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.
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