Title: The World's Best Single Burger Pt 1
Categories: Beef, Groundmeat, Sandwiches, Ham
Yield: 1 Servings
Hamburgers
It's time for another round of The Burger Lab.
I'm a sucker for crisp, brown, salty crust, and up until recently, I
thought the burger at the Shake Shack was about as crispety
crunchety as they come but then I discovered this one. It's like a
thin, small (four ounces), classic diner-style burger on crack.
Don't cook it for company (the recipe only works for one burger at a
time ).
The Grind: Like most of my favorite burgers, the grind here is of
utmost importance. For the ultimate experience, go with the oxtail
and brisket-enhanced Blue Label Burger Blend. When feeling lazy, I
sometimes use 100% short rib or 100% well-marbled ground chuck, but
having at least 25% fat content is essential.
Just push the beef together until it forms ragged piles that barely
cling together. Forming the patties is the most crucial step in the
whole process. Using a thoroughly-chilled meat grinder or food
processor and cubes of beef that have been placed in the freezer for
15 minutes prior to grinding, grind the meat directly onto a
parchment paper or foil-lined baking sheet. Then and this is
key, form the beef into four-ounce patties without picking it up.
That's right. Just push the beef together until it forms ragged
piles that barely cling together.
It's got to do with the structure of meat. When ground, beef
proteins are very sticky--particularly to each other. Given the
chance, they'll cling to each other like Japanese school girls to
Hello Kitty bento boxes, and the more you work them, the tighter
they cling.
The goal here is to keep the meat as loose as possible. This offers
a myriad of benefits, which will make themselves clearer as we work
our way through the technique.
Salt and pepper the patties generously on one side, then carefully
flip with a wide spatula (remember, don't ever pick up the patties
with your bare hands) and season the second side before slipping
it (via a spatula) into a ripping-hot small skillet.
N.B. This is the main reason that this recipe absolutely cannot be
made with store-bought ground beef. Store-bought ground beef is
ground too finely and already pressed together before you take it
out of the package.
Burgers and Mandelbrot fractals: If you look at a coastline from far
away and measure it, which gives you a certain perimeter. As you
zoom closer and closer, you realize there are tiny inlets or curves
in the beach that weren't visible from far away. When measured
again, these bumps actually add length to the total perimeter. This
is a phenomenon known as the Richardson Effect, and basically states
that the more precisely you measure a coastline, the longer the
measurement gets. And the more bumpy or irregular the surface is,
the more this effect is pronounced.
Well, the same applies to hamburgers. While at first it may seem the
two burgers above have the exact same mass, pretty much the same
volume, and must therefore have the same surface area, because of
the highly bumpy and irregular surface of the loose-packed patty,
it's surface area is actually much much greater than the hand-formed
patty.
