely on top of a burger. For those, you'll need to use a method that more closely approximates the actual process for making sliced American cheese (check out the awesome video here for more on the industrial cheesemaking process), namely, forming it into one gigantic-but-thin slice and subsequently cutting it into square.

Heston Blumenthal recommends lining a rimmed baking sheet with a silicone liner, pouring the cheese on top of it, then letting it set. This works well, but I find that plastic wrap on a really large plate or baking sheet works equally well for the job

This method has an added advantage over the block-then-slice method because once you pour the cheese in and toss it in the fridge, its wide, thin shape and great surface area to volume ratio lets it chill quite rapidly. Instead of waiting three hours for a block of cheese to cool and slice, you get ready-to-use cheese slices within about 10 minutes of pouring.

Finally, the plastic wrap gives you one last perk: when cutting the cheese slices, if you transfer the entire extra-large cheese slice to a cutting board, you can cut through the cheese and the plastic wrap together when making your square slices. That way, when you stack them all directly on top of each other, they end up each separated by a sheet of plastic wrap, making them easy to store, peel, and use as desired.

Sure beats making a run down to the supermarket for me!

Assembly

Alright, you've all sat still through that lesson, so I suppose we can get on with a bit of the gratuitous food porn.

Start with a toasted bun with plenty of homemade mayo.

Thinly sliced red onions and homemade dill pickles on the bottom. (They've got to be on the bottom!)

Oozy slice of cheddar cheese melting over the top of a hard-seared smashed burger patty.

The real question: will the wife like it?

Yes, yes she will.

>>Get the full recipe here!

About the author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Managing Editor of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at @thefoodlab on Twitter, or at The Food Lab on Facebook.

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The Burger Lab: The In-N-Out, Telway, White Manna Ultimate Animal-Style Slider Mashup

2011-07-25T21:00:00Z

VIEW SLIDESHOW: The Burger Lab: The In-N-Out, Telway, White Manna Ultimate Animal-Style Slider Mashup

[Photographs: Robyn Lee and Christine Tsai, except where otherwise noted]

There was a time when we were a country divided. West Coasters told us you couldn't find a good burger on the East Coast, and us East Coasters said the same about your pizza, not to mention what those strange folks in the middle were doing.

But in these enlightened days, we're fast discovering an entire nation full of great food, and what better way to bring it all together than in a single sandwich?

That was exactly the idea behind my offering at this year's Serious Eats All-Star Sandwich Festival: To combine the best elements from three of my favorite burgers in the world into one glorious mashup of a sandwich.

Before we get to the recipe, here's a bit of background on each of the three burgers I'm talking about.

From the West Coast: The In-N-Out Double Double, Animal Style

[Photograph: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

What more is there to day about this sandwich? In-N-Out is the undisputed king of high quality fast food, with a near fanatical devotion from its legions of followers ranging from Californians, to displaced Californians, those wishing they had fast food burgers as good as Californians, to those in the lucky few states beyond the California borders that have In-N-Outs in their towns.

Yes, their regular burgers are great, but the key to In-N-Out's fast food supremacy is their most popular Secret Menu item: Animal-Style burgers. What exactly does that mean? Well, ask for any burger animal-style and your patty will be grilled in mustard and get a spoonful of grilled onions on top, along with extra pickles and In-N-Out Spread on the bottom.

What we're stealing: Mustard-grilling and In-N-Out spread. Rather than adding extra pickles, we're just going to add some pickles and pickle juice to our sauce.

From the Middle: The Slider From Telway in Detroit, MI

[Photograph: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

Telway is a mini-chain of slider joints in the Detroit area. Their sliders start out much like any other slider—patty smashed on the griddle, topped with onions, flipped so it can steam with the buns stacked on top. The key here is the towel trick (one that I usurped previously for my More Ultimatest Sliders).

After the buns go on top, they place a towel over the whole getup. This traps in the steam produced by the onions at the bottom of the stack. The result is burger, cheese, and buns that are all softened with onion-scented steam, for the softest, tenderest, pillowiest, onioniest possible experience.

What we're stealing: The onion towel.

From the East Coast: The Slider From White Manna In Hackensack, NJ

[Photograph: Nick Solares]

One of the most storied sliders in the world, the tiny steamed burgers from White Manna in Hackensack, New Jersey, are a certified masterpiece, and one of my favorites. What's the key here? It's the masses and masses of ultra-thin sliced onions that the patties are steamed over, along with the Martin's potato rolls. Thin slicing lets the onions release their juices rapidly, creating tons of steam, permeating burger and bun with flavor. And we all love Martin's, right? There's no better burger bun in the world.

What we're stealing: The ultra thin-sliced onions and the Martin's rolls.

The Mashup

So what do you get when you put all three together? The In-N-Out, Telway, White Manna Ultimate Animal Style Slider Mashup.

That would be: 2-ounce patties of fresh ground beef (ours was an awesome short rib/brisket/chuck blend from Pat LaFrieda), smashed onto a dollop of yellow mustard, seasoned with salt and pepper, topped with a blizzard of thinly sliced onions, flipped so the onions are on the bottom, topped with American cheese, stacked with buns, covered with a towel to steam, then served with a big squirt of In-N-Out style burger spread.

Sound delicious? Indeed it is. See, great things can happen when we can get the whole country to work together, right?

Click through the slideshow for step-by-step instructions, or jump straight to the recipe.

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The Burger Lab: How To Make Any Cheese Melt Like American (Almost)

2011-07-08T14:30:00Z

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

Some folks balk at the idea of putting American cheese anywhere near their burger. "Cheese? You call that stuff cheese? More like orange chemical plasti-crap. No thanks!" they say, as they peel off the orange slices and fling them against the wall all angry-like.

On the other hand, as you may know from my past record, I'm a bona-fide, American Cheese-o-phile, and I'll defend it to the end. It's because nothing else melts like it. It envelopes a cheeseburger or a grilled cheese sandwich in a fatty, salty goo that drips and melts into every nook and cranny of a well-formed patty.

And therein lies the fundamental problem with American cheese: it melts perfectly, but tastes bland.

For a while now, chefs and cooks of the "molecular" variety have been trying to come up with a solution to this problem. Heston Blumenthal, of England's The Fat Duck, suggests emulsifying Comté cheese into a base of herb-infused sherry along with sodium citrate to keep it smooth, then pouring it out onto a silicone sheet, letting it set, and cutting it into squares. The first time I tried to make it, I didn't meet with much success, but have since been able to successfully pull it off. I've also had luck with the very similar cheese slices Nathan Myhrvold suggests in Modernist Cuisine, made with both Emmenthal and Comté emulsified into wheat ale. You end up with very tasty slices of cheese that melt almost as well as American cheese does.

Now these recipes are all well and good, but there's one problem: They're a pain in the butt to make. Burgers, almost by their very definition, are fast food. When I'm searing up a batch for lunch or dinner, I don't have the time or inclination to reduce sherry and wheat beer, emulsify cheese, measure out chemicals, pour and cool onto silicone sheets, then cut into slices before even starting on my burger itself.

What I want is a working method to get any cheese to melt smoothly like American cheese in the same amount of time that it takes my buns to toast and my burger to cook. Is that too much to ask?

Grateful Ted

A quick, but relevant diversion: This past Sunday morning, I was driving through central Connecticut on my way out to Cape Cod to do some "research" (i.e., eat the heck out of a boatload of fried seafood), and what better way to whet your appetite for fried clams than with a cheeseburger? I ended up stopping by Ted's Restaurant in Meriden, a working-class burger joint that's been churning out their specialty, steamed cheeseburgers, for over 50 years.

Now, I've never had a steamed cheeseburger before in my life, and after tasting one of Ted's—supposedly the best—I can tell you that I never really want to again. Sure the meat was beefy, moist, well seasoned, but it was, well, steamed. It tasted washed out, and with no browning, the best beef in the world fails to live up to its potential. There were other problems as well, most of which have been enumerated in Nick Solares' post on the subject, but I'm not here to rip into Ted's (there are plenty of people on both sides of this argument, and I don't want a war breaking out here).

I am here to tell you what is undeniably awesome about Ted's cheeseburger: the melted cheese.

Both the burgers and cheese get cooked in a custom-built steamer in little rectangular trays. As the steam envelopes the tray of young Vermont cheddar cheese, it heats it evenly, slowly melting it until it forms a gooey, lava-like substance that pours over the patty of beef, completely coating it. It's pretty awesome stuff, and a method I decided to immediately incorporate into my burger cooking arsenal.

Great story, right? But what's it got to do with the topic at hand? George Motz (author of Hamburger America) has one of these steamers and was kind enough to lend it to me for a bit of research. One of the things I immediately noticed when melting cheese in the steamer is that it melted far more evenly with a much lower likelihood of breaking and separating into greasy pools than any other method of cheese-melting I've encountered.

But as we soon discovered (apart from the fact that steamed cheese and seared burgers go great together) is that even with steaming, you still can't get certain cheeses to behave when melting. So what exactly makes a cheese break anyway?

On Moisture and Fat

Take a look at this lovely block of Comté. As we all know, it starts as milk: a mixture of water, proteins, fat, and a few trace minerals all swished together in a white, frothy soup that gets squirted out the nipples of cows (ain't that appetizing)? Now when cheesemakers convert this milk into cheese, they start by adding rennet, an enzyme found on the interior lining of calves' stomachs. This rennet causes proteins in the cheese (mainly casein) to unravel and link together into a matrix, which in turn traps both fat and liquid in its web.

After pressing out excess liquid, the cheese then gets aged, during which period, it loses yet more moisture through evaporation. The older a cheese is, the less moisture it has. The less moisture it has, the higher its concentration of fat, protein, and other minerals. Luckily, all that fat remains trapped away in its protein net, which keeps it from pooling out in greasy puddles when you warm it.

Melting changes all of this. As soon as you being to heat cheese, its fat begins to soften. Even at warm room temperature, you'll notice that cheese gets softer as it sits—this is all due to the softening of fat.

At higher temperatures—between 130°F and 180°F or so—proteins start losing their grip on each other. The net gets holes in it, and minuscule liquid fat droplets begin to escape. Just like fish finding their way out of a fisherman's net and schooling, as soon as these fat droplets are free they start to congregate and amass themselves into larger and larger pools. Eventually, you're left with a sticky, tangled ball of protein surrounded by a greasy pool of fat. Ick.

I'm sure you've all seen this happen when trying to melt an expensive slice of really well-aged cheddar on your burger.

Within a given class of cheeses, the age of a cheese has a direct relationship with the relative moisture content, which in turn has a direct relationship with how easily it melts. With low moisture cheeses, like, say, the 20-month old Comté above, proteins are more tightly packed together, and thus form tighter bonds which must be heated to a higher temperature to melt. At the same time, this high temperature heating causes extra moisture to evaporate. Without a good ratio of liquid to fat, it's simply impossible to form a smoothly flowing emulsion.

How Steam Helps

With traditional methods of melting cheese—in a pan, under the broiler, in the grill—it's very hard to transfer heat evenly and efficiently to the cheese. One part of the cheese inevitably ends up overheating before the other comes to melting temperature. This can exacerbate breaking, as localized hot pockets will form on, say, the base of the pan, or at the top of the cheese under a broiler. And once fat starts breaking out, it makes it even easier for more fat to break out.

A steamer fixes this problem in two ways. First, it heats very evenly. Inside a steamer, there are constantly shifting and flowing convection currents of hot air and water vapor traveling around. This forces energy all around the cheese, not just from the top or bottom surface like in a pan or broiler. Grating the cheese so that steam can flow easily around it helps on this front.

Secondly, and almost more importantly, steam also adds liquid to the cheese. Much of the heat that is transferred to the cheese comes from the energy released when water vapor condenses into actual droplets of water as the steam hits the cooler surface of the cheese. The water droplets coat the cheese, adding back some of the moisture that was lost during aging.

By the way—you don't need a magic custom steamer to do this—small bowls of cheese set in a standard steamer insert over a pot of simmering water will work just fine.

With younger cheeses like mozzarella, young cheddars, or Jack, steaming in itself is an effective way to melt your cheese without breaking it. For older cheeses, you need to still need to give'em a little helping hand.

Stablilization

So how does one form a stable emulsion? Two ways: fixing the ratio of liquid to fat, and adding an emulsifier. This is exactly the way that American cheese slices are formed. To make American cheese, curds of real cheese (yep, real, honest-to-goodness, cultured cheese!) are melted together along with extra milk and an emulsifying agent.

* If you check the ingredients list with an open mind and a willingness to find out exactly what those long, funny-sounding chemicals really are, you'll find that they're completely harmless, and indeed occur naturally in many foods you eat every day. For instance, trialcium phosphate is actually a naturally occurring salt that you'll find in milk...and when you burn animal bones.

In commercial cheeses, these emulsifying agents generally work on a molecular level—they are tiny molecules with hydrophillic (water loving) heads and hydrophobic (water-hating, i.e., fat-loving) tails. These molecules bridge the gap between fat and water, allowing them to coexist relatively harmoniously.

But there are other types of emulsifiers out there. Flour, for instance, can help keep a mornay sauce from breaking. It does this by absorbing water in its starch, swelling up and gelatinizing, and physically impeding fat molecules from bumping into each other and coalescing, like a bouncer at a night club.

I tried tossing my cheese with a bit of regular flour as well as with some cornstarch before steaming it, but it didn't work all that well. The problem is that it takes too long for the flour to hydrate and gelatinize. By the time it's in a state in which it can perform its emulsifying duties, it's already too late—the fat has escaped. What I need is a way to get my flour to absorb water and gelatinize faster.

Luckily, there's a product on the shelves designed to do exactly that.

Gold Medal's Wondra flour is an instant flour—that's an ultra-low protein flour that's been pre-gelatinized, then dehydrated into individual, sandy granules. Because of this treatment, it doesn't have the same raw flavor as regular flour, and it very rapidly absorbs water, making it excellent at forming smooth, lump-free emulsions. Tossing my grated cheese with a bit of it before steaming helped quite a bit, though it still wasn't quite as smooth or break-free as I would have liked it to be.

I can't be sure without a microscope, but my instinct tells me that the problem is that as the cheese melts, even when coated with the Wondra flour, some of the fat leaks out before sufficient steam condenses on the surface to fully hydrate the flour. The solution? Just add more liquid.

By adding just a teaspoon of heavy cream or milk per ounce of grated cheese to my bowl. I was able to form a mixture that melted and stretched long, thin, gooey strands as you bit into it, yet was solid enough to stay put on top of a hot burger, just like a slice of good old American cheese.

While I admit that the applications of this method are pretty limited—cheeseburgers, grilled cheeses, and the like—and the texture is not quite as great as you'd get from a true-blue American cheese or chemically emulsified homemade cheese slice, there are some major advantages here.

For starters, you can make it with long-lasting pantry staples that you can purchase at any supermarket. It's also extremely fast. It takes about 30 seconds for you to set up a steamer and toss some grated cheese and flour together with cream, and an ounce of grated cheese (the right amount for a 4- to 6-ounce burger patty) set in a steamer insert takes just about a minute to melt into a gooey fondue-like consistency that sets as you pour it on top of your cooked burger.

Great flavor and perfect meltability? Who says we can't have our cake and eat it too?

And please—for the love of god—sear your patty, don't steam it!

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The Burger Lab: Building A Better Big Mac

2011-05-13T13:00:00Z

[Photographs: Kenji Lopez-Alt]

So yeah, the Big Mac is an undeniable American icon, inextricably tied with our image, but that doesn't make it a good thing—after all, so are poor foreign policy and the Kardashians, right?

That said, in concept, the McDonald's Big Mac is a pretty beautiful thing. I mean, who could really say no to two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, and onions, all on a sesame seed bun? And there are certain things the clown does very well—the proportions, for example. There's just the right amount of beef to cheese to sauce to onion. Even the triple-layered bun, which may look overwhelming, is made of sweet, squishy bread that melts down into practically nothing as you bite into it, neither overwhelming not getting lost in the other flavors.

But just like many great ideas squandered before they fulfill their destiny, it's in the execution that things start to go awry. Luckily, execution is precisely where you Serious Eaters can make things right. The goal this week is to build a better Big Mac by taking that great concept and fixing up everything that's wrong with it. There's certainly no shortage of Big Mac clones on the internet, but, in my humble opinion, every single one I've seen misses the boat, opting for larger patties or other such "improvements" that only really serve to throw off the proportions of a perfectly conceived sandwich.

The first step was to take a close look at the original sandwich to determine exactly what needs improving.

Two All-Beef Patties: All-beef, maybe. But it sure ain't the tasty, juicy, well-seared, well-seasoned beef that you want in your burger. We can definitely do better here.
Special Sauce: This is the key to the Big Mac—tangy and sweet, it's what takes a normal burger and turns it into a Classic. Indeed, the only way I can see improving this sauce is its texture. More on that later.
Lettuce: Shredded iceberg that usually has seen better days.
Cheese: In perhaps one of the greatest crimes against burgers, McDonald's not only places a cold slice of cheese onto the sandwich, but it gets placed under the bottom patty. WTF Ronald?
Pickles: A couple of dill chips that are nice and crispy. I could do with a couple more.
Onions: The Big Mac gets dehydrated onions that are rehydrated in the store. Decent flavor, but not quite as powerful as I'd like them to be.
Sesame Seed Bun: The one factor that I really see no way of improving. It's soft, it's slightly sweet, it's giving, it's got untoasted sesame seeds that don't overpower, it's just about everything you'd want in a burger bun. Replication will be the goal here.

With analysis complete, I moved on, tackling one element at a time.

The Sauce

The Big Mac sauce has been a closely guarded secret recipe for many years. At least, that's what many on the internet will have you believe. And if you are to believe those same people, then cloning Big Mac Sauce is as simple as combining Mayonnaise (or Miracle Whip!) with ketchup, pickle relish, and a few other flavorings, making the sauce essentially a Thousand Island-type spread.

Problem is, even a cursory bit of research on the Mcdonald's website reveals that the sauce is actually nothing of the sort. Rather, it is a mayonnaise-based sauce with no ketchup or tomato to speak of consisting of:

Soybean oil, pickle relish [diced pickles, high fructose corn syrup, sugar, vinegar, corn syrup, salt, calcium chloride, xanthan gum, potassium sorbate (preservative), spice extractives, polysorbate 80], distilled vinegar, water, egg yolks, high fructose corn syrup, onion powder, mustard seed, salt, spices, propylene glycol alginate, sodium benzoate (preservative), mustard bran, sugar, garlic powder, vegetable protein (hydrolyzed corn, soy and wheat), caramel color, extractives of paprika, soy lecithin, turmeric (color), calcium disodium EDTA (protect flavor).

It's a frightening-looking list, but it's not really as bad as it seems. Calcium chloride is used to keep pickles crunchy (you'll find it in your canned tomatoes), xanthan gum and propylene glycol alginate are both thickeners derived from corn and kelp, respectively. Potassium sorbate and sodium benzoate are preservatives (we'll do without them), while disodium EDTA prevents metallic ions from reacting and affecting flavor during long-term storage (we also won't be needing that).

When you look at what's left, you've basically got soybean oil, pickle relish, vinegar, egg yolks, sugars (including HFCS), onion, mustard, vegetable protein, colorings, and emulsifiers. Essentially, it's a mix of mayonnaise, relish, and mustard with sugar, onion, turmeric colorings, and a bit of hydrolyzed vegetable protein thrown in. It's this last bit that might throw you for a bit of a loop.

Hydrolyzed vegetable protein is made by breaking down proteins into their constituent amino acids, resulting in a product with a distinctly savory flavor. Indeed, it's very similar to bottled yeast extracts (which are made by autolyzing yeast) such as Marmite, Vegemite, or Maggi seasoning. Any of those will do.

For the onions, rather than using powdered or dehydrated onions, I found that I got better flavor out of simply grating fresh onion on a Microplane grater. Combining this with the remaining elements and fiddling with the ratios got me a sauce that taste-wise was almost identical to the Mac sauce, though it lacked the characteristic pinkish hue, no doubt from the caramel color. No worries—I could live with yellowish sauce.

As for the thickeners, I also gave them a miss. My theory is that McDonald's only thickens their sauce so much in order to make sure it doesn't drip onto Drive-thru customer's laps on the freeway. I, on the other hand, like my burgers like I don't like my ice-cream cones: drippy.

The Bun

The key characteristic when it comes to the Big Mac bun is the center "Club" layer, consisting of a single circular piece of bread with crumb exposed on both sides. Simple enough. All you've got to do is use a very sharp knife to cut the very bottom off of the bottom half of a regular bun. Though Martin's Potato Rolls won our burger bun tasting, Sunbeam or Wonderbread seemed the natural choice for these burgers because of their diminutive size and ultra-squishy nature (I went with Wonder because my local supermarket doesn't carry Sunbeam).

Problem is, neither of these brands have sesame seeds, which means that to get seeded buns, I'd have to self-apply.

Interestingly enough, if you start typing "How many sesame seeds..." into a Google search bar, the very first suggested autocomplete is "...on a Big Mac bun," and according to Answers.com, it's about 178. Now I may not have the very best vision in the world, but I call BS on this. Glancing at my bun, I'd guess there are at least twice as many.

I did some very quick calculations via the standard bacterial colony plate-count approximation technique: Just divide the circular plate into quadrants (or 1/8ths in this case), count the seeds in that section, and multiply. 75 seeds on 1/8th of the bun, which means that a Big Mac bun has actually got closer to 600 seeds on it.

Moral of the story: Never ever trust random sources on the internet to relay vital pieces of information.

To apply the seeds to the bun, I used a very simple egg white wash, applying it sparingly with my finger tip (a brush left too thick a coating, resulting in an inappropriately glossy bun top), after which I carefully applied precisely 600 untoasted sesame seeds with a pair of fine tweezers.* A quick 30 seconds under the broiler and my seeds were fixed.

* This may or may not be true

The Onions

My initial reaction was to simply replace the dehydrated-rehydrated onions with fresh ones, but it didn't quite work out. The flavor was simply too pungent and not at all right for the Big Mac. Sautéed onions weren't quite right either. You see, when onions are dehydrated, a lot of the volatile, sulfurous compounds that give them their pungency get evaporated, so what you're left with is onion pieces that exhibit mostly sweetness, with a very faint, underlying onioniness.

100 percent dehydrated-then-rehydrated onions are pretty lacking in flavor and texture, but what if I were to just dehydrate my own onions partially in order to concentrate their flavor and cut down on some of their pungency?

I placed a paper towel-lined plate of minced onions in the microwave and zapped them on low power for 10 minutes in order to drive off their moisture. The result was onions with a distinct sweetness and just a touch of the sharp pungency of fresh onions. Perfect.

The Beef

Here's where we can really improve matters. McDonald's may use 100 percent beef, but it's pretty awful stuff with an odd, mash-like texture. We're much better off starting with fresh meat and grinding it ourselves. While most of my burgers get the Blue Label Burger Blend, this time I opted for 100 percent straight-up short rib, figuring that the sharpness of the pickles and sauce would cut through the otherwise overwhelmingly beefy and rich ribs.

Obviously, no additional fat was necessary, due to the insanely high amount of marbling in these ribs.

McDonald's Big Mac patties are the same patties used on the regular hamburgers, known in McD's lingo as "10 to 1's"—that's ten patties per pound of beef, or 1.6 ounces per patty. The amount of beef may seem tiny (even two patties is less than a single quarter-pound Shake Shack patty, for instance), but after trying to increase the amount of beef, I found that any more, and the sandwich's flavor balance went way out of whack. Don't get me wrong—a bigger burger can certainly be delicious, but it loses its essential Big Macness when the beef overwhelms the other ingredients.

Cooking and Construction

McDonald's uses a proprietary double-sided griddle to cook both sides of their burgers simultaneously. The cooked patties are then held in a temperature and vapor-controlled warming drawer until your sandwich gets assembled. This is clearly sub-optimal.

Much better is to sear the thin patties over insanely high heat in order to build up a substantially browned crust. With 1.6 ounce patties, there's no way to expect a medium-rare center, but with beef this heavily marbled, even well-done meat stays plenty juicy.

You could go all fancy-pants and use "real" cheddar cheese, but that'd be missing the point. We're not trying to build a fancy-pants Big Mac, just a better one, and there's really no way to improve upon the glories of good, well-seared, well-seasoned beef and perfectly melted, gooey American cheese. The one improvement we make here is to actually melt the cheese on top of the patty as it cooks rather than placing a cold slice on top of cold lettuce and pickles like the Clown does it.

My only guess as to why they perform this logic-defying move is that it's an artifact of the assembly-line style construction process at the store.

As for bun placement and stacking, toasting is essential, and I'm in 100 percent agreement with their decision to place the sauce, onions, lettuce (ours is freshly shredded), and pickles (I use four chips instead of their two) underneath the patties. Not only does it protect the buns from burger juices, it also keeps everything crisp and fresh longer, allowing the hot beefy steam from the patties to be absorbed by the buns instead of by the lettuce.

The final result is a sandwich that's truly worthy of the title of American Icon. Two all-beef patties diminutive in size but massive with flavor potential. A special sauce that need not hide behind an of artificially colored mask with no problems dripping out wherever it wants to go. Fresh, crisp lettuce shredded just before serving. American cheese melted to its gloriously gooey fullest. Sharp pickles. Onions carefully guided to tame their pungency and bring out their natural sweetness. All on a soft triple-decker sesame seed bun made with precisely the right number of seeds.

If this isn't the American dream, then I don't know what is.

Your move, clown. Your move.

Find the complete recipe here!

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The Burger Lab: What's The Best Bun For My Burger?

2011-04-15T13:00:00Z

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[Photographs: Robyn Lee]

The Winners!

The Overall Winner: Martin's
The Non-Potato Bread Winners:
#1: Sunbeam
#2: Arnold
#3: Gold Medal

For big, thick burgers, a hearty (but soft!) bun bought from a local bakery or made at home will do you well (try out our recipes for a clone of the Spotted Pig's awesome bun), but for thin, griddled, classic diner-style burgers, nothing beats a store-bought bun. There are some battles not worth fighting, and soft burger buns at home is one of them. Why bother when they're so cheaply and readily available, and perfectly suited for the task?

The ideal soft burger bun should be pillowy, squishy, and tender, with a tight but soft crumb and a distinct sweetness. It should hold up nicely to the burger's juices, but should never be tough or cottony. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you don't want a burger that disintegrates half way through your meal.

The Contenders

We picked the 7 most common nationally available brands for our lineup, as well as including our write-in wildcard favorite, Martin's Potato Rolls, sold mostly on the East Coast. For competition, we also included the only other brand of potato rolls we could find: Pepperidge Farm's Golden Potato. Finally, we included one generic brand from the local supermarket to see how it would compare to the mass-market brands (Super A). Here are the contenders, in alphabetical order:

Arnold
Gold Medal Bakery
Martin's
Pepperidge Farm
Pepperidge Farm Golden Potato
Sunbeam
Super A
Market Pantry (Target)
Whole Foods
Wonderbread

When there was a choice, we always chose the unseeded version of their hamburger bun (some of them were called "sandwich buns"). We tasted each bun in two ways: plain, and toasted with a cheeseburger. For the plain buns, tasters were asked to evaluate flavor and texture. Is it sweet enough? Buttery, or bland? Does it become cottony in your mouth as you chew it, or is it sufficiently soft?

Each bun was also toasted and used to assemble a cheeseburger. Tasters were asked to evaluate how well it stood up to the onslaught of burger juices, as well as whether or not the flavor of the patties was compatible with the flavor of the cheese and the burger. Does it balance out the meat, or detract from it? Does it disintegrate halfway through the burger? Or perhaps it's too tough so the burger gets squashed as you eat it? These are the pressing questions we ask ourselves on a typical work day.

The Results

No huge surprises here: Martin's was the overall winner, although we were mildly surprised by the fact that both the sunbeam and the Arnold brand buns scored within .2 points (out of 10) of the Martin's. So all is not lost if Martin's isn't available in your area!

The most interesting result to come out of the tasting came when I compared a graph of the overall score of each burger bun against a graph of the perceived texture of the buns. There was a near perfect correlation between how soft the buns were and how much we liked them. Check this out:

There was no such similar correlation between flavor and overall ranking, which indicates that for burger buns, texture is the overriding factor when comparing quality.

Here are the final rankings, with our tasting notes.

Martin's (6.7/10)

The gold standard of burger buns, its signature yellow crumb, buttery-sweet flavor, and soft but substantial texture make it the ideal partner for beef and cheese. "Sweet and pillowy," said one commenter, while another simply stated, "HELLO MARTINS. I WOULD HAVE YOUR BABIES." Are you listening, Martin's?

Sunbeam (6.6/10)

The buns are quite small—about the same as Martin's rolls in size—so if you plan on burgers much wider than 3 1/2 to 4 inches, you should pick the Arnold buns below. A surprise winner for us; people weren't too keen on its "mild bready flavor," but its softness won tasters over once the burger was slipped into it. It squishes down until it's just "a little something between the meat and your fingers," but never disintegrates.

Arnold (6.5/10)

Slightly larger than the average bun, but not unwieldy or too thick by any means. The flavor is "inoffensive and slightly sweet," and the look is "very generic white bun," but used in a cheeseburger, the "bottom bun layer soaks up all the burger juices in a good way." "Nice balance, nice chew."

Gold Medal (5.8/10)

The only seeded option we had to use, they were also the largest bun of all. They may have actually been more appropriate for a large, grilled backyard burger, although some complained that "the bun dissolved a little with the burger." Others really liked it, describing it as "thick, but squishy and fluffy." The sesame seeds were a dividing factor.

Pepperidge Farm Golden Potato (5.3/10)

The other brand of potato roll in the lineup, they didn't fare nearly as well as Martin's. Like the regular Pepperidge Farms buns, these ones are significantly larger than either Martin's or Sunbeam. "Kinda weird tasting" and "soapy aftertaste" were used to describe its flavor—every single taster reported an odd aftertaste—but its texture was "squishy and soft" in a good way.

Market Pantry (Target) (5.2/10)

The house brand at Target, it's a little taller than a standard supermarket bun. "Slightly sour but pretty neutral taste," was the overall impression on flavor, but texture is where it suffered. "Crumb a little stiff" and "dry crust" were the big problems.

Pepperidge Farm (4.7/10)

Pepperidge Farm produces a fairly large roll with the most substantial "real bread" look of all the ones we tasted. But that doesn't mean it tastes like real bread. "Doesn't taste like much, but doesn't taste too processed," describes the overall flavor impression. Several found that the outer crust had a stiff, papery quality. "Soft but dry," it was called, though it fared a little better with the burger in it. "No character, but inoffensive."

Wonderbread (4.5/10)

The classic polka-dotted bag brand, and one that we thought would be a favorite. In comparison with other buns, though, it just didn't stack up. Flavor was "pretty neutral and fine," but the real problem was in the "gritty crumb," which crumbled in a weird way when eaten on its own, and disintegrated to almost nothing when the burger was put it in. For a brand known for its soft-textured, insignificant sliced bread, its burger buns are surprisingly stiff.

Super A (4.2/10)

Looks like going with the national brands is the way to go. Our one generic label brand dropped quickly to the bottom of the heap. "Weird, funky aftertaste," and "weird bubblegum flavor," or just plain "yuck" were used to describe its flavor, while the crust was "too chewy," and "a bit dry and thick."

Whole Foods (3.8/10)

Once again, Whole Foods 365 brand dragged its way over the finish line in dead last place. Whatever else they do right, they just can't seem to make any decent packaged products. It is significantly taller and denser than any of the other entries, it "dwarfs the burger meat" with a full "inch and a half thick top" with a very cottony, dry texture. Some were ambivalent, claiming it to be "kinda thick and dry, but not awful," while others (namely, me) didn't mince words: "I hate this bun with a passion."

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