Hamburger patties, ingredients, techniques, etc.

[RubberToe]

Hey everyone,

I'm not into the meat grinder thing (yet?) and wanted to get your opinion on a few things for making hamburgers.

1) Store bought ground meat for burgers. What do you prefer, ie: beef, pork, turkey, lamb, a mix?

2) Meat alone, or other ingredients and seasonings? I've done everything from meat alone to spices, egg, and breadcrumbs.

3) Do you prefer thin or thick patties? Sliders? Large in diameter?

For now I have some lean ground beef and ground pork that I'm going to mix 50/50. I haven't decided if I'll add spices or anything else for this batch.

Feel free to comment on grinding your own as well. Also cooking methods: charcoal, high heat or low?

Recipes welcome.

Thanks, and cheers!

-Rob

[mr x]

Best burgers I had in a long time were from the rye tasting we had at my place. I think it was 1/3 flank, the rest bottom blade, with a bit of brisket fat. I never use binders.

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[jeffsmith]

No binders here either. I do 70% beef, 30% pork. No spices or anything in the meat. Just salt and pepper before going on the grill.

I try not to make the patties too thick and make them close to the diameter of the bun I'll be serving them on.

[dexter]

I tend to make my own "ground meat" with my food processor. I use a mix of bread milk and sometimes egg to bind them together depending on how loose the meat is. In the winter I cook on a cast iron pan with a lid and some butter, in the summer or when it's more temperate it's on the egg at 550-600.

I shape the burgers to the bun, I tend to not try and make puck like burgers so I usually make them on what might be considered on the thin side, not mcdonalds thin but not two inches thick. I also use the " donut style" or the indent in the middle to keep them from compacting and rising in the middle.

[LeafMan66_67]

Regular burgers at our place are store bought lean ground beef with some dry panko bread crumbs to help hold the moisture. I throw a bit of salt and pepper in with the mix and fold together really gently - the less handling the better. I've also done 70/30 mix with pork, or 50/50 mix with whatever type of sausage suits the mood. I don't add the panko to the sausage mix.

The patty diameter is usually just bigger than the bun and thickness will vary from McDonalds thin (pressed between wax paper) to 1.5 inches or so, depending on the mood. The thin ones make great little bacon double cheeseburgers! I always cook over high heat because I love the crispy exterior and moist juicy interior, and since getting the Vision, haven't cooked them on anything but charcoal.

[Keith]

Just made some last night. I always go on a whim with what's available.

Ground beef typically.
diced mushrooms and onions
garlic, salt, paprika, (if kids aren't eating then some chili's)
used some crushed croutons to help hold moisture.

My burgers are larger, slightly larger than the bun, and about 2-2.5" thick.

[mumblecrunch]

I also made some last night.

If I'm doing all beef it's usually medium (grinding my own is on the list for this summer). I do like to mix beef and pork and when I do it's roughly 70/30 beef to pork, but I use lean beef in that case.

I also almost always use an egg and a little breadcrumbs (never more than 1/2c to 1/2kg meat). I find I get a more consistent patty that way and they're definitely more forgiving of being overcooked.

Past that, I always use salt and pepper and minced garlic and onion. From there it's what I've got or what I'm craving: fresh thyme and/or rosemary; fresh and/or dried oregabo; fresh and/or dried chilies; a little nutmeg; celery salt; cayenne; Worcestershire sauce; hot sauce; both fresh ground cumin seed and anise seed are major favorites.

I make my patties about 1-1 1/2" thick and aim for a little bigger than the bun. And I try to put a dimple in the middle (as the meat contracts it goes away).

On a gas grill I used to sear then use indirect heat. It looks like things are different on the kamado so I effectively tried to use the reverse sear method last night. I was extremely pleased with how they turned out.

ImageUploadedByTapatalk1397496311.923592.jpg

I would say I had them going at 250*F for about 25-30 min before cranking the vents and searing them off at 450/500*F

ImageUploadedByTapatalk1397496453.421985.jpg

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[Tony L]

Unlike the monster burgers Nash does ( the kind you have to sneak up on to take a bite ), mine are about 1 1/2 inch thick and on charcoal if I'm up to firing up the BBQ or on an iron fry pan if I'm not. Top that with sauteed onions and regular condiments on a toasted bun.
Sometimes I'll Nash the burger with tomato and lettuce and cheese.

[RubberToe]

Best burgers I had in a long time were from the rye tasting we had at my place. I think it was 1/3 flank, the rest bottom blade, with a bit of brisket fat. I never use binders.

Yeah those burgers were epic.

Thanks for the discussion, everyone.

How do you guys feel about an egg on the burger? I think I've only had it once, at H&T after a grain buy, and loved it. Do you fry it first or can you manage to cook it on the patty? I won't be doing that tonight but I plan on making some of that hop mayo.

[LeafMan66_67]

I've had egg on other burgers as well and enjoy it. I think they are typically fried on the side and added as a topping. The peanut butter burger at Angles in Sackville also has egg, and it really ads to the richness.

[sleepyjamie]

I've often used onion soup mix and egg and bread crumbs and it comes out with a nice flavour


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[pet lion]

Any beef burgers I make always have thyme in them. Preferably fresh. When I first started making burgers I quickly found out that was an integral flavour of the burgers Mom made.

[GAM]

I tried the Meat, salt and pepper only last night and they were some of the best ever.

1" thick sized to fit the bun.

I usually add crumb, egg and misc. spices.

Good buns are a must.

This could be a weekend experiment with 3-4 techniques divided 4 ways.

Sandy

[NASH]

1) Store bought ground meat for burgers. What do you prefer, ie: beef, pork, turkey, lamb, a mix?

Beef. Not lean. When I'm making lamb burgers, it's lamb

2) Meat alone, or other ingredients and seasonings? I've done everything from meat alone to spices, egg, and breadcrumbs.

Meat only for me. Salt, pepper, garlic, olive oil before grilling - I prep and cook burger like steak.

[sleepyjamie]

What temps and times are you guys using to cook burgers?


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[jeffsmith]

What temps and times are you guys using to cook burgers?


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About 500ºF, for as long as it takes. I don't think I've ever noted the time to cook a bunch of burgers, but it would be under 10 minutes for sure.

[sleepyjamie]

Excellent!


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[Celiacbrew]

I usually use the ground beef from Getaway farms at the market. I tend not to mix with pork because I like the gamier taste of the grass-fed beef. I find their lean is fatty enough for cast iron. Also they use a really chunky grind that is similar to what I would do with a knife. It makes for a great loosely formed beef patty. The juices will act as a binder if you let it cook before touching it. It also helps if you spoon some oil and butter over the patty before moving it. For size I tend to go with about 1cm larger radius than the bun and about an inch thick. I cook on one dot above medium on my range in my cast iron. Temp is just a smidgen too hot for EVOO. I use canola or avocado oil as the base and drop a little pat of butter in once the heat goes down after the flip. For time I go till the juices run clear without blood in them.

[GuingesRock]

How do you make a burger that's pink in the middle without risking a serious E-Coli infection?

Any general tips on avoiding E-Coli.

[RubberToe]

Related: Suppose by chance you have ground beef infected with E-Coli. If you cook it well done are you safe?

[mr x]

How do you make a burger that's pink in the middle without risking a serious E-Coli infection?

Any general tips on avoiding E-Coli.

The same way you make steak tartar.

Color is only used as a layman's guide. There are tables that specify exponential bacteria reduction rates over time. I use that plus a temperature probe.

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[LeafMan66_67]

http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/03/02 ... s-thought/

Medium-rare burgers are taboo in Canada but may not be as perilous as thought

During a trip to Montreal, U.S. bookseller Steven Elliot decided to troll the downtown looking for a local take on one of his favourite foods, the medium-rare hamburger. Yet in every brasserie, pub and bistro, no matter how many winks and nods he offered, Mr. Elliot was always met with the same reaction: Blank stares, confusion or “we don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. Mr. Elliot had just experienced the culture shock of any U.S. burger lover who crosses into Canada. In the daily words of servers across the country: “Medium-rare hamburgers are illegal in Canada.”

Canadians will pair their martinis with a plate of raw oysters, load up their plates with cheap sushi and tuck into a steak served Chicago rare – but the pink, medium-rare hamburger remains strictly taboo. Once a staple of Canadian cuisine, for about 40 years a hamburger served anything less than well done has remained a delicacy enjoyed only in a handful of brave establishments and on trips south of the border. It is targeted by health inspectors, feared by restaurant owners and scorned by the public, but the long-misunderstood pink burger may not be nearly as dangerous as we all thought.

“I’ve served probably 100,000 burgers and nothing’s happened,” said Greg, a Canadian restaurant owner who isn’t in fact named Greg but wished to stay anonymous, arguing that media attention could attract unwanted scrutiny from the health department. Greg sources his own meat and grinds it in-house, but he still treads a narrow legal line. “A lot of guys do it, but we do it under the radar. If we put our names out there … they’re going to stop it.”

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Get more of our food and drink coverage, as well as recipes, at The Appetizer

The official “safe” temperature for hamburger meat, as enshrined in municipal codes and provincial acts across Canada, is 71 degrees Celsius, eight degrees higher than the generally accepted threshold for medium rare. “At 71 degrees … you’re basically turning your meat into shoe leather; protein with no moisture left in it,” said Gilbert Noussitou, chair of culinary arts at Victoria, B.C.’s Camosun College. The French-born chef compared it to the difference between a fresh, juicy apricot or a dehydrated apricot slice pulled from the bottom of a bag of trail mix.



On food blogs and forums, Canadian burger-lovers trade notes about the few kitchens willing to serve up a pink burger. In most jurisdictions, medium-rare burger joints often survive solely on the discretion of health inspectors. At any moment, they could find themselves subject to a by-the-book shutdown.

A 35-year veteran of health inspection, Jim Chan is manager of food safety for Toronto Public Health. Two weeks ago, his department busted a Toronto restaurant for “intentionally” serving medium-rare burgers. After a diner fell ill after a meal of hamburger, health inspectors entered the establishment at lunchtime, seized a burger and plunged a digital thermometer in the patty. The reading, said Mr. Chan, was an incriminating 60 degrees Celsius. The restaurant – he wouldn’t identify which one – was slapped with several charges and a conditional pass.

Vancouver’s health inspectors claim they are equally rigorous. “Every so often a restaurant will come up and advertise pink burgers, and we will go in and talk to them,” said Anna Marie D’Angelo, spokeswoman for Vancouver Coastal Health, the city’s health inspection agency. If West Coast diners see even a tinge of pink, health authorities advise them to “ask it to be recooked for their own safety,” said Ms. D’Angelo. Health Canada takes it a step further: After sending back the offending burger, “ask for a new bun and a clean plate, too” reads an advisory on the federal agency’s website.

What concerns health authorities, of course, is E. coli, the food-borne bacterium that killed seven people in Walkerton, Ont., prompts yearly recalls of fresh produce and crops up in the occasional fast food scare. Most notoriously, in 1993, 73 Jack in the Box locations in the Western U.S. found themselves at the centre of a massive E. coli outbreak that killed four people and sickened more than 700 others.


ReFuel Restaurant in Vancouver has gained a reputation as one of the few establishments on the West Coast in which burgers are offered “to order.” All the restaurant’s burgers come from neck meat sourced by proprietor Robert Belcham and dry aged for 30 days. Then, chefs carefully strip the meat of fat and sinew, dice it up and grind it fresh daily. The risk, said Mr. Belcham, is no greater than a medium-rare steak, and the taste is captivating. Once a person tries a medium rare burger, it’s ‘‘‘where have you been all my life?’” he said.

Hamburgers, more so than most illness-prone foods, remain subject to an odd double standard. Raw sushi remains largely unregulated. Any Ethiopian restaurant worth its salt offers gored gored (raw beef) and this month, Toronto’s prestigious Royal York Hotel is hosting the Great Toronto Tartare-Off, a showcase of raw minced steak mixed with raw egg. “Somehow, somewhere along the way we’ve been conditioned to think that if you see pink in a burger it means someone’s trying to kill you,” said Donald Kennedy, manager of the Victoria, B.C.-based Victoria Burger Blog.

According to chefs, the fault lies with a product completely removed from the traditional, fresh-ground beef patty they learned to make in culinary school: The frozen, heavily spiced, pre-packaged hamburger “hockey puck.” Hardly the product of a single ground-up steak, these patties are packed with a wide array of beef leftovers ranging from gristle to sinew to intestines, the incubators for E. coli. A single patty can contain fragments of hundreds of cows, raised on feedlots thousands of kilometres apart. “It has increased the risk of contamination greatly over the years,” said Mr. Noussitou. Even the most die-hard fan of medium-rare burgers avoids eating frozen patties at anything less than well-done. “I would never want to eat a frozen hamburger patty medium rare because I just don’t know the providence of the meat,” said Mr. Belcham.



In 1974, Canada had its first inkling of a modern-day tainted-meat scare when a CBC investigation turned up staphylococcus and fecal coliforms in Ontario ground beef. Arguing that it was logistically impossible to inspect all of Canada’s beef supply, federal health minister Marc Lalonde told the House of Commons that Canadians should just make sure to fry up their hamburgers to 71 degrees. With contaminated meat remaining the norm ever since, the advisory stands to this day.

In the France Mr. Noussitou remembers, pre-packaged ground beef did not exist. Rather, he says, patrons would point out a cut of beef and the butcher would grind it right before their eyes. But times are changing. Last summer, France was subject to a highly publicized E. coli outbreak that hospitalized seven children. The guilty party turned out to be frozen hamburger patties.

Even in the U.S., one of the last bastions of the medium-rare burger, tainted beef fears have increasingly prompted Canadian-style meat-searing advisories. “I believe I should be able to treat my hamburger like food, not like infectious f—ing medical waste,” U.S. food writer Anthony Bourdain wrote in response in his 2010 book Medium Raw. “Is it too much to feel that it should be a basic right that one can cook and eat a hamburger without fear? To stand proud in my backyard … grilling a nice medium-rare f—ing hamburger for my kid-without worrying that maybe I’m feeding her a s— sandwich?”

Last summer, North Carolina became the latest state to ban any piece of ground beef cooked to less than 155 degrees Fahrenheit (68.3 degrees Celsius). Similar laws were already on the books in South Carolina and Wyoming, although South Carolinians can order a medium-rare patty if they are over the age of 18.

A resident of Raleigh, N.C., Steven Elliot responded by founding RareBurger.com, a website listing the state’s few remaining rare burger purveyors. “It’s much like a speakeasy; you give a wink and a nod and you get what you want,” said Mr. Elliot. Patrons can also slyly tell the cook they want their burger to “moo.”

Nevertheless, Mr. Elliot’s list is short, as he routinely gets calls from lawyers demanding that their restaurant clients be taken off the list. “If I order the highest-quality meat possible, I should be able to order it medium rare … I’m not going to eat garbage meat,” he said. “What’s worse for you? A four-ounce, fresh ground burger prepared for you medium-rare, or a giant heart attack hamburger from McDonald’s?”

“I don’t need them to be my mother and tell me what I can and cannot eat,” said Mr. Elliot.

National Post
thopper@nationalpost.com

[mr x]

Iirc, this country specifies 160f, which translates to 155f for minute, and so on...

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[RubberToe]

Has anyone here ever sous vide a burger? I've seen several Reddit posts about that.

[mr x]

Just look up a table, and you'll find the safe time/temp curve for the particular bacteria. I'll find the one I use later.

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