How To Make A Hamburger | GoodToEat
Here's how to make the best hamburger recipe ever by the co-founder of Honest Burgers, Tom Barton...
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00:00I'm Tom from Honest Burgers, I'm one of the co-founders and I'm going to show you today how to make a humble beef burger.
00:10Alright, so like every good burger, it starts with great beef.
00:14This is ours here, we use two cuts, both readily available in a decent butcher's.
00:19We've got chuck steak and rib cap.
00:22One of the things we do which is quite unique in our butchers is we don't mince on our burger,
00:28which is quite, that's kind of the common ground is a minced burger.
00:32And when you mince something, you basically squash it through a tiny little hole, right?
00:37And when you do that, you squash a lot of the goodness out of the burger and you break the texture down.
00:42So a lot of burgers will be minced like twice, three times, four times sometimes.
00:47The more you mince it, the less natural the texture is, the more rubbery the texture is.
00:53So what we do is we chop.
00:55Just like kind of steak tartare or ham and steak hash, you end up with a really natural, lovely texture
01:02and you keep all that really amazing fat and all that amazing juiciness in there.
01:06So all you need at home is a very sharp knife, chopping board and like I said,
01:11decent amount of chuck steak and rib cap.
01:14So I've got one kilo's worth here, so I've got about 800 grams of chuck and 200 grams of rib cap.
01:21And the best way to chop it nice and fine is to start slicing it really, really thin.
01:28The thinner you go now, the easier it will be to get it chopped really, really finely.
01:33Kind of like the thickness of ratatouille bacon, if you can.
01:37So I've sliced those up nice and thin and then this is our chuck steak.
01:41So this is a kind of, you know, standard stewing steak.
01:45Sort of slow cooking, really, really good for burgers as well because it's got a nice flavour.
01:51But yeah, it's quite tough so you need to do something with it.
01:54Obviously what we're doing now is we're chopping nice and fine.
01:57There is a bit of natural fat in chuck, sometimes sort of more than others obviously,
02:02this is a natural product, but we're getting the majority of our fat from the rib cap.
02:08And you can see the chuck has got a bit of fat running through it,
02:12but like I said, most of it's coming in from the rib cap itself.
02:17Loads of fat, that can be sometimes 50% if not more.
02:21We've sliced it nice and thin.
02:23I appreciate this might seem like a lot of effort to go for a burger, but trust me, it's worth it.
02:29You get a really amazing steak-like texture.
02:33So what you've got to do now is you take in those long, thin strands
02:37and you're basically just going to cut them really, really fine.
02:41You want to just go as much as you can really, you can't really overdo it at this stage.
02:48Because you need to get it nice and fine, you need to get that fat nice and fine.
02:52So when you mix it together with the leaner bit, with the chuck, it all kind of blends together.
02:59So that's what you're kind of after.
03:02So we think that a decent burger literally needs nothing more than good quality meat and salt and pepper.
03:12And really, really, really important that you don't add salt at this stage or pepper,
03:19because what ends up happening is the salt will literally just suck the moisture.
03:24So we don't want to do that with a burger, and it will happen in a burger in a couple of hours if you leave it.
03:30And that's when you start to break the texture down, start getting a really rubbery texture.
03:35And worse than that, obviously, you're sucking out all of the really lovely flavors.
03:39So the other good thing about these cuts of meat is they're not crazy expensive.
03:43That's, you know, one of the best things about burgers is you really don't want to put expensive meat.
03:48Probably a butcher, you might be paying six quid, six pound a kilo, something like that.
03:54Right, so now we've got our meat cut up nice and fine.
03:57We need to give it a good mix because we've got loads of fat in the rib cap,
04:02but not a huge amount in the chuck.
04:04So you want to get that fat evenly distributed.
04:07Get it nice and stuck in, and it's good to do with your hand as well, all right?
04:10If you use your hands, the heat from your hands, they help the fat kind of start to melt a little bit,
04:16and that's what we're using as our glue.
04:18So what I'm going to do now, this is an American technique, it's called smashing.
04:22So you take a ball, we're going to say that's roughly 150 grams.
04:26I know that because I've made many of these in my life.
04:29And you basically just bang it together.
04:32By doing this, again, you're getting a bit of heat in there.
04:36You're going to get the fat starting to glisten a little bit, so you know the fat's kind of melting.
04:41And then as soon as we're confident, take that onto our board in between the paper.
04:48And then one of these, you can pick up one of these online, they're about 25 quid.
04:52Nice firm press.
04:56And then we've got our first burger right there.
05:11So we're going to get about seven patties out of this mix.
05:15We did about a kilo.
05:17Really important now, we go put them in the fridge.
05:19They need to set.
05:20Like I say, if you try and cook these now, they're going to fall apart.
05:23So we need to put them in the fridge, get them set, four hours, six hours, something like that.
05:27And then they'll be ready to go.
05:29All right, so burgers are ready.
05:32They've been chilled in the fridge, so they're nice and firm.
05:35They're going to hold together when we cook them.
05:39I'm going to say something controversial now.
05:42Even on a beautiful, hot, sunny day like today, I'd still be cooking my burgers inside in a frying pan.
05:49It's the best way.
05:51I really mean that.
05:52You know, if you're going to go to the effort on texture, on flavor, on sourcing good quality meat,
05:56you put it in a barbecue, you're not going to get all that flavor in there.
06:00So we want to get a pan super hot like this.
06:03You drop the burger in, and it's going to literally sear all that flavor in.
06:07You don't want to just get this really dark crust on the burger.
06:10That is like gold, all right?
06:12You want to keep that in there so it keeps all the juiciness, all the flavor,
06:15all the reasons for us chopping, not mincing.
06:17It's going to keep it in there.
06:19Barbecuing just doesn't work by that.
06:21So you don't even have to put any oil in the pan.
06:23We're just going to go straight in because there's so much fat in the burger it's going to hold.
06:28And now we're going to season very liberally with salt and pepper.
06:35And you do have to go really big on the salt and pepper because there's nothing running through there.
06:40So you're only going to have a salt crust on the top and a salt crust on the bottom.
06:44So trust me when I say it, you've got to go quite big on the salt and pepper.
06:49We're going to just do a really kind of humble beef burger today.
06:53So there's not crazy amounts going on in there, but because we've got this amazing beef,
06:57you're going to get all that flavor through.
06:59So we've just got some shredded little gem lettuce on a toasted glazed bun.
07:05We're going to be cooking this for about three minutes each side.
07:08That's going to give us a really nice medium pink in the middle.
07:12Honest, we do that, we go down to medium rare as well.
07:16It is pretty complicated serving medium rare burgers and serving medium burgers.
07:21We go to a hell of a lot of effort right the way back to the farms, to the abattoirs,
07:27to cutting plants, to our very own butchers to make sure that it's safe for us to do medium rare burgers.
07:34For me, it's the only way. Obviously, completely up to you how you cook your burger.
07:39I'm going to just give this a little scrape now.
07:43You should see a really, really lovely dark brown sear, which is exactly what we're after.
07:50And then, like I said, another big load of salt, load of pepper.
07:56So what we've got here is just a reduced, really, really reduced onion relish.
08:02We put a load of brown sugar in here. This is red onion.
08:06You can use white wine vinegar, red wine vinegar, balsamic vinegar.
08:10You need something in there to kind of counteract all the sugar.
08:13So I remember seeing my dad cook a burger on a barbecue and he would be pressing it down as hard as he could.
08:20God knows where that's come from, that technique. It's mental.
08:24You've got all this lovely fat and lovely flavour and moisture in the burger.
08:28You've seared it that side.
08:30As soon as you start pressing down now, you're literally squashing all of the lovely flavour out of the burger.
08:35So you've got to treat it with a bit of love.
08:37You can see it's just about starting to bubble at the top now.
08:40So I'm going to take this off now.
08:44So we're going to leave that burger to rest now.
08:46And you look at it, there's really lovely juices coming off there.
08:48It's nice and medium.
08:50We're going to move over to our chips.
08:52So chips, for us, are just as important as the burger.
08:55We were never going to serve a frozen chip with our burger.
08:58We've always made them from scratch.
09:00So these are our chips.
09:03So these are homemade in our prep kitchen.
09:06And you notice we put the skin on.
09:08We quite like the rustic look and we love the taste of the skin.
09:12Nice and crispy.
09:13We cook these in our prep kitchen.
09:15And then we do a final fry in the restaurant to get them nice and crispy.
09:20This is our seasoning.
09:23We put this on our chips straight away, so fresh out of the oil.
09:26And all you've got in here is rosemary.
09:28So fresh rosemary, lemon zest and Maldon sea salt.
09:32And you can make this at home really, really easily.
09:34All you need is a pestle and mortar and a load of thyme.
09:37And you literally just grind away.
09:39As long as you can, you can get a really lovely colour, lovely flavour.
09:42And it's a real nice kind of citrusy rosemary smell.
09:45Works amazingly with chips.
09:47So I'm going to drop these in now.
09:50So I've just got to be really careful with the fryer.
09:53You can make these on the stove at home.
09:55Just be really careful.
09:56Make sure you've got a thermometer in there.
09:58Because we all know what happens when you heat oil up too hot.
10:01So we've got some lovely resting juices going on the burger now.
10:04We know that's going to be nice and pink.
10:06So be very gentle, pop it on there.
10:11So we've got lettuce, beef, chopped beef, not minced.
10:15Red onion relish and our toasted bun.
10:19And then what burger would not be complete without some chips.
10:24So we're just going to drain the oil.
10:29Put a decent amount of rosemary salt on there.
10:35It's really important that you season straight out of the oil.
10:39So you get it nice and coated.
10:46Nice generous portion there.
10:48There we go, that's our beef burger with rosemary salted chips.