With the seeming rise in popularity of lacy-edged, thinly smashed hamburgers, many home cooks have turned to converting their backyards into makeshift diners by placing steel griddles or large cast iron pans atop their grills at backyard cookouts.
This is a trend I can get behind. Occasionally, I may be in the mood for a behemoth half-pound burger (the kind that ends up obliterating its own bun with juices before you get halfway through), but, increasingly, I find myself craving — and satisfied by — a more reasonably sized burger, with thinner patties that maximize flavor over volume.
For all the joys that smashed burgers offer, they lack some essential summer flavors: smokiness and char. We home cooks smash our burgers on the backyard grill not because it is inherently built for it, but to save our kitchens from the grease splatter. And if you’ve ever tried to cook a thin patty on a grill and choked down the dry, shrunken results, you know that adding smoky char is not a simple matter if you want your burger to stay juicy.
So what makes a grilled burger so fundamentally different from a smashed burger? Why are smashed burgers so successful in smaller sizes? It has to do with the cooking process. Direct contact with a screaming-hot griddle yields intense browning (and thus flavor and texture). This intense heat also cooks them very fast, and faster cooking makes it so that less juice is lost through evaporation. Using a solid griddle also prevents rendered fat from escaping.
Grilled burgers have none of these advantages. Grills cook primarily through infrared heat — the electromagnetic radiation that travels from hot coals or grill bars the same way the sun’s heat energy travels through space — an altogether less-efficient form of heat transfer than direct conduction from a hot griddle. Browning and flavor development take longer, giving the patties more time to dry out. Rendered fat immediately drips off the burger and vaporizes in the fire below. That vaporization and the sooty deposits the fat subsequently leaves on the burger’s surface are essential to the flavor of chargrilled foods, but less trapped fat also means drier burgers.
There are structural issues as well. For thicker grilled burgers, I typically prefer beef that’s ground fresh and handled as minimally as possible in order to keep its texture light and tender. (Small air pockets in a loosely packed patty also act as insulators, keeping the burger’s interior a shade pinker as the exterior browns.) Try this with thin patties, though, and even those that survive the initial transfer to the grill will crumble when you try to flip them, falling through the grates like a smoky, fiery game of Kerplunk.
Solving this structural problem is straightforward. In many ways, ground meat resembles bread dough. Both of them get their structure through a matrix of interconnected proteins — animal protein in the case of ground meat, gluten in the case of dough — and rely on that structure to ensnare water, minerals, aromatic molecules and fat. We all know that the more bread dough is kneaded, the more robust this structure becomes. The same is true for ground beef.
Kneading the ground beef in a bowl will cause proteins to become entangled with one another: That’s bad news for big, fat burgers, but necessary for thinner burgers. I knead my beef until it forms a mass that’s just tacky enough to stick together. (Incidentally, do not be tempted to add salt to the meat during this kneading phase. Salt will dissolve some muscle proteins, causing them to link together excessively: Your burger patty will come out with the bouncy, smooth texture of breakfast sausage.)
This kneading introduces another problem: geometry. As a burger (or any bit of meat) cooks on the grill, several factors can alter its shape. Solid fat renders and drips out, water evaporates and flies off into the atmosphere, and proteins coagulate and contract. Any burger will lose girth as it cooks, but a thin, well-kneaded patty especially so. With loosely packed burgers, I aim for patties that are about an inch wider than the buns to account for shrinking during cooking. With thin patties, I had to practically double this precooking overhang, and shaping a few ounces of ground meat into a patty with a half-foot diameter is no simple task!
I tried it by hand. I tried it using a ring mold. I tried it using a tortilla press. In the end, I discovered that the most effective method was to place balls of well-kneaded beef between two sheets of parchment paper, then press on them with the bottom of a sheet pan or skillet to make them into a thin, even circle.
To form the patties, well-kneaded beef is placed between two sheets of parchment paper.
Then, the beef is pressed with the bottom of a sheet pan to create large, rounded patties. The trick to seasoning and transferring them to the griddle was to peel off one sheet of parchment, then season the patties, return the parchment, flip over the entire parchment-and-patty sandwich so that you could peel off the second sheet of parchment and season the second side. This loosens the meat from the parchment enough that it can be easily flipped out onto a hot griddle.
Then flipped, sandwiched between parchment..
and seasoned on the other side.
Structurally and geometrically, things were working out well. My patties held together on the grill and shrunk to just the right size for a burger bun. Flavor and juiciness were still the most difficult elements to master.
I focused first on my heat source. Grills can vary wildly in their maximum heat. Lump charcoal burns hotter than compressed charcoal briquettes. Both burn significantly hotter than your average gas grill. Gas grills with ceramic “sear” burners (also called “infrared” burners) can rival coal. But, even with the hottest fire, my burgers were drying out before they browned properly on both sides.
That’s when it occurred to me: I’d been cooking my thin burgers the way I’d cook fatter burgers, by flipping them to get even browning on both sides. But that’s not how a thin smashed burger is typically cooked. Rather, with a thin patty on a griddle, you cook it on its first side for the majority of the time, flipping only at the last moment. The idea is that deep, dark browning on one side will provide more flavor than moderate browning on two sides.
Does the same method work for thin grilled burgers?
Indeed it does.
By laying patties on the hottest part of my grill and letting them sit undisturbed until the first sides were deeply browned and charred and the top sides showed just the faintest remnants of pink color, I could then flip them, and let the flame just kiss that second side, while I melted a slice of cheese on top. Finally, I got them straight into their waiting buns. (These thin burgers don’t do well with sitting or cooling, so be ready for them!)