Every Way to Cook a Hamburger (42 Methods) | Bon Appétit

Hi

every

one, I'm Emile Stonek, editor-at-large at Bon Appetit, and these are pretty much all the ways to

cook

a burger. You can make a burger with almost anything - turkey, chicken, fish, even plants - but when most people think of a burger, they think of beef and the character of a burger is largely determined by the cut. of meat you use. Some people swear by lean sirloin, others swear by rich, fatty ribs, and some people love the full flavor that cuts like skirt steak offer, but for my money, it's about good old-fashioned chuck chuck that comes from from the cow's shoulder, it's super meaty and affordable and naturally contains about 80 percent meat and 20 fat - exactly what you want for a burger with tons of flavor and plenty of juiciness once the meat is ground.

It is gently formed into a nice, neat six-ounce patty with a small chunk in the center to prevent it from shrinking when

cook

ed. The biggest challenge when cooking a burger is getting as much caramelized crust on the outside as possible while still achieving the perfect juiciness. medium rare to medium inside and we're going to try to do exactly that in

every

cast iron burger way we can imagine. Okay, we've got our burger, we've got a preheated cast iron skillet and we're going to get some oil in there, we're going to season our burger generously on both sides with kosher salt, the fattier the meat is, the more salt you need, let it sit, press it gently and cook for about four minutes on each side.

I have a nice caramelization on the outside with some crunchy bits here from cutting into them. We have a nice medium raw wall, very little gray and the texture looks very nice and loose, very juicy. Amazing, the meat is succulent and tender, the exterior is salty and This complex method may be simple, but it offers grilled burgers, so now we will use a grill pan that is simply a cast iron skillet with ridges that mimic those of a grill and we are going to spread it with oil to prevent it from sticking. our burger and cook it for about four minutes on each side, done, you'll notice that the browning is concentrated in these lines where the meat was in contact with the ridges, but the rest is a little gray, it's not browned enough for my taste.

The inside looks pretty perfect, I mean, it's tasty, but I'm not sure I see the point in grilling when standard cast iron delivered a pre-seasoned burger with a better sear. You've probably noticed that we've been spicing up the outside. the burger, but not the inside, this time we are going to try to mix a little salt with the ground beef, salt our meat, knead it well to distribute it in our burger and cook it for four minutes in this hot cast iron, let's take a look at it. It's time to try our salt inside the burger experiment, it's pretty crispy looking when you open it, okay so this is interesting, it definitely cooks less evenly and you can see how the outer layer is gray and a bit dull looking. not very dense, that's because the salt actually breaks down the proteins in the meat making it stick to itself instead of being loose and tender, yes the texture is much more like a sausage, it's more elastic and less tender.

You know, from now on I'm going to keep salting the outside of the burgers. The same frozen burger, but this one. one has been frozen, we're going to grease the pan, season our burger and this is going to cook for over seven minutes per side, okay, let's see because this guy spent a little more time in the pan, we got a little more color, but nothing. Too significant, the interior is blush and beautiful, but a little grayer than our fresh burger. I mean, it's not bad, but it's not an improvement over our fresh burger, but it can be done.

Okay, let's go to the backyard so I can air out my clothes. Some three ways gas grilled burger, we have three burgers that have been salted and oiled, we have our gas grill, this first one is our standard beef burger, this one is frozen so it's completely hard and then this one is another fresh burger that We're going to put an ice cube on top supposedly to keep it moist and apparently we're not supposed to turn it over until it melts. We'll just remove them when they're ready. Gas grilled burger, revenge of the grill marks, you know, unless you have a great gas grill, it's hard to produce as much heat as a cast iron skillet, so we're looking for the inside to brown much less, good color, but it looks a little dry, yes, I want it to brown a lot more and because the heat was a little lower, it lost some juice while cooking, okay, nothing to write home about about the burger frozen on gas grill so it was there for quite a while, had to be thawed and then cooked all the way through, chopping yes definitely less.

Even and you're seeing some kind of weird gradients, you know it's a little juicier than the previous one, maybe because the fat was colder and it was rendered differently, but it's not a method I would repeat unless I had to do a burger with ice cubes, I don't think so. that ice cube did anything at all, it certainly didn't help the outside and yes, the inside cooked quite unevenly, probably because one side was colder. Yeah, I mean, it's okay, but it's certainly not juicier or better in any way. Water does not moisten food. Fat people make charcoal grilled burgers, okay, we have a burger that's been salted and oiled, we have a hot charcoal grill, we're just going to leave this here, okay, it's been about four minutes, let's give it a try. back, it seems done here. make our charcoal grilled burger have a nice sear on the outside, it will definitely have some of that smoky charcoal smell.

Wow, look at that, it's cooked really well, perfect medium-rare and it's still nice and juicy, you can tell it's just the juicy taste of summer. beef beautiful crust that charcoal smoke flavor this is so iconic in the backyard this is a great way to cook a burger you know it's a little cold out here I'm ready to get back in the kitchen hibachi burger grilled like this that here we have a hibachi style grill we're going to salt our burger and let it break down, it's burning binchotan charcoal, which is special because it burns very, very hot and very cleanly, so we can do this inside, under the hood, without smoking the place, voila, hibachi burger, wow, this.

Smells very good, decent color. I'm pretty impressed with that grill and the interior I love to see looks pretty perfect. Wow, the flavor is amazing. It could have gotten a little more crusty, but the grill flavor is incredible as the fat and juices drip off. over the charcoal, they kind of steam and perfume the meat in a really delicious way, delicious butter seared burger, cast iron again, except this time we're going to grease our skillet with a little butter, season the burger, four minutes per each side should be good. To top it all off, it smells like butter and is delicious, but we're not seeing much caramelization, probably due to the water content of the butter.

The interior temperature looks very good. There is nothing to complain about. You know, I feel like I'm barely tasting the butter. I'm missing that crust, not bad, but this didn't add much in my opinion. Steamed burger. I swear, this is actually something. We have our burger. We have a steamer in this pot with boiling water. We'll just leave it here, close the lid and come back in about eight minutes. Oh wow, that looks good, definitely not as attractive as a gray city in the US, no direct heat, no browning and it actually shrunk a bit inside. juicy but we have a fat gray ring around it probably because it was cooking on all sides at once the texture is not horrible but it is strange to eat so much meat without browning at all, could be good with a slider burger but this is quite unpleasant for my.

Toaster burger. Why not season this guy right? Slide it into the toaster and we'll see what comes out the other side. Okay, he exploded, I'll get him out of there. Look, it's okay, just get some chopsticks. Take it. I'm just going to flip the toaster burger. Wow, well, we got a little scratched taking it out of the toaster. I'm not in love with this exterior. I just don't think the heat was high enough with that. He said it looks a lot better than some of the burgers we've seen today, the inside actually looks pretty good, I'm not going to lie, it reached the right temperature, I'll be in for a weird little fun fact, the place he claims to have Invented the

hamburger

sandwich.

Louie's Lunch in New Haven Connecticut uses weird vertical grills that aren't all that different from a home toaster. Well, I'm missing the browning, but it's certainly juicy. It could have been much worse. Iron burger. No room service burger exists. It's going to be hot and cool enough for me, so if I'm staying in a hotel, I'll just light the iron salt for my burger generously on both sides with salt, sprinkle it with the pam that I snuck for the safety of the airport and went to the city, I'm going to turn it around and finish the other side.

Wow, okay, honestly, I'm pretty impressed with what's going on here. The brownie is almost flattened to the level of the burger, although I'm a little worried about the flattening and loss of moisture. The interior is nice. it might be a sleeper hit, it's a pretty good burger, it's a little drier than our standard burger, but honestly, it's better than a solid seventy percent of our

methods

, it's a pretty good fried burger, we got a burger, We have a deep fryer. Season this bad boy on both sides and place it in our air fryer at 350 degrees for about 12 minutes.

I'm not impressed with the way it looks, we could have used more heat to cut it, the temperature is not terrible, but yes. that same kind of gray ring around it as our steamed burger and I think that's because it was completely surrounded by heat. I mean, it's not horrible, but it's definitely not better than our cast iron burger. Not sure if I'd pull out the deep fryer for this waffle burger we had to make it friends burger salt hit our waffle iron with some cooking spray and do the damn thing there's nothing I want to say it's just depressing at this point oh wow , yeah there it is, I mean it looks great to be honest, decent color on those touch points but otherwise pretty pale, yeah it's overcooked, we definitely smash it so it loses a lot of moisture, it tastes like a burger cafeteria, it's a disgusting grilled burger, okay, let's take In this thing we're going to tie up our burger to try not to squash it too much, okay, put it in there, close the door and spin it, and there's our grilled burger, so this It is a situation that seems like we lost a lot of juice, but The exterior is not the worst we have seen today.

It's definitely weirder. Really uneven. It's definitely a lot less juicy than our other burgers. I lost a lot of fat while spinning and the exterior doesn't have the depth of flavor. What I want is to save the rotisserie for chicken. Thank you very much, smash the burger. Now for something a little different, we've got a little bit smaller piece of ground beef, we've got our dinner griddle well seasoned and instead of making a patty, we're just going to plop it in there and use a spatula to flatten it, give it a touch. of salt and season again and there is our smashed burger.

The beautiful thing here is how much caramelization we got on the outside, a beautiful even layer of crispy texture control. that inside is still a nice nice looking pink texture but certainly more cooked than some of the others, mmm this is definitely one of my favorites, that outside flavor is out of control and it's still quite juicy and tender honestly, I think this is one of the most infallible. There are ways to make a delicious burger, it's like the platonic ideal of the roadside diner burger, frozen burger, okay, same thing, but this time we freeze our piece of meat for about 15 minutes so that it's nice and cold, which some people say produces a better one. smash burger smash it well let's take a look here it has good color but not as good as our first smash burger maybe because the meat took longer to heat up inside a little rarer it doesn't look bad honestly it's hard to tell the difference I had heard that chilling meat would prevent fat from being released, but I won't buy it.

Onion burger. Well, spoiler alert. This is one of my all-time favorite burgers. A tribute to a place called White Mana in Hackensack, New Jersey. Put our meat on the ground, cover it with thinly sliced ​​onions, mash it, season with salt, give it more salt and there it is beautiful, even with a crust, I love to see it, which isreally interesting is what happens on the other side, although it was steamed in the onion juice, God. It smells amazing, the inside looks good, just like our other Smash Burgs, so good, it's like an onion-scented Smash Burger, so much flavor, honey, okay, let's go back outside.

Shall we grill a Smash burger? Can we make a Smash burger on a grill? We'll try it, we'll smash our meat ball on this grill heated griddle and let it do what I think is right, so here we have our open air smashed burger, great crispy caramelization on this side, just like our versions for stove, the interior looks great, very nice. It is exactly what we have inside, but with better landscapes. If I'm cooking burgers on a gas grill, this is definitely my preferred way to do it. Smoked burger, smoke 'em if you got 'em, we've got our burger, we've got our smoker, let's do this, okay? so it's not browning much, it's definitely darkened a bit, but the temperature was too low to get a real browning, smoky smell, although the inside looks pretty uniform, but also maybe very weird, yes it's smoky, okay, the pinch dried up. that crust is really missing, it probably would have been better if we seared it afterwards or smoked it at a higher temperature or something, the burger burns, okay, let's cook this burger with a sears all, which is basically just a imagined hit .

Torch, I'm going to sit down and watch this, fix the other side, let's look at this so it browns a little bit. Concentrated in a few areas, we have some charred burnt bits, you know, everything browns, it's actually more to finish things off already. cooked that to cook them inside, it is quite raw, you know, it is too strange for me, it is cold in the middle, no, thank you. yeah, this seems like a good time to get back into the kitchen sous vie burger now we're going to get fancy and scientific on the souvia burger, we're going to slide our burger into this bag, then we're going to suck out all the air and seal it now.

We're going to put it in this pot that's equipped with an immersion circulator that will keep it at a constant 120 degrees. We'll check it out in about 45 minutes. Phase one complete. Now we will open our bag. oil in our preheated pan, pat our burger dry and sear it hard on both sides, okay, it looks good, here we have our sous-vide and seared burger. I'm a little disappointed by how little color we have here, but I was afraid. take it further because the inside was already up to temperature, yes, don't I love that souvenir cooking is much better for a larger cut of meat, not for quick cooking like this, yes, totally fine, a little overcooked, you know the reward just isn't there.

hamburger

in the microwave they are making me do this in case you haven't guessed we have a microwave we have a hamburger let's season it transfer it to a plate put it in and cook it for two and a half minutes oh lord that needs to be done so here it is our burger cooked with a low level of radiation, it looks very twisted and clearly lost a lot of its juice, it is not browned and is a little pink in the middle, but it was cooked very unevenly, let's finish this well.

It tastes like beef, it's definitely worse than our extreme burger, there's no reason to cook a burger this way and that's it, dehydrated burger, why do people climb Mount Everest? because it's there, season it with salt, open this dehydrator, put our burger in there, close it and we're done. We'll leave it at 158 ​​degrees for four and a half hours, let's take a look, that's kind of cool, this looks pretty eerie, it's very dark, almost like a black bean burger or something, let's take a look inside, I mean . It looks pretty good, honestly I'm a little afraid to eat this because it's been in the danger zone for so long I really hope I don't get sick oh, there's no outside it's like leather, it's so strangely hard ah bad, don't make this burger tartar, okay, we've cooked a lot of burgers at this point, so now we'll try not to cook any.

Here we have some ground meat, we will add an egg yolk, a little chopped onion, a little salt, a little olive. oil, we're making a very minimal tartar here formed into a burger and there's our tartar burger, obviously, this is just raw meat with mixtures, I'm going to cut it in half, which is pretty unnecessary, yeah, still raw meat, You know, I love steak. tartar but for some reason it's a little discouraging on a bun it's totally delicious it would be so much better if this bun was toasted to create some texture and temperature contrast I don't think I could eat all of this it's a really great way to eat ground beef burger by hand now we're going to do something a little different here we have six ounces of chuck that we've frozen a little bit to harden and then we're going to cut it by hand into nice, uniform quarter inch cubes now we're going to shape it into a loose burger, we're going to put a little oil in our pan, we will season and cook for about four minutes per side.

Beautiful, that exterior is really beautiful, the roughness of the minced meat created a great surface area. so you have a lot of browning and these nice crispy craggy bits, the inside is not as cooked as some of our ground burgers, but it looks very juicy and I love the loose texture, the amazing flavor, the moist meaty texture is so different and fantastic that just falls apart in your mouth, it's definitely labor intensive, but it's certainly a really great take on a burger, mix the burger three ways, so we've already established that we don't like mixing salt in our hamburgers, but there are a lot of things that people add to hamburgers and swear they make them better.

In this one we're going to add some cold cubes of butter, then we're going to add some mayonnaise to this one and this last one is going to get a few tablespoons of smooth peanut butter, oh my god, this looks disgusting, form them into patties, season each one with salt and warm these guys up let's take a look at the butter burger, I mean it looks like a nice caramelized burger and I think it has to be it has to do with the milk solids and the butter melting and browning which is interesting, the inside is well cooked but it looks like there are some pockets where the butter used to be, it's very juicy but no juicier than a normal burger and I think most of the butter just Honestly, I'm not sure if this is a hamburger with mayonnaise.

I'm actually a little excited about this because I love mayonnaise on a burger so maybe I'll like it, the texture seems a little loose and we got good color because the egg and sugar in the mayo cut interestingly, it looks rather well cooked even though it was cooked for the same amount of time as I was. I don't think it's any better than our standard burger. I'm not sure the mayonnaise added anything. I'd rather just have mayonnaise on the bun. Peanut butter burger. This was very crunchy and again I think it's because there are natural sugars in the peanut butter. which encourage caramelization, nice kind of crispy, craggy bits here and it smells a little nutty, I guess the inside looks pretty good though a little less so, even that's weird, it tastes like eating a burger and smelling the pb and j from someone at the same time, I don't. like that moral of the story no mix juicy lucy people I know I just said I don't want things on my burger but we're going to try a Minnesota specialty known as juicy lucy we're going to form two burgers From this meat, put some American cheese and press it in gently to seal the season, cook it in our hot cast iron for about four minutes on each side and my friends it's a juicy Lucy.

He likes the color here, but the shape is original. We couldn't make our little dimple in the middle so it shrunk a little, but the inside is supposed to be really the exciting part and there's the melted, oozing cheese, the temperature is still pretty nice, I got a great taste, I love American cheese on a burger, so why not put it on at the same time? I wouldn't say it tastes better than a regular cheeseburger, but it sure is a cool party trick. Oven baked burger, this burger is salted and oiled and we're going to put it in a 350 degree oven for about 30 minutes and to my friends, it's a pretty boring looking baked burger, it's gray and it feels a bit leathery, the interior is very uneven.

You can see that this side received more heat from the tray and this side not as much, honestly. It tastes very similar to our steamed burger. I hate that the top is almost raw and the bottom is well cooked. Yuck, the grilled burger was a flop. Now we're going to increase the heat and decrease the time to 475 degrees for about seven minutes, which should do it somehow this seems almost less cooked than our baked burger again it's super uneven much more cooked down here than up here the metal is a better conductor of heat than air not crazy about this yeah overall There are a lot of textures here and none of them are good.

It's a more over-the-top version of our baked burger. No good. Grilled burger. Time to grill, we'll put our burger in there for about six minutes and see what comes out the other side. Alright. It seems done, so many restaurants grill their burgers, but they have much more powerful units. Our homemade roaster barely browns on top and there's not much to see on the bottom, nor does the inside actually look any better than our other baking

methods

. but it definitely shrunk in a funky way, it's a little weak, yeah, I don't like how gray this juicy taste is, but it's really missing the flavor of the brown burger.

You know, this oven doesn't seem to work very well for us, but why? Didn't we try the easy bake burger? Well friends, we have a mini burger. We have our easy bake oven. It actually feels a little hot. We're going to add salt. Put it in this special little tray and slide it in. And now. We're going to use this ridiculous tool here too, ew, I mean, ew, but also kind of cute, obviously this burger is too small for this bun, it definitely looks cooked, but it's just a little disc of meat and the bottom It looks very unattractive.

I mean it was cooked with a light bulb, the inside actually still has some pink in it, which is a little disturbing. It tastes like the burgers they served in my high school cafeteria with a hint of burnt plastic. We have a hot pan, we're going to put a little bit of oil on it, we're going to season our burger and then we're going to sear it on both sides just to get a crust, then we're going to transfer it to this rack and finish it in the oven, done, so no. It didn't get any new color in the oven and since we were trying not to overcook the burger on the stove we took it out before we got the kind of crust we wanted, the inside looks pretty well cooked, a little gray around the edges, it is not.

Bad either way, but I'm missing that crust and this was no better than if we gave it a few more minutes in the pan. Upside down seared burger. Okay, let's try to do the exact opposite of this burger that we greased and salted. We're going to put it in this oven at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes until the inside is raw, then we're going to take it out and now that it's fully cooked we're going to brown it in a hot pan for about a minute on each side. just to get some upside down charred burger color, the exterior here is quite attractive.

The brownie is much easier to achieve when you have given the outside a head start in the oven, that inside is very pretty and even almost not gray at all and looks very juicy. really nice, much better than our sous vide or our skillet oven which said it's not much better than our seared burger and took longer so I'm not sure I see the point of any of these two step methods honestly , you know, I think. I'm ready for a little burger outside on the stove three ways, okay, we've got three burgers here, this first one we're going to put on this preheated lava rock, this one we're going to put on this grate directly above the coals and this foil-wrapped burger will go right here, we'll come back and flip them halfway through and take them out when they're done.

Lava stone burger, you can tell the lava stone was super hot, look at that beautiful golden brown on that stone. It provided really direct heat and flare protection at the same time which we love and the inside looks great, a hair overcooked that's really my fault, that crust is amazing, very flavorful and just a faint whisper of smoke from firewood. I really like this method. wood grills burger, so this one was cooked directly on the cold and shows a very aggressive caramelization, a little charred, even very nice inside, it's really nice, a little bit overcooked again, but that's my bad, very tasty , greatwood smoke energy, mmm, a little less juicy than our lava stone. the burger is not still great, the fire pit is definitely done with the foil packaged burger, well first thing is to open it, damn this is wrapped tightly, oh yeah, that's not nice, something raw here , I mean, it's just steamed in that package. because there was nowhere for the moisture to go, let's cut it, oh yeah, ugly interior, very weird over here, overcooked over here, yeah, no, not a good method, no need to waste good paper aluminum, make a bad burger, yuck, George Foreman's lean, bad burger, reduce the fat. grilling machine let's season our burger we'll spray our george foreman with a little bit of cooking spray put our burger in and close it up let's try it so we've got some grill marks reminiscent of our grilled burger. concerned about how squished it looks, although the inside, yes, it's overcooked, definitely in the middle territory, yes, that's pretty dry and grainy, I mean, George Farm and Grill's promise is that it squeezes out the fat and the meat juice and let it drain. which is not a good burger, in my opinion, miss me with this air fried burger, we have our burger, we have our droid, salt, both sides, brush it with a little oil, open our weird box and drop our burger on that.

I'm going to cook at 350 degrees for I don't know how long, flip it over and there's our air fried burger, it looks really horrible, the outside just looks dry, open it up wide, it's cooked to temperature, but there's definitely some grayishness. around the edges. product of that indirect ambient heat that is not a good hamburger, I hate that thing, okay, today we cook a lot of hamburgers in many ways, what did we learn well? At the end of the day, a good burger is one of life's simple pleasures and as such, our simplest methods ended up giving the best results, there's no need to overcomplicate things, all you need is quality beef over high heat and maybe a little smoke, and you'll get the kind of burger dreams are made of, have your favorite way. to cook a hamburger that you didn't see today here, leave it in the comments