Hamburger

Variations

• Bacon cheeseburger: Add crisp bacon.
• Double patty: Two thin patties, smash-burger style.
• Mushroom & blue cheese: Sauteed mushrooms and blue cheese for a grown-up burger.
• Chicken/veggie burger: Chicken breast or a plant-based patty instead of beef.

Tips

• The dishes built on the same mince define themselves against this patty, and they are all naming one protein. Hambagu: "a hamburger patty is handled as little as possible so the grain survives; hambagu is kneaded until tacky, for a springiness closer to sausage. Similar ingredients, opposite aims." Meatloaf: without its panade "you've just made one giant hamburger patty." Tteok-galbi refuses a food processor because it "breaks the protein down completely and the grain is gone."
• The protein is myosin, and every rule below is a way of not extracting it. Emulsions carries it as an emulsifier the cooking makes: salt dissolves the myofibrillar proteins, working them turns the mixture tacky, and heat then sets that bind permanently. Hambagu's page states the condition in one line — "salt goes in first, before anything else. The proteins will not dissolve without it" — and works it for three minutes. So "salt only the outside, just before cooking" is that sentence inverted: salt on the inside, given time, is the first step of making a sausage.
• Which is why there is no binder here and no gentleness to spare. A panade, an egg, a long mix — each is a way of holding a patty together, and each costs the loose open grain that is the whole point. This patty is held together by nothing but being pressed once, so it is fragile by design, and that is also why it gets one flip: turning it repeatedly is handling.
• The dimple is the one tip that is not about protein extraction. Muscle fibres contract as they denature, and a flat disc gripped at its edges by the pan can only take up that slack by bulging in the middle. A shallow well gives it somewhere to go, so the patty finishes flat enough to build on rather than domed.
• Form the patties gently for tenderness — packing them tight makes them tough.
• Press a dimple in the center so they stay flat instead of bulging.
• Salt only the outside, just before cooking — mixing it in toughens the meat.
• Don't keep flipping — high heat, one flip — to keep the juices in.
• Toast the buns in butter to stop them going soggy and add richness.