![]() The tasters: Four trained Consumer Reports sensory panelists evaluated each method blindly, unaware of the different ways in which they were prepared, or that we were seeking to compare different cooking methods. The chefs: Consumer Reports lab staff cooked three of the methods, while Bernie led the charge on his own method, shaping his burgers and cooking them. With the exception of Bernie’s flat burgers, every patty was shaped in a burger press:Īside from the added ingredients in the “meat loaf” method burgers, each of the patties were seasoned with the same amount of salt and pepper: And as much as we’d have loved to cook all these patties outside on a grill, we opted to cook on a stove top in cast iron pans.Įach burger was made from 4 oz of ground beef: To minimize variables, we used the same ground beef for all four methods, going with patties of 80/20 grass-fed beef. “You can guess all day, but unless you’ve done it 10,000 times, you’re not gonna be good at it.” “Don’t guess,” Velie says when it comes to a burger’s temperature. In addition, he stressed the importance of using a meat thermometer, to make sure you don’t cook the meat over 165 degrees and into tasteless hockey puck land. Trying to hurry the cooking process by pressing the patty with a spatula is just going to result in a dry burger, says Velie, who calls it “the most tragic thing you could do because you’re basically just pressing out all the flavor.” To do that, he says it’s important to use a ground beef with high fat content, because fat equals moisture. “Those are the two big philosophical statements that if you do those two things, you will cook well,” he says, adding that if you want something to be moist, like a burger, you have to maintain the moisture within the product. In a nutshell, says Velie, it all comes down to controlling heat and controlling moisture. We labeled Chef Velie’s burger the “Plain” method. His preferred method? Simple and straightforward: Salt and pepper seasoning beef with an 80/20 lean meat/fat content ratio cook in a cast iron pan on high heat in a cast iron pan for a few minutes on each side until the meat gets up to temperature. We asked him how he would teach a student to cook the perfect burger to a safe temperature. This “Bernie’s Method” involves making a very thin “beef pancake” that is quickly seared in a super-hot pan.įor the fourth method, we spoke to Chef Howie Velie, Associate Dean of Specializations at the Culinary Institute of America. The third method came from a reader, Bernie, who also happens to be a colleague of ours at Consumer Reports. This entails placing individual patties into sealed bags and then placing them into a water bath to slowly and evenly bring up the internal temperature before a final quick sear in the pan. ![]() The second method involves the use of a sous vide bath. ![]() The first, which we dubbed the “meat loaf method,” combines bread, milk, and steak sauce. In the end, we went with two ideas submitted by multiple readers. Consumerist readers made a variety of recommendations involving everything from adding non-beef meat - like veal or pork - to the mix, to fiddling with temperature settings on the stove, to tricks for flipping patties.
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