Details? Which smashburger places? In NJ or NYC?
Pairs well with this though
I never buy “lean” meat for burgers. That fat is indeed critical to a tasty juicy burger.
Off subject, but sometimes I dice up a little filet mignon (tail), onion, and bacon, add that to the meat, and make some really great “burgers.”
Reminds me of a burger I used to make when I lived near a middle eastern market that would grind a boneless leg of lamb for you. I would cook some thin slices of bacon or pork belly and rehydrated shiitakes together, then mix into the ground lamb before making the burgers. I’d cook the burgers in a grill cage – there were occasional issues with cohesion since the pork/shiitake were sliced rather than cubed. I tried cubed and had patties without any risk of falling apart, but I liked the texture better with slices rather than cubes.
Fresh shiitakes don’t work as well here – the dried ones have a deeper flavor.
Bacon vs pork belly seemed to be personal preference – some people liked the burger better with bacon, some with the unsmoked pork belly. I was kind of on the fence myself.
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God, i can only wish my fat ratio was at 20%. The last time that was true I was still in my thirties. Now I’m closer to A5.
Hahahaha.
But that’s what makes you delicious Chuck.
I bet the distribution of fat is worse.
OK, maybe more like pork belly.
Alex N brought it up:
The meat is not irrelevant, but almost.
By far the most important factor is time from grinder to flame. When I am cooking for company, I will typically cook about 6 burgers (2 - 6 people, 1 - 2 burgers per). So the average time from grinder to flame is just over 1 minute. If you do anything else, you are cooking garbage, and as they too rarely say, garbage out, garbage in.
It’s been a long time, but I’ve done taste tests, grinding the same meat:
1 day
1 hour
1 minute
Small burgers cooked rare on a hardwood charcoal fire. Virtually every taster put them in the right order:
1 minute
1 hour
1 day
If you have never ground your own meat when the fire is ready, please give it a try. You won’t go back.
Dan Kravitz
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These are small places in Santa Barbara, ca. Third Window Brewing (parker ranch), XO Santa Barbara (brisket and shortrib), and Broad St Oyster co (correction, it’s Niman ranch beef).
Today I bought a Parker Ranch wagyu inside skirt steak and a grass fed top sirloin from another vendor, both at the farmer’s market. The chuck offerings were all way too big (red meat is about once a month at home). I’m going to blend the two for steakhouse style burgers. Will post how that goes here but it’ll probably be a few days.
Meat matters. We make burgers with Flannery, Bison or Wagyu. Everything else is flavorless. My Wife bought some premium grass fed ground beef the other night. I seasoned it with s&p and even added some Santa Maria seasoning byt it was terrible. Even my Wife commented on how bad it was. Dry, flavorless. When I did custom blends with Flannery I always added brisket fact to keep the fact content around 35%. That and the dry ged steak ends made for a tasty burger.
A generous addition of heritage-breed pork fat was my rural North Carolina grandmothers’ secret to making everything taste better. As kids we always wondered why their cooking tasted so good.
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Here’s the grass fed top sirloin & Parker Ranch wagyu inside skirt. Cubed both and did a 16oz half/half blend for two 8oz patties. The rest is portioned and vacuum sealed in the freezer for another day. The skirt had such a nice level of good fat, so I didn’t use the fat cap from the sirloin for this round. A bit of a sin to grind that awesome skirt steak but these turned out really good. Not sure where the loch ness quality of the last photo came from. These were really rich and decadent, next time will be 1 for 2 people.
Seared in a dry pan for a nice crust, flipped, added caramelized onions, then Barber’s Reserve 6y aged cheddar and cooked to just above medium rare. If that bun looks familiar, we picked those up from In’n’Out. They are less cakey than brioche and less bready a lot of other options. A little dijon, and finally homemade pickle slices were the only “vegetable”.
Dan speaks the truth on this. I grind my own or I don’t bother. It makes such a huge difference.
OK, all this discussion about grinding your own raises the question of what you guys are using for a grinder?
When I was a kid, we had a hand cranked grinder we would clamp to our breakfast nook table. We also had a neighborhood grocery store just across the street that ground their own, and when they ran short, they would just take some chuck steak or sirloin steak and go in the back and grind some more with a electrical grinder of some sort.
There’s a bunch of options, but I use the metal grinder attachment for the Kitchen Aid stand mixer. Same thing applies as to when making sausage - all your gear and meat needs to be as cold as possible, otherwise the grind gets a bit mushy.
Same. At first I was a little intimidated by the KA grinder attachment (mostly the cleaning aspect), but man, what a game changer. I do find that the medium die is still too large a grind and that the burgers tend to fall apart…unless I need to add more fat as an adhesive…so I use the smallest of the three for my burger grind.
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I just got the KA metal grinder attachment as my father’s day present, basically due to me talking with my wife about things I was reading in this thread. I’ve never ground my own before and am looking forward to giving it a whirl (although probably after an upcoming vacation). Thanks to those who are sharing tips…I’m learning a lot.
There was an interesting cooking episode from a show I no longer remember with heston blumenthal where he made his own burger, plastic american cheese, ketchup etc. The grind portion was very interesting in that he ground the meat pre seasoned and kept the meat straight an in a clingfilm roll so that when you bit into it the fibers were vertical and easy to bite through.
found it:
