Hey there. Happy Independence Day! It’s me, the guy looking over your shoulder at the barbecue, giving you unsolicited tips on how to perfect your burgers. It’s extremely annoying. But in this case, you should listen to me, for I am a known expert on most subjects including this one, and I have a lot of experience on the grill.
Check out the Insta. Made this burger last night:
Looks pretty good, right? No? Well, it tasted awesome. I also grilled this pizza recently:
I smoke dope ribs on the regular:
Point is, I fire up the grill at least once a week pretty much all year long. I grill burgers a lot. I’ve made a lot of mistakes and figured out how to right most of them, and I’m here, spelling out all I’ve learned about barbecuing burgers on this website so you don’t have to endure the same long, arduous burger journey I did. You didn’t ask for this, but I’m doing this for you.
Here are 7 general, unsolicited tips for perfecting your Independence Day burgers on the grill:
1. Find the right meat
This one you might know about already, but one of the biggest rookie mistakes in burger prep comes in meat selection. You see “ground sirloin” in the supermarket and think, “Ooh, how fancy!” Or you think, “well, if I’m going to punish my body with all these burgers, I should probably buy this meat that’s 93% lean.” Don’t fall for it. A higher fat content in your ground beef makes for more juiciness and more flavor, and the best burgers feature about an 80/20 blend. Fatty cuts of beef like brisket and short rib are great when ground up for burgers, but plain ol’ ground chuck works pretty darn well, too.
2. Think thin
I like meat in massive quantities, and so, once upon a time, I would fall victim to temptation and attempt to grill ostentatiously large burgers. That’s a mistake: Too often, you wind up with a thick wall of unevenly cooked beef that undermines the inherent deliciousness of the char-grilled burger. I find I’m always better off making thinner patties and stacking them before serving than trying to make one huge burger. I tear the ground beef into balls of about 3-4 ounces each, then flatten them between my hands.
A cheeseburger.
Fatty meat is going to pull together a bit over the heat, so the patties won’t really turn out as thin as they seem when you’re prepping them. And while there are all sorts of pseudoscientific explanations for the best ways to smash and sear and sous vide and wildly machinate to perfect the burger cook, thin patties make things extremely easy: Throw ’em over hot fire, flip ’em once the juices start pooling on top, throw on your cheese, then pull ’em when the cheese is melted. Speaking of which…
3. Choose cheeses carefully
People knock American cheese, but few if any cheeses better suited a classic, grilled cheeseburger. The “processed cheese food,” you may have noticed, melts evenly without breaking down into cheesy clumps and grease because of — fun fact — an emulsifying salt incorporated into its production by James L. Kraft himself. I’m here to destigmatize American cheese and encourage you to do the same.
But if you’re worried about getting judged for it, at least think carefully about about your cheese. Does it melt relatively well? Will it overpower the flavor of the burger and toppings? Cheese exists on a burger to add creaminess, saltiness, and a touch of delightful cheese taste, in my opinion, not to be the dominant force. Don’t use more than one slice of cheese per patty, and don’t mess around with any thick hunks of cheese.
4. Ditch the briquettes
Another big one. And this one might not be feasible: Maybe you use a gas grill for convenience, or maybe you already have a huge bag of briquette charcoal in your garage and don’t intend to buy more until it’s empty. But it is this author’s strong, strong recommendation that you cook with lump charcoal moving forward. Some people prefer the control that comes with briquettes, maybe, but lump produces better, cleaner flavor and isn’t way more expensive. The distinction becomes abundantly clear if you attempt to smoke meat low-and-slow with charcoal, but it’s still there — if subtle — on hot cooks.
5. Work the zones
So, look: Sometimes things go awry when you’re playing with fire. And if you fill up your whole grill with an evenly distributed layer of burning charcoal, or turn all the gas burners up to an equal temperature, you’ve got no real recourse for when you’re trying to gently toast the buns but also pull the burgers off the grill and you accidentally flip a burger cheese-side down onto the plate and want to adjust but oh, no, now the buns are on fire.
This obviously depends on the size of your grill and how many people you’re feeding, but if it’s possible, I recommend setting up a multi-zone fire where one side is hotter than the other. It affords so much more flexibility, and a failsafe for when something goes wrong.
6. Remember Ron Swanson
This is probably my favorite scene in Parks and Recreation:
One of the most frustrating things about the direction of restaurant food in general, I think, is the way so much of it now seems catered to Instagram. Stacking tons of disparate ingredients atop a burger might make for a fun photo, but it doesn’t necessarily make for a great sandwich. If you’re using good meat and preparing it adequately, you really don’t need much more.
I hit my patties with a tiny pinch of salt and a turn of black pepper before throwing them on the grill, then follow a hard-and-fast rule for non-cheese, non-condiment toppings: No more than two. If you want to put bacon and avocado on a burger, as I did on the one above, then great. But bacon, avocado, a fried egg, an oyster, and a handful of crushed Doritos piled on there means it’s not a burger anymore, it’s just a mess. Go easy with all this stuff.
On that note, though: It’s fun and extremely easy to make something you can call “special sauce.” Take a dollop of mayonnaise and mix in the dregs of whatever condiments are sitting in your fridge. It almost always comes out a delightful pinkish hue. Last night, I made a burger sauce of mayo, ketchup, sriracha, mustard, barbecue sauce and some hot sauce I got in Barbados. It was delicious.
7. Flip once, rotate twice
This really only matters if you’re making hamburgers and not cheeseburgers, because no one’s going to see the surface of the burger if there’s cheese. But while you want to flip your burgers only once, rotating them about 45 degrees halfway through the cook on each side will make cool cross-hatch grill marks. That’s sort of a boring final tip, so here’s a bonus one…
BONUS: Follow your heart
You know what a good burger is. Trust your instincts and follow your heart, and ignore the guy standing behind you ensuring you he can do it better.
