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

if there was 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 burger

myths

around and learn some eye-opening techniques that will lead to a better, more delicious burger throughout my career. They have taught me certain things very well and then I read your blog and you say the complete opposite and from time to time. You come across something like this that everyone does all the time. In fact, if you try it side by side, it turns out that it's not the best way to do things, that's what makes you unique.

You take a scientific approach and then document it. it's like for all the haters these are my notes they just go against the grain and they like it and prove they're right they always want to go against the grain today what we're going to do is actually hopefully different from any other. Another burger we've made on the

show

before I call the ultimate one-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 burger

myths

.

Things people say you always have to do. And there is a time when we will explain why you shouldn't. Should not? This is like a Jedi Yoda moment. Can I ride on your back? here what you'll hear a lot of people say is that the chuck uh, which comes from you know, the steer shoulder is the best, it's the best meat for hamburgers, yes, the chuck is a very good type of meat all in one. makes it easy, you know, chuck is one of those mussels that works hard for the entire life of this deer, it has very good marbling, a lot of fat, a lot of flavor development, um, but if you think of a burger as if it were a good blended whiskey or a good blended wine, you know you want to take different elements and make sure that the flavors between them are balanced when you mix them together.

What we have here is brisket, what we have here is sirloin and then here we have a brief. rib, so let's try some of these burger varieties. I say we start with the chuck, which is the one you're probably most used to eating and it will have that kind of balance and taste like a pretty classic burger. Wow, okay, let's move on. As for the ribs, there's a lot of richness here, but not too much depth, you know, it feels like everything is very rich, yeah, it feels like something like edm, you know, it's just that it's based on one, but there's nothing way over the top, yeah, okay, let's move on to the brisket, you get a kind of acidity, yeah, people describe it, I think it's like a whey flavor, like blood, minerally, yeah, um, and now let's try a Bit of prime sirloin here, yeah.

You can't just make a burger like that, not dry, so where the brisket I think has this kind of crumbly texture, the sirloin comes together better, stays more tender, yeah, yeah, so what I like to do is combine some 50 sirloin just to have that kind of blank black canvas and that tenderness, along with about 25 breasts and 25 ribs, it makes a lot of sense that we're using relatively cheap cuts of meat, you know? We are not using a hamburger, yes, it is a hamburger it must be ground beef, yes, it is the most democratic food in the world.

We're just going to cut this into cubes, you know, nice inch, inch and a half chunks, so what we're doing is we're cutting into cubes and we're throwing all the cubes together in a bowl so that when we grind them up, you know that everything is mixed evenly. One thing you might wonder is when should we put the salt in the, 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 an important topic. I think someone in the '50s or '60s said this is exactly the point where you put salt in it, so yeah, a lot of people will tell you to put salt in it.

At this point I think this is a big mistake. I have two hamburgers. One of them was made with salted beef and the other was made with unsalted beef, so let's do a quick little experiment. I think we should probably go out. I have your two identical burgers except for the fact that in one of them the salt was mixed into the meat and in the other the salt is only on the outside. Okay, both are cooked. so now I want you to hold that tray there so I'm going to throw first this is the burger that's salty only on the outside ready you got it did you hit my nerds okay so you can feel it that was the burger without salt? burger that was only salty on the outside and you saw it, I'm serious, it fell apart just from the force with which I threw 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 to really be so tender that it basically melts in your mouth like it's barely holding together. Now I'll

show

you what happens if you salt the meat before grinding it or before forming the ready-to-eat burgers. you get this kind of chewy texture that's in a sausage, kind of good that kind of chewy snap that 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 attacks to your friends. with the burgers you just threw me a burger yeah I think you are I mean I'm pretty clean now we're good let's grind the meat actually okay I think that's enough for what we do the next myth.

What we're going to talk about is that your burgers need to be shaped and shaped in a very specific way. Yeah, you know, for this burger we're actually not going to form it at all, instead of picking up the meat and forming it into patties. What we're going to do is gently shape it into a burger like this, very lightly. What I like to say is that once the meat has been ground, we never lift it again with human hands, the goal we are seeking here. is the maximum surface area to get it crispy and golden and that's why we don't want to press it flat because you know the smoother the surfaces, the lower the surface area to volume ratio you're going to have and, so the more nooks and crannies you have, like an English muffin, the more nooks and crannies it has, the crispier and the better, uh exactly, so for home burger makers, the key thing to remember is that you have to manipulate the meat as little as possible.

My two basic ingredients in a burger that don't I don't know what yours are, if I had to choose only two ingredients it would be pickles and onions and green tomatoes when they are in season and if it's going to be lettuce for me, it has to be a grated iceberg, so we have our lettuce we have our tomato um now let's get into this onion now if you look at an onion there are two different ways you can cut it if you imagine this is a planet and it rotates around this axis we can cut it orbitally which is the way in that a satellite would orbit around it, yeah, and you'll get onion rings or you can cut it from pole to pole, it actually makes a pretty significant difference, which direction you cut it, and the reason.

That's because the cells of the onion are not symmetrical, they are elongated in one direction. I happen to have this accessory ready. So imagine this when you were a kid, did you have a microscope? Have you ever looked at the onions underneath? I mean, you see, it looks almost like this, it has kind of elongated cells and those cells run this way, they go from pole to pole, so the cells are much longer that way than the other way around and what happens with the onions. and other alliums is that um that kind of spicy taste what you know what makes you cry what gives you that spicy taste in your nose um those chemicals um don't exist in a raw onion um what happens is when When you open the cells of onion, there are these precursor chemicals that come out and interact with each other and then form these kind of pungent aromas after you cut them, so the more cells you break down in an onion, the more exactly it will make you cry. the more it will make you cry, the more bad flavors it brings out all those things and puts them in the air, exactly imagine you're cutting this onion, pull to throw it like this, yeah, just go down, come on, so yeah By cutting it like that, basically you're cutting like a single row of cells, so right now you've freed up what you know a cell is worth, maybe two cells in this little section, but if you're cutting across the equator Yeah, you're cutting all of those cells, um, and that's exactly what happens when you cut an onion across the equator so that all of this releases, you get a much stronger pungency when you cut it across the top, that's great, so I've got a little frying pan here, 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 who are home alone, it's not great for a restaurant, It's not excellent.

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 we'll put a little bit of oil in the pan and salt. It is kosher salt after this meat has been ground. um we haven't picked it up with our beer, we haven't seasoned it and we haven't picked it up with our bare hands, carefully, flip it over with a spatula, just no hands, carefully, so we have our pan. It's a little hot in here, it's about 400 degrees right now, we're going to take our burger while it's cooking, the fat is going to melt and it's going to start to fill the pan a little bit, so it's like frying is your own fat, you know, so you get all that extra flavor, you get all that crispy texture if you do this in a flat tub or a larger pan, all that fat just drains away, how long do you say per side, about a minute , so yes?

If this side is almost done, you can tell it's loose, it's falling apart, yeah, and you can see all these little bits of brown meat that are fried in their own fat. I'm going to put the onions right here so they have a little bit of a chance to steam this will hold everything together exactly what I'm doing now is I'm just going to put a little towel over this so it can steam, yeah exactly, just to soften that bun. trapping a little bit a little bit of that onion in jersey they use a piece of parchment paper they make a kind of tent okay so now we're ready to set up I'm going to put some mayonnaise down there it's hot it's nice instead of toppings I'm more of the right kind of bottoms so I like to put my little bed of lettuce on and this is for tectonic shifts it exactly has to hold up to keep everything stable oh you can see the crust there the cheese is melted. oh honey, you can see these edges like this, it looks completely different from a smashed burger, but yeah, how many nooks and crannies there are and just like the roughness of it makes you happy, taste the juiciness, so this is a well done burger, yeah.

It doesn't have a hint of pink, but because of the cooking method, it doesn't come out super super juicy, it has so much texture like it's super crispy, it's like a burger like croissant with the flakiness of the beef. the solid burger guy solid salt burger stuff there's a lot of hard and fast rules about cooking anything, cooking burgers um, but yeah, you know, sometimes breaking the rules leads to really delicious, delicious results, yeah , this shows culinary school and half the books I've read wrong burger forest is really with you well thanks buddy I appreciate it what's your um what's your midichlorian count what's up burger world I'm alvin kyle del burger show smash that like button hit the subscribe button if it wasn't for me for the segway