The Perfect Hamburger

The perfect burger. I’m not the first person to observe that it’s something you cannot find for love nor money in this country. Even in London, which offers more formed–meat-patty-in-bun eating opportunities than most British cities. Let’s rule out the big fast food chains for a start: the golden arches and the creepy mask-wearing King are obviously popular around the World, but for a real burger connoisseur they’re only ever a desperate last resort when there’s no other option or you’re too drunk to care. Again.

Gourmet Burger Kitchen, Hamburger Union and Byron are slightly better, with the latter being the best of the bunch. Though I’ve got to say that with Byron Burgers’ rapid expansion throughout London I’ve had mixed experiences at different venues. I also think there’s something fundamentally wrong with paying close to a tenner for a cheeseburger – which by definition should be a lowbrow, low cost food.

The consensus seems to be that the birthplace of the hamburger is the German city of Hamburg where to this day one of the local delicacies is the Frikadelle: a flattened meatball with lots of onion, egg and filler. I’ve eaten the occasional Frikadelle, having spent some time in Germany, and it’s a bit of an acquired taste if you ask me.

But apart from the name and the vague resemblance to Hamburg’s favourite chopped meat snack I don’t think anyone would deny that the hamburger we know today is really an American invention. There are various contradictory claims about who first popularised the burger but most accounts seem to date back to the turn of the twentieth century. And here we are more than a hundred years later, still enjoying a grilled meat patty on a bun, from its most basic version to the simultaneously terrifying and intriguing sounding McAloo Tikki with Cheese.

So can you get a decent hamburger in America? Yes you can. That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of terrible versions to be had in the US, but their highs are so much higher than our highs, so to speak. The best American burgers seem to be simpler, purer; letting the core ingredients speak for themselves and focussing on the real star of the show: the salty, crusty, juicy meat.

Take the independently owned In N Out Burger chain, for example. The mere mention is enough to make a hamburger aficionado stare wistfully into the distance, remembering burgers loved and lost / eaten. In N Out has a cult following. Mainly because of the quality of the food, but no doubt partially due to the Secret Menu – all manner of unusual combinations of ingredients that aren’t advertised in store. In fact the secret menu isn’t remotely secret because every regular customer knows their Animal Style from their 4 by 4s, and most of the variations are even listed on the company’s website.

(In case you’re wondering: Animal Style is with grilled onions, extra pickles and ‘spread’ (sauce), and mustard cooked into the patties. 4 by 4 means four patties and four slices of cheese.)


You may hear the singing of a heavenly choir whilst looking at this photo of a Double Double. That's normal.

The problem with In N Out is that they only exist on the Western side of America - California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah. In fact one of the company policies is that they will only open a restaurant within one day’s drive of their meat processing plant in Baldwin Park, California. So I’ve got no hope of getting a Double Double anywhere near the office at lunchtime. Being more than five and a half thousand miles away, and all.

Only one thing for it: I’ll have to make my own. I’m not going for an In N Out clone, just a perfectly made, delicious hamburger.

My inspiration was Kenji Alt-Lopez, currently my absolute favourite food writer on the internet. In his Food Lab column on Serious Eats Kenji goes to fabulously absurd lengths to understand the science and cooking technique behind various foods. Want to know how to make the perfect home-made French fries? Kenji is your man. He cooked dozens of batches in his New York apartment, chopping, frying and eating kilos of potatoes until he’d cracked it.

In a recent column Kenji had several In N Out Burgers shipped overnight from the West coast in order to carry out a CSI style forensic investigation and make his own version. If you like food and science this is the site for you.

My recipe for the perfect hamburger is in the next post below.

My perfect hamburger recipe

You can’t make a burger without meat so I headed to Borough market to buy some cuts of beef that I though would give me a good blend of flavour and texture. It’s always tricky trying to apply knowledge from American burger recipes when shopping here because we have different cuts of meat. But the principle remains the same: you need plenty of fat to lubricate the meat during cooking and some flavourful muscle to make the whole thing taste good. The good news is that you get all these attributes from the cheaper, lesser used cuts, so even if you go for high end beef it’s not going to be outrageously expensive.

In the end I bought some feather steak for bulk, a piece of onglet for its gamey flavour and one shortrib with plenty of fat. The perfect combination? I’m not sure, but I liked the look of the pieces of meat and thought they would work well together. And even at extravagantly-priced Borough market the whole lot cost me less than ten pounds.

You could also just buy all chuck steak, which would do a perfectly respectable job, and might be easier to find.



Back at home I dusted off the old meat grinder, which I bought a few years ago when I was experimenting with making sausages. If grinding meat sounds like your idea of fun I would really recommend buying one. They only cost around £35 and will last a lifetime. The quality of minced meat you get out of it is infinitely superior to anything you can buy. I got mine here.



Having said that you can also make these burgers by pulsing the meat in a food processor. But no matter which method you use one thing is absolutely crucial: you MUST chill the meat.

First cut it up into chunks, lay it out onto a baking sheet and put it in the freezer for about 30 minutes. This allows the meat to firm up and means when you come to grind or blend it, it cuts cleanly across the muscle fibres, rather than squashing and smearing them into a raw beef pate. You’ll end up with a much better texture and a juicier finished product. It’s also a good idea to chill any bowls you’ll be using too. And if you’re using a metal meat grinder stick that in the freezer before you use it.

If you’re making burger to eat straight away getting this nice clean cutting and grinding action is the main advantage to semi-freezing the meat. But if you’re making burgers to cook at a later stage (or indeed making sausages) it’s also essential from a food safety point of view. Bacteria breed on the surface of meat, not on the inside. When you grind meat into mince you’re massively increasing the surface area, and effectively turning the whole thing into a potential bacteria All You Can Eat Buffet. But if you keep the meat cold microbial growth is significantly inhibited.

This is nothing to be scared of, so don’t let it put you off, especially for these burgers if you’re cooking them straight away. You just need to keep your equipment clean and your meat cold. That’s all there is to it. Keeping your equipment clean and your meat cold is a useful motto which can be applied to all sorts of life situations, by the way.



I ground the trimmed, fatty short rib once, mixed it in with the other cubes of meat and ground the whole lot again. I then split the mince into quarter pounder sized piles and formed them into burger shapes very gently. The idea is to handle the meat as as little as possible to maintain the loosely packed meaty grain. If you work it too hard the meat fibres start to get sticky and cling to each other, giving you a completely different, more processed texture, like a sausage.



You’ll also notice that there are absolutely no flavourings in this meat. This is another big difference between a high end US burger and the kind of thing you’d get served in a restaurant or a gastropub here. No onions, cumin, herbs, coriander, paprika, garlic, truffle oil, essence of Tibetan wood fungus… nothing.

I too was lost and have now seen the light. I used to try to build up flavour with all sorts of additional aromatics and seasonings before realising that less is more. If you’ve got great beef, then let it taste of beef.

In fact, you may have spotted there isn’t even any salt in the burger. This is for a different reason altogether. And again I have to raise my burger bun in salute to Mr Kenji Alt-Lopez, who carried out a range of experiments on his very subject (an interesting read with photographic evidence).

Adding salt at the grinding or forming stage fundamentally changes the texture of the hamburger. Instead of loose granular pieces of beef you end up with a homogenous sausage-like mass.

Only once you’re ready to cook should you season the burgers with salt and pepper. You’ll need to be quite generous because you’re seasoning the whole burger from the outside. If you’re not cooking them straight away, don’t season them and put them in the fridge. Because you’re dealing with minced meat you probably don’t want to refrigerate the burgers for more than a day or two, but they freeze beautifully.

The burgers are quite loosely packed so they cook best in a hot frying pan or on a hotplate with a little oil. Cook them for 2 to 3 minutes on one side, without poking or moving them about to allow a nice crust to form, then flip them over to finish cooking on the other side and rest.

Getting a decent burger bun is a perennial problem here, one that I haven’t solved yet. But whatever you use give it a good toasting so it can cope with the hot juices flowing out of the burger without disintegrating.

Following Kenji’s In N Out autopsy recipe I served my cheeseburger with a Thousand Island style spread made with Ketchup, pickles and yoghurt (mayo in the original, but alas I’m cursed by my egg allergy).

I also made some fabulously sweet caramelised onions: 3 large onions chopped and sweated in a little butter over a VERY low heat. Whenever they eventually started to catch I added some water and let them carry on reducing. They cooked for about 3 hours, though it wasn’t very labour intensive.



Making your own burgers by grinding meat may seem like a lot of work, but it’s definitely worth the trouble because the end result is infinitely superior to any other method. Have a go yourself and let me know how you got on.