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All You Meatheads: Heed This Burger Advice

Posted by Adam Kuban, May 23, 2007 at 11:00 AM

Before I founded A Hamburger Today and really started delving into Burgerworld, I was like most home cooks when it comes to this most delicious and iconic American dish.

Yes, I bought the ground chuck in the grocery store, thinking it was perfectly adequate for grilling or throwing into the cast-iron skillet.

This was wrongheaded, and Mark Bittman, in today's New York Times, wants to set us all straight.

The key is to avoid packaged ground meat. When you buy it, you may know the cut of the meat — chuck, for example — and the fat content.

But you have no way of knowing whether the meat came from high- or low-quality animals. It could come from dozens of animals, and they could all be poor-quality animals — old dairy cows, for instance, rather than cattle raised for beef. The meat from these animals is ground together in huge quantities.

If the aesthetics of that don’t give you pause, consider the health concerns. Massive batches of ground meat carry the highest risk of salmonella and E. coli contamination, and have caused many authorities to recommend cooking burgers to the well-done stage. Forgive my snobbishness, but well-done meat is dry and flavorless, which is why burgers should be rare, or at most medium rare.

The solution? Grind your own. It's not as much a pain in the ass as it sounds, and if you have a food processor, that'll work, Bittman says, so you can avoid the cost and hassle of buying a dedicated meat grinder.

There are a couple recipes with the story, like this one: The Real Burger. Instead of the sirloin that Bittman calls for, I'd recommend using chuck, which has a little more fat and will yield a juicier burger.

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Tags: burgers