Kenji’s Tips for the Best Burgers You’ve Ever Had | J. Kenji López-Alt | Cooking 101 | NYT Cooking

Get even more burger wisdom from Kenji here: https://nyti.ms/4lJ0MPw

Get the free (!) recipe for Kenji’s Smash Burger here: https://nyti.ms/4mfy7lb
Kenji’s Diner-Style Burger is here: https://nyti.ms/4ojbTR8
Kenji’s Thick Backyard Burger here: https://nyti.ms/4o4e9eP
And his Thin Backyard Burger right here: https://nyti.ms/470CBrl

Burger season is peaking, and Kenji is sharing his rules for making better burgers at home. Whether you’re cooking in a skillet or out on the grill, these 4 recipes will make your summer that much better.

First up, Kenji shares his recipe for making classic smash burgers (and a double-stacked version) with caramelized, lacy edges.

Then he shares his tips for a thicker diner-style burger, with techniques that capture that diner-griddle flavor at home.

And, finally he fires up the grill to make two types of backyard burger.

This video is part of Cooking 101, our series on kitchen fundamentals. Every episode covers a different technique, tool or ingredient, and each host shares the tips and recipes that they believe will set you up for success, no matter where you are in your cooking journey.

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Hey, everyone, I’m
Kenji López-Alt, and this is ‘Cooking 101 — Burgers.’ We’re going to
talk about ground beef — the different ways you
can buy ground beef, the different cuts of beef,
and the different flavors that you’re going to get — how to
handle the beef when you’re making patties for
various styles of burgers. And then we’re going to get
into specific key styles of burgers — smash burgers,
diner-style burgers. And we’re going to talk about
both thick and thin burgers cooked on a grill. And we’re also going to
touch on some condiments, and toppings, and bottomings,
and everything else you need to know about burgers. [MUSIC PLAYING] you’re going to find a few
different beef options. Starting from here, we’ve got
our pre-formed burger patties. The problem with a pre-formed
patty is that you don’t really know what you’re going to get. Oftentimes, the meat is going
to be from unidentified bits of the cow, and they’re going
to be generally very tightly packed. So it’s a little bit difficult
to tell whether you’re going to have the right
fat content in there, how that fat is going
to be distributed. And, also, because they
are so tightly packed, they’re often going to come
out a little bit tough. I would generally stick to
making your own patties out of ground beef. So your next option
is going to be this type of cryovac package. I think of ground beef
like bread dough, where — bread dough is this
matrix of proteins. In the case of dough,
it’s going to be gluten. And the more you work it, the
tighter the dough becomes. Ground meat is this
matrix of proteins that have been ground together. And as you start to
handle it, those proteins will start to link
with each other. So the more you work
with ground meat, and the more you compress
it, the tighter and tougher it becomes. So something like this, where
it’s in this cryovac package, has been really
tightly packed. The same way that you
can’t un-knead dough, you can’t unpack beef that’s
already been packed tightly. As it cooks, it’s
going to tighten up. This type of beef is
going to work really well for certain
styles of burgers. So if making a smash burger — something where you’re really
going to be compressing it — you can absolutely
use cryovac beef. Your next option is going to
be the packets of beef that have been — not cryovac — but ground either at
a factory or in-store. When it has a sealed
plastic on top of that, that’s been ground in a
factory before it was sent to the store. It’s going to be much looser. You can already
see the texture. It’s much looser than
this cryovac beef. The problem with the factory
ground beef is that, again, you don’t know exactly what
parts of the cow it’s coming from. You also don’t know how many
different parts from different cows are going to be in here. So, generally, if you’re
buying meat from the store, it’s going to be
ground in-house, and it’s going to be ground
from whatever cuts they have on-hand there. So it could be coming
from one animal, it could be coming from a few. Here, it could be
coming from dozens, or maybe even hundreds,
of different animals. It’s mainly a
food safety issue. So a muscle is going to
be sterile on the inside. So, really, you
only have to worry about contamination,
bacteria, and stuff on the outside of it. So when you take a
steak, for example, you can eat a steak
medium rare or rare, because you’re
searing the outside. You’re destroying all
the harmful bacteria, and the inside is
going to be sterile. With ground beef, you’re going
to be grinding the outside of that meat into the middle,
which is why it can be a little bit dangerous, from
a food safety perspective, to eat a rare burger or
a medium rare burger. You greatly minimize
your risk by only using a minimal number of
cuts and a minimal number of animals in a
specific burger patty. With the factory
ground stuff, however, you’re multiplying that. Because if there’s a dozen
different animals in here, that’s a dozen different
potential sources of contamination. I will save that for something
that’s going to be cooked well done — so a thinner
burger on the grill, or maybe a smash burger. The best type of meat
to get for a burger is actually just to buy cuts
of meat from the display case and ask them to
grind it for you. Most people will do it
for you, no problem. If you look at this ground
short rib over here, compare that to
the cryovac beef. So this is a solid meat ball. It’s a little bit mushy,
almost the texture of Play-Doh. Whereas this has a
fluffy, loose texture. It crumbles. And that’s going to translate
into a burger that’s juicier, more tender. As it cooks, the fat’s going
to melt and collect in little pockets inside, so you these
nice little bursts of flavor. I have three
different cuts of beef here that we had
ground by the butcher. There’s chuck,
there’s brisket, and there’s short rib. If you’re only going to
pick one type of meat, chuck is the way to go. Chuck — it comes from
the front shoulder. Those shoulder muscles are
muscles that the cow uses a lot during its lifetime. So there’s generally a
correlation between how heavily worked a muscle is and
the beefiness of the flavor. It naturally has a really
nice balance of fat to lean, so it’s going to be around
20 percent fat or so. Brisket comes from
the navel area. It’s not used as much, but
it tends to be pretty high in fat. And if you taste
it on its own, it has a minerality and
a brighter flavor to it. Short rib, on the other hand,
comes from along the ribs here. And short rib is going to
be very, very fatty — very, very rich in flavor. When I’m blending beef, I
think of it like I’m building — orchestrating a score. Think of the short
rib as the bass. It’s the double bass. And your middle strings — your violas — [STRING INSTRUMENTS] — and your cellos, and
your second violins, are in the ground chuck. And then your brisket is
going to be your piccolo — [WIND INSTRUMENTS] — and your first violins. So when you blend
them all together — [ORCHESTRAL MUSIC] — you get a much broader
spectrum of flavors. So when you’re buying
meat from the supermarket, you’re going to see these
things on the label. So, here, it says 85 percent
lean, 15 percent fat. Sometimes you might just see
that referred to as 85/15. Or you might see
80/20 or 70/30. That’s just the ratio of
lean to fat in the grind. So when I’m making a burger,
I generally look for 80/20 — at least 85/15. But, generally,
80/20 is better. And if I’m going to be cooking
it in a pan on a flat top, like a diner-style burger, I
might even look for something higher like 25/75 or,
sometimes, even 30/70. On a grill, I’m going to be
looking for something a little bit more towards the
15/85 or 80/20 side. Because if you have too
much fat on a grill, it can all drip down
through the grates, and then you end up
with a big fireball. And your beef tastes
like burnt fat. One thing you might notice
— whether you’re buying meat that’s prepackaged or freshly
ground at the butcher — if you look at
this chuck here, the outside of it has a
pretty deep red color. If I pick some up,
and I open it up, you can see there’s this
darker colored meat inside. This happens because
of oxidation. So there is a pigment in
meat called myoglobin. Blood is hemoglobin. That’s the pigment in blood. Myoglobin is the pigment
that makes muscle red. On the outside,
it’s myoglobin. It’s red. When it gets packed on the
inside, and it loses oxygen, it becomes a form
called deoxymyoglobin. And deoxymyoglobin has
this purplish color. [PERCUSSION INSTRUMENTS] So if you ever open up
a pack of ground meat, and you see that the outside
is bright red and the inside is brown, it’s not the
supermarket or the butcher trying to play tricks on you. It’s just the natural
reaction of beef to air. [MUSIC PLAYING] Smash burgers — they
cook really, really fast, so you want to have everything
ready to go before the beef even hits the pan. I’m going to start by toasting
my bun and getting my sauce ready. I like to use a really soft,
squishy supermarket bun — so nothing too significant. Smash burgers are pretty thin. You want to basically have a
bun that’s going to just hold the meat. You don’t want anything with
a lot of heft or a lot of bite to it. It’s a real basic
burger sauce, similar to what you might
get at In and Out — on their burger. So it’s mostly mayonnaise,
a little bit of ketchup. I would say around 1
to 4 mayo to ketchup — a little bit of pickle relish. I like to add a little
bit of mustard, also — a touch of sugar. You can use distilled vinegar. I’m going to use a little
bit of pickle brine. Quite a bit of black pepper. [MUSIC PLAYING] Mm-hmm. This is a case
where you can use virtually any kind of beef. You can even use
the cryovac stuff, because we’re going to be
packing it pretty tight, and then we’re going
to be smashing it down. The key here is that a
smash burger is really thin. It cooks really, really fast. And it’s all about
developing that crust. So I’m going to go,
maybe, about 4 ounces — about 1/4 pound — which is about this. With the smash burger,
you can’t really overwork the meat. If you mush it
around too much, maybe it’ll start to contract
a little bit as you cook. But you can feel
free to compress it into a nice ball like
this, because we really do want it to bind together. We’re going to be we’re going
to be smashing it out real thin. All right. I’m also going to cut out
a square of parchment here, and this is what we’re going
to use to make sure that it doesn’t stick to the
bottom of the spatula. We’re going to be cooking
this in stainless steel. What happens is, if you
were to use a cast iron, or if you would have
oiled this first, or if you were to use
nonstick, what happens is you would smash
the burger out. But then because it
doesn’t stick to the pan, it’s going to
start contracting. So the way you get those
really nice crispy, lacy edges on a smash burger is by using
something that intentionally is a little bit
sticky, so that as we smash the burger out,
it stays in place. I’m going to put my sheet
of parchment on top, and then I’m going to use
the bottom of a pot here. And we want our pan
be nice and hot. [MUSIC PLAYING] At home, I have
a steel plancha. I find that to be a really
easy and effective way to smash burgers down. But, here, you
can use a spatula. The bottom of
the pan, I think, works nicely, because
it fits inside. It doesn’t get — the edges of the pan
don’t interfere with it. You can see how we got the
edges really nice and thin. You want them to be held
together with nothing but cheese and hope. So once we get that
really nice browning, we’re going to cook this
burger about 90 percent of the way on the first side. And the second side is just
going to be barely touched. Nice, stiff spatula. Flip it over upside down
so that you get leverage. And then we give it a flip. [SIZZLING] So you can see all these
really crispy, lacy edges. That’s where all the flavor
in that burger comes from. And with a burger like this
that’s really about the beef, I tend to not go overboard
with my toppings. I like just pickles, thinly
sliced onions, and spread. With the smash
burger, I actually want those lacy edges
to really hang out over the sides of the
bun, because I think those are the most delicious part. So I go for something that’s
a little bit bigger than the size of the bun,
or even a lot bigger. [MUSIC PLAYING] They’re not so much
about internal juiciness. They’re going to be plenty
juicy because you’ve got sauce on there. There’s plenty
of fat in there. They’re really about
maximizing that Maillard browning and that deep, beefy
flavor all the way through. What I’m going to show you
now is the way we do burgers at a couple of the restaurants
that I’ve either consulted with, or owned, or opened. We do smash burgers. But rather than
one 4-ounce patty, we do a couple of
smaller patties. The idea is that, by
doing two patties that are stacked on
top of each other, you can get even
more of that really deep, brown, beefy flavor. They also cook a lot faster. So these are about
2 ounces each — maybe even 1.75 ounces. It looks like I might be
seasoning these really heavily. What you have to remember
is that you are going to be spreading this out. So you want to put enough
salt on this one surface here so that when it spreads
out into a wider patty, it’s as if you had put enough
salt to season that entire surface area. [MUSIC PLAYING] Smashing down this guy — [SIZZLING] When you’re cooking
a smash burger, you want your pan
preheated very, very hot, because you’re going to be
cooking these hot and fast. They’re very thin, and you
want maximum browning — so, high heat for
smash burgers. So this is essentially
the same amount of meat as the bigger burger, but
we’re just smashing it a little bit thinner. I’m going to go in and
scrape these out now — one slice of cheese. So it cooks most of the
way on that first side, so you really barely have
to let that second side just kiss the flame for a moment. [MUSIC PLAYING] All right. Here. This is how I personally
prefer them — the double smash. So you get twice
as much beefiness from that brown flavor for
the same amount of meat. It also cooks faster. [MUSIC PLAYING] burgers. For me, a diner-style burger
is any burger that’s cooked on a flat top. So the classic thing in a
diner is to have a flat top where you’re going to
be cooking your eggs for breakfast. You might be toasting
your grilled cheeses and your melts. You might be
cooking your bacon. And you’re also going to be
cooking a burger on the side. It can be thin like, say,
a Pie ‘n burger in Pasadena. Or it could be thicker,
like JG Melon in New York. And it’s not smashed. When I’m making a
diner-style burger, I really like to start
with freshly ground beef, because I want my beef to
be as loose as possible. So what I’m going to do is I’m
actually going to blend a few different cuts here. So I’m going to start with
about percent ground chuck. I think my finished burger
will probably be around 5 ounces or so — and then equal parts ground
brisket and short rib. So this is freshly ground. So it’s nice and loose. What we don’t want to do
is really pack it in really tight. So when I’m blending
it together, it’s tossing it and letting
the crumbles fall together. And then when I form
the actual patty, rather than picking it up and
packing it into a ball like that, what I like to do is
put it on a sheet of parchment like this and just gently
pat it into shape — really pushing it
only as much as it needs to be to
barely hold together. And we’re aiming for a size
that’s a little bit bigger than the size of the bun. As it shrinks a
little while it cooks, it’s going to end up
right around bun size. With a burger this
thick, I do also like to push a tiny, tiny
dimple in the middle. If it was even bigger, I
would push a bigger dimple. But this one — I don’t know if you can
see it, but it’s very, very slightly concave
towards the center here. And you’ll notice no salts —
nothing in the actual meat. What happens is, if you were
to put salt inside the meat itself, the salt
actually dissolves some of the muscle proteins so
that they bind together much tighter. So you end up with a patty
that’s going to shrink a lot more and also have
a bounce to it. It does end up exactly the way
a sausage texture is bouncy and springy, because, well,
a sausage is essentially just ground meat that’s bound
together with the help of salt. So over here I’m going
to toast my bun — a little butter. What they call brioche
buns at the supermarket these days are of a hybrid
between a standard hamburger bun and brioche. So it’s an extra
buttery hamburger bun. I actually like
this style of bun for a thicker
burger or something that has a little bit more
significance than, say, a smash burger, or a
really thin burger. I’m using a pan that
basically just fits the patty. When you go to a diner, you’ll
see there’s generally going to be a lot of burgers
cooking side-by-side. And you get this nice build
up of fat that’s rendering out of the burgers. So the fat comes up the sides
of the burgers a little bit, and the burgers almost
fry in their own fat. If you were to use a much
bigger pan here and just cook a single burger in it, what
happens is the fat runs out. It spreads out across
the surface of it, so you don’t get as much of
that deeper frying action. [MUSIC PLAYING] This is a medium high heat. [SIZZLING] The idea is we want to
get some good browning, but we don’t want it to burn
or anything before it cooks through to the center. So, preheated on the
high end of medium high. And we’re going to let
that first side sear. [MUSIC PLAYING] So if it falls
apart like that, that’s actually a good sign. That’s a sign that you
didn’t over pack it. It’s totally fine. It’s going to hold together. The cheese is going
to help it get there. So whether I’m going to be
using a more flavorful cheese or not — like, say,
a slice of Swiss, or a slice of cheddar — I generally also like to
add a slice of American. I do the same thing when
I’m making a grilled cheese, because the American has
emulsifying salts in it that help it melt really nicely. And, in fact, there’s enough
salts in there that they will help whatever cheese is in
contact with it melt more nicely. [SIZZLING] [MUSIC PLAYING] So, gentle with it. Pickles on there. This is going to be a
multi-napkin affair. When you flip them
over like that — if you put the toppings
on the bottom — if you make bottomings —
you end up eating it the way my buddy Dan Pashman, who
has a podcast called ‘The Sporkful’. He insists that you should
eat burgers upside down, because you want the cheese
to hit your tongue before everything else,
to give you the — you get your tongue primed
for the other flavors. [MUSIC PLAYING] For these, we’re going to take
a slightly different approach. With a grill, you’ve
got the open grates. So if you were to make a
patty that’s that loose — one that even might
potentially fall apart — you run the risk that it’s
going to fall into the grate. So you need to have it a
little bit more tightly packed. I’m going to start with
about 50 percent chuck, 25 percent brisket, and
25 percent short rib. We’re going to be making
a thick burger and, also, a thin — but juicy and
flavorful — burger, which is possible
to do on a grill. So this is looking
pretty good. So for our thick burger,
we’ll go, probably, about 5 ounces — 5 or 6 ounces. So I toss it between my
hands a little bit just to get it packed, but
not crazy tightly packed. And, again, when
I form this patty, I want it to be a little
wider than the bun, and I want it to have
a dimple in the middle. When you’re forming
a patty like this, if you make it flat — because the outside of the
meat is going to cook faster than the center — the outside end ends up
cinching up like a belt. It’ll end up looking like a
softball and getting really round. So to counteract
that effect, we want to place a small
divot in the center. That way, as the outside
cinches up a little bit, it squeezes the inside
until it lays about flat. So your burger ends
up starting out with this red
blood cell shape. But by the time it’s done
cooking, it’ll be flat. So for our thinner burger — maybe 3 1/2 to 4 ounces. So, this one, I’m actually
going to pack it up pretty tightly. And patties like
this — by the way, you can pre-form these and
just keep them in your fridge. You do want to keep them in
the fridge until you’re just about to cook them though. Because what can happen is, if
the meat starts to heat up too much — let’s say it comes
to room temperature or, even, you’re outside and it gets
hotter than room temperature — the fat will
start to soften. And if that happens, as soon
as you put them on the grill, they’re going to start
to really heavily drip. So you’ll lose the
juiciness, you’ll lose some of the emulsion
going on in there, and you’ll end up
with a drier burger. But let’s take these outside
and get them fired up. [MUSIC PLAYING] So we’ve got our grill
up here preheating. Whenever I grill, I typically
make a two-level fire. So, right now, these
burners are fired up as hot as they go. And that’s going to be
our hot cooking zone. And then these ones
are at a lower heat. So we’ve got a hot
zone and a cool zone. I can toast my buns over here. If it looks like my burgers
are cooking a little bit too fast, I can start
to shift them over. I’m going to oil up my grates
so that they don’t stick. And I like to go with
a couple of layers. So, you see, as soon as I
put as I put it on there, it starts to smoke. And that’s a sign that
the oil is polymerizing. The same way as when you’re
kind of seasoning a cast iron pan, you want to get
layers of oil on there. So once it starts to smoke,
I go in with a second layer of oil. [MUSIC PLAYING] All right. So it’s been a couple minutes. Let’s see how our
patties are doing. So, as with the smash burger,
when I’m cooking this thin patty over here, I like to
let it cook about 90 percent, maybe 80 percent,
on the first side. The idea is that if you flip
a thin patty like that over, you end up really
overcooking it and losing all the juices by the
time you brown both sides. So by letting it sear
really nicely on one side, and get a really nice dark
brown crust on that first side, and then flipping it
over and cooking the other side just until it’s
barely cooked through, you’re really maximizing the
amount of brown flavor that you get out of it. [MUSIC PLAYING] I’m going to put some pickles
on the bottom with my onions. Shredded lettuce,
shredded iceberg lettuce. [MUSIC PLAYING] Whether you’re using
gas or coal, really, what you’re tasting is
that singed beef fat — the stuff that’s
dripping down onto there. And that’s the big difference
in flavor between a backyard burger and something that
you’re cooking on a flat top. I think with the
thinner burger, you’re really tasting
the outside crust more. Whereas with a thicker burger,
you’re tasting that beef blend. I am a burger lover, and the
reason I love burgers so much is because there’s
such variety in them. It’s the same basic
set of ingredients. But depending on
how you cook them, you can get this huge range
of flavors and textures. None of them is the right
or wrong way to do it, and I love that you can
enjoy all of them at home. Go out there, get your grind
on, and don’t let anybody else tell you what you should
top your burger with. [MUSIC PLAYING]