Debunking Burger Myths with J. Kenji López-Alt | The Burger Show

If there were a

burger

jedi, it would be

kenji

lopez alt, award-winning author and internet food legend has conducted hundreds of groundbreaking experiments on his influential blog the

burger

lab today we're on a mission to debunk some of the most prevalent

myths

about burgers. the burgers flip and learn some eye-opening techniques that will lead to a better, more delicious burger my entire career has taught me certain things okay, okay, okay and then I read your blog and you say the opposite and every once in a while you find that you like it this thing that everyone does all the time, like you actually try it side by side, turns out it's not the best way to do things, that's what makes you unique, you take a scientific approach and then you document it. it's kind of like to all the haters these are my notes you just go against the grain and they like you and prove you right you always want to go against the grain today what we're going to do actually is h thankfully different than anything another burger we've made on the

show

before i call it the best single person burger because you can literally only make one at a time it doesn't work if you try to make too many and in the process i think we're going to try to debunk some

myths

about burger things what people say you always have to do and there's a moment where we'll explain why you shouldn't this is like a jedi moment yoda do i get to ride on your back here what you'll hear a lot of people say is chuck uh what comes from you know steer shoulder is the best is the best burger meat yes chuck is a very good all-in guy -a meat makes it as easy as he has done you know the dish is one of these mussels that works hard throughout the life of this venison has a lot of good marbling a lot of fat a lot of flavor development um but if you think of a burger as a good blended whiskey or a good blended wine you know you want to take on different elements and make your as far as the flavors between them balance out as you mix them together what we have here is brisket what we have here is sirloin and then here we have short rib so let's try some of these varieties of burgers I say let's start with the dish which is probably the one you're probably most used to eating um and it's going to have that kind of balance and it tastes like a pretty classic burger wow ok let's move on to the rib eye here there's a lot of richness but not too much depth you know what it feels like it's all yum yeah it feels like something like edm you know it's like base one but not much on top yeah ok let's move on to the brisket you get com or a kind of sourness yeah people describe it I think it's like a wheyy taste like blood minerally yeah um and now let's try some sirloin here yeah so you can't make a burger like that, not dry, so where brisket i think? it has this kind of crumbly texture sir loin um league better um stays more tender yeah yeah so what I like to do is combine um about 50 sirloin just to have that kind of black blank canvas and that tenderness um along with about 25 brisket and 25 short rib it makes a lot of sense we're using relatively cheap cuts of meat you know we're not using a hamburger yes it's a hamburger the hamburger should be ground beef yes it's the most democratic food in the world just let's cube this you know inch and a half pieces so what we're doing is dicing and dumping all the cubes in a bowl so that when you crush them you know it's all mixed evenly together one thing you could wondering is when should we put the salt in it obviously you need salt you need salt in a burger to make it taste good you know it's been debated for a long time but it's a big one i think someone in the 50's or 60 was like this is the point where you salt it exactly so and eah a lot of people will tell you salt it right now.

I think it's a big mistake. I have two hamburgers. One of them was made with salty beef, okay? let's do a quick little experiment um for that i think we should probably go out i have your two burgers identical except for the fact that on one of them the salt was mixed into the meat and on the other the salt is just on the outside it's ok they're both cooked um so now i want you to hold that tray there um so i'm going to toss first this is the burger that uh it's salty just on the outside voila you got it you hit my nerds.

Okay, so you feel like that was the unsalted burger, the burger that was only salted on the outside and you see, I'm serious, it fell apart just from the force of me throwing it before it got close to you, right? ? And that's what you want in a burger at least that's what I want in a burger I want it really so tender it basically just falls apart in your mouth like it's barely holding together. Now I'm going to

show

you what happens if you salt meat before you grind it or before you form the ready-to-eat patties that it gets that rubbery. the texture a sausage has is a good thing that kind of rubbery snap you get in sausage but it's not really what you want in a burger don't put salt on your burgers before you grind them but mug your friends with the burgers you just tossed a burger for me yeah i think you are i mean i'm pretty clean we're good now let's grind the meat actually okay i think that's enough for what we do the next myth that let's talk. is that your patties need to be shaped and shaped in a very specific way yeah you know for this burger we're not actually going to shape it at all instead of picking up the meat and forming patties all we're going to do is kind of gently shape it into a burger like this super light one.

What I like to say is that once the meat has been ground, we never lift the meat with human hands again. The goal we're going for here is the maximum surface area to get it crisp and golden and that's really why we don't want to push it because you know that the smoother the surfaces, the lower the ratio of surface area to the volume so the more nooks and crannies you have it's like an English muffin the more nooks and crannies you have the crunchier and better huh exactly So for you home burger makers the most important thing to remember is they want to handle the meat as little as possible.

My two basic ingredients in a burger. I don't know what yours are. If I had to pick just two ingredients, it would be pickles. and onions and green tomatoes when they're in season and if it's going to be lettuce for me it needs to be shredded iceberg alright so we've got our lettuce we've got our tomato um now we're going to go into this onion now if you look at an onion there are two different ways in the ones you can cut it off if you imagine it's a planet and it's rotating around this axis we can cut it orbitally which is the way a satellite would orbit it yeah and you'll get onion rings or you can cut it from post to post um it actually makes a pretty significant difference uh which way you cut it um and the reason for that is because um the onion cells aren't symmetrical they're a little elongated in one direction I happen to have this accessory ready um so imagine this when you were a kid you had like a microscope have you ever looked at onions under it i mean you see it looks almost like this it has these kind of elongated cells and those cells run this way corr in from the pole to the poles so the cells are much longer that way than the other way and the thing about onions and other alliums is that kind of spicy flavor you know what makes you cry which gives you that spicy taste in your nose um tho These chemicals, um, don't exist in a raw onion.

The more cells you break in an onion, the more it'll make you cry, exactly, the more it'll make you cry, the more of those bad flavors, it takes all that stuff out and puts it in the air, just imagine you're cutting this onion. pull to pull like this yeah just go down there come on so if you're slicing it that way you're essentially just slicing like a single row of cells so now you've posted what you know a cell is worth such Maybe two cells are worth stuff in this little section, but if you're going across the equator, yeah, you're cutting all those cells, um, and that's exactly what happens when you slice an onion across the equator so all this stuff is released, you get a much stronger pungency by cutting it across the top a little bit, that's great man, so I have here a little little pan, um, essentially the same size as the burger, right? and this is planned, you want us, I want that, and this is precisely why a burger like this is great for people at home alone it's not great for a restaurant it's not great if you're cooking for a crowd because you really need to cook it one at a time it should be in a small pan and i'll show you why so i'll put a little oil in the salt pan.

This is kosher salt after this meat has been ground. We haven't picked it up with our beer. We have not seasoned it and we have not picked it up with our hands. Flip it over carefully. spatula just no hands careful so we've got our pan kinda hot here it's about 400 degrees right now we're going to get our burger as it cooks uh the fat is going to come off of it and it's going to start filling the pan a little bit and it's like frying in it's own fat you know to get all that extra flavor you get all that crunch if you did this in a flat tub or a bigger pan all that fat just drains off how long do you say per side about a minute so yeah this side is almost done can you do it?

Tell him it's loose, it falls apart, yeah, and you can see all these little pieces of beef that are fried in their own fat. I'm going to put the onions directly here so they have a little chance to steam. This is I'm going to hold it all together exactly what I'm doing right now is I'm just going to put a little towel over this so it's kind of steamed yeah exactly just to soften that bun up a little bit by catching a little bit of that onion in jersey They use a piece of parchment paper they make a kind of tent ok so now we're ready to assemble I'm going to put some mayonnaise on there it's hot it's nice compared to the ingredients I'm more of the passive type . as a kid so i like to put my little bed of lettuce and this is for tectonic shifts exactly it has to hold up to keep everything stable oh you can see the crust on there the cheese is melted oh baby you can see these edges right like this it looks completely different than a squashed burger but yeah how many nooks and crannies and kinda like roughness animates man you know how juicy so this is a well done burger yeah not a hint of pink in it but because of the cooking method how it comes out not like super super juicy there's as much texture as it's super crunchy man it's like a burger like a croissant with the flakiness of the beef that's the kind of solid burger burger of solid salt stuff there are a lot of so called hard and fast rules about cooking anything cooking burgers um but yeah you know sometimes sometimes breaking the rules leads to really delicious results yeah this proves that school culinary and half the books i've read wrong burger forest is really with you thank you thank you friend i appreciate it what? it's your um what's your midichlorian tell what's up burger world it's alvin kyle from the burger show smash that like button hit that subscribe button if not for me for the segway