Who knew a person could
screw up hamburger by handling it too much?
I grilled some
great-tasting patties, but they were tough. Tough hamburger? Who
knew that was a thing? I googled it. It turns out that the more you
handle hamburger meat the tougher it gets when you cook it. All my effort
to shape it into nice round evenly sized balls, then massaging it out into
perfect patties with smooth edges, was actually screwing it up. Keep it
simple. Ground chuck. Separate it into the right size chunks and
smush each one into a patty once. Don’t stress about smooth edges.
One more factor.
There is a grain to hamburger meat, and it matters. It doesn’t matter as
much as the grain in a tough piece of meat like skirt or flank, but it matters
a little. When hamburger comes in a round tube, the grain, the way it
comes out of the grinder, runs horizontally the length of the tube. If
you slice crosswise across the tube you’re cutting across the grain; you cut
the pound of hamburger into three or four pucks. Take each puck and lay
it on the flat side. That orients the grain vertically. That’s the
way that will result in the most tender bite. Squash it out into a patty.
Okay, one more
thing. You can fashion the patty with your hands and put a dimple in the
middle so it won’t ball up when it’s cooked, or you can squash out the patties
with the dinner plate method. Place a plate upside down on the
counter. Lay a square of waxed paper over the round part on the bottom of
the plate. Put the puck of hamburger meat in the middle of the
upside-down plate, put a square of waxed paper on top of it, and with a second
plate, right side up, squash the hamburger down into a patty. They come
out like this:
Salt and pepper.
Grill to 165 degrees.
Melt in your mouth tender
and juicy. Best burger ever.
And there we have today’s
installment of “Answers to questions you never asked!”
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