How to Make the Best Smashed Burgers

I love a big, thick, juicy burger, it's tender, it's medium-rare, it's almost perfect, but what I love about it is that crust on the outside, especially when it gets hard and a little crunchy. Today I'm going to

make

a burger that's really all about the crust, we're smashing

burgers

and it's so fast and so much fun I'm going to take you for a ride now, these cook up really really fast like I said so let's work on all other components. Before we get to the burger, starting with lettuce, you can now choose any type of lettuce you want.

I'm going with the classic iceberg. I love the crunch here and the refreshing flavor it adds. Now I need to dishearten. All you have to do is smash the iceberg on your counter just like that, flip it over and you can get the core out pretty easily and I'm making

burgers

for two. I'm going to take off this slightly wilted little petticoat. lettuce, get rid of that and go for some of the crunchier bits on the inside, so I'm going to leave aside a couple of nice bits that don't brown and now, how about a nice, juicy, ripe tomato?

Summer tomatoes are the

best

, but if you buy them at the supermarket in winter, look for the ones that are ripened on the vine, they taste much better and when you store tomatoes at home, store them with the core down, they will actually age a little slower that way, if nothing else it worked on everyone, so I'm going to take a paring knife and just cut this heart out. I'm holding the paring knife at an angle. Here I can't smash the tomato to get rid of the core and now I'm going to Cut this tomato if your knife is pretty dull, you can always use a serrated knife for this.

Right now, one of the hallmarks of some really great smash burgers is that special sauce that you put on the burger, and again, this is optional if I just want to go for ketchup and mustard, but I'm going to

make

some special sauce here. , so we start with some shallot. I need a tablespoon of chopped shallot, cut it in half with the peel. Peel it and then because I want it to be very finely chopped, I'm going to make the cuts very close together, so I space the knife about an eighth of an inch or even less and take your time, you see how.

My hand up here is not close to the blade, so now I'm going to do the same thing, cross over here and then just grab it now. I just need a tablespoon that looks good, let's put really big pieces in there and I'm going to measure this sometimes I don't measure it, I'll just watch it because you get a good feeling, but really this sauce is all about proportions so I'll tell you that measure well, who wants a pickle? Here we're not just going to cut up dill pickles, we're actually going to add dill pickles to our special sauce, it's almost a version of a Russian dressing, so these are just dill pickles, a spear, one here, leave that jar to a side for a moment, similar to shallot.

I want to slice this finely and I only need about a teaspoon and a half, so I'm going to cut them in half so I have a nice flat surface and the same thing I did with the shallot, I just make horizontal cuts and then across them. vertical, okay, and I need a teaspoon and a half teaspoon of pickles and that looks like half a teaspoon. Now I want to use some of this brine as well, obviously it's salty, it's brine, but it also has great flavors. we're going to use half a teaspoon now of course we need a creamy sauce so we're going to use a little bit of mayonnaise we use two tablespoons of mayonnaise and a little bit of ketchup we have a teaspoon and a half of ketchup and one of the hallmarks of a really good sauce is which is spicy, salty and also a little sweet, so I'm going to add a little sugar.

I have an eighth of a teaspoon of sugar. Remember that ketchup is already quite sweet and one-eighth of a teaspoon. teaspoon black pepper or if you like it a little bit spicier, okay, let me mix this together to get that nice pink tone that looks lovely. You'll also want to make a lot of this and in fact it can stay in the refrigerator for a couple of days now let's talk cheese we're not using gourmet artisan cheese we're using cheese individually wrapped in plastic these were actually designed to melt so So why not use science for our benefit?

So here's some preparation. what you have to do is unwrap the cheese and what I like to do is just fold it back so they are well spaced until you are ready to use them when seconds count this pre-unwrapping of the cheese will come in handy. and let's talk about buns, nice soft buns, they're soft, they have a nice flavor and you should be able to compact them in your hands before you eat them, so I'm going to split them up and then just to put about a tablespoon of sauce on each of the tops of the muffin oh yeah, okay, what are we missing?

How about some meat? Now I have ground beef that I bought at the grocery store, eight ounces of ground beef. Here is the reason. I recommend that you buy ground beef at the supermarket instead of grinding it yourself at home. This is because they tend to grind the meat quite well. It's actually quite compacted. That tight grind really works in our favor. It releases a sticky protein called myosin each time. that they grind the meat and we want that sticky protein to release here because these burgers are very delicate, they're very thin, so we needed to add a little bit of cohesion, so this is again eight ounces of 80 percent lean, that sounds good . a little greasier than what we usually order, but that's also by design, these burgers cook very quickly and are very thin, they're almost well-done, so you want a burger that has a little bit of fat to go with it. 80 percent lean up to 85 percent lean, but anything leaner than that will give you a really dry burger, so I need to go down to zero on my scale.

I went ahead and lined it with some plastic wrap. I like to do that anytime. I'm working with raw meat and again I need two ounce patties and as I weigh them I'm going to put them on this plate so I've got the meat portioned here and I'm not going to put them into patties I'm just going to shape them into balls Loose at this point, I don't want to compact the meat, we're going to save the flattening and forming of the patties for when the patties hit the pan, so that's it. The preparation looks good.

I'm going to wash my hands. It's time to start cooking and we're going to heat up our pan. I'm using a large 12 inch cast iron skillet, it really heats well and will give us the right crust, I'm going to add a quarter teaspoon of vegetable oil to my skillet, it's very well seasoned, but every time you use a skillet it's a good idea to give it a little bit of oil and then spread it on the bottom just to make sure it gets into every pore of the pan. Now this is a cold pan. That's why I can do it without tweezers.

Now I'm going to turn the burner on to medium-low heat and heat it up. pan for five minutes just started my timer; Cast iron heats up very slowly and quite unevenly, so if you apply heat from the start, you'll end up with some hot spots on the pan and cooler spots, obviously, for more uniformity. heating over medium-low heat for a good five minutes, so while that's heating up, let's talk a little about my saucepan. Now we're using this as a burger press because we notice that when you're going to press a burger with a spatula. your hand is offset from the spatula and you end up putting it in at an angle and it's hard to get a really nice flat burger, so we're going to use this saucepan, this is just a small saucepan and I've wrapped some aluminum foil. on top so it's nice and clean and I'm going to use this as a burger press.

I'm going to grab the sides and just press down, so we'll wait for our pan to heat up. So I'm starting to see a little smoke in the pan. I know it's hot enough, it's preheated, so I'm going to turn the heat up to high, so I'm going to grab two of these mounds of meat, I have to work fast. here, so I'm going to place them about three inches apart in the pan, there we go and then we'll use that pan. I'm grabbing the sides, not the handle, to really crush them. You don't have to worry too much about being too aggressive. we want them to stick to the pan, so we'll squish them in the pan.

I'm going to hit them with about an eighth of a teaspoon of kosher salt and a little bit of pepper to taste and we're going to let this first side sit for two minutes so it gets a really beautiful brown color on that first side. Okay, so they look cool. The top three-quarters of these burgers are no longer pink, which is a good indication that they are done. it flips over and you can see this spatula it needs a super thin one so we can flip them oh look at that beautiful color and it really gets in there because the burgers stick to the pan and again we want that amazing so just 15 seconds in the second side because the burgers are almost cooked at this point it's about 15 seconds let me take this off the heat so now I'm going to put them on our bottom buns and now I'm going to put a slice of the cheese right on top start the melting process and we'll work on our second batch of burgers, so same thing two minutes on this first side, flip it another 15 seconds on the second side, okay, that looks great, I'm going to slide this in.

Turn off the heat again, the heat from these burgers will finish melting all the cheese before you put the bun top back on. I'm going to add our garnishes, a little bit of iceberg. Here we're going to weigh this lettuce with a little tomato and now put on the top that looks pretty good right now look those burgers have the crust still juicy oh the cheese is melted um I just got a little hint of that pickle sauce in there, nice and bright and tart, it's just the right amount of ingredients a little bit of tomato a little bit of that crunchy iceberg and the cheese melts perfectly.

I'm going to call it a burger smash and if you want to make burger smashes at home, remember that these keys use eighty percent lean ground. Form two-ounce mounds and smash burgers right into the America's Test Kitchen skillet at home. Quick and fabulous shredded burgers. I'm going to crush them in my mouth. Thanks for watching America's Test Kitchen. How about? Leave a comment and tell us what recipes you're excited to make or you can just say hello. You can find links to today's recipes and reviews in the video description and don't forget to subscribe to our channel.

See you later. I will see you later.