Debunking Burger Myths with J. Kenji López-Alt | The Burger Show

[Music] if there was a burger jedi it would be kenji lopez alt the award-winning author and internet food legend has conducted hundreds of breakthrough experiments on his influential blog the burger lab today we're on a mission to debunk some of the most prevailing burger myths around and to learn some eye-opening techniques that will lead to a better more delicious burger my entire career i've been taught certain things right right right and then i read your blog and you just say the complete opposite and every once in a while you find hey like this thing that everybody's doing all the time like actually if you actually test it side by side it turns out that it's not the best way to do things that's what makes you unique you take a scientific approach and then you document it so it's kind of like for all the haters out there these are my notes you just go against the grain and like you and you prove it right you always want to cut against the grain today what we're going to make actually is hopefully different from any other burger we've done on the show before i call it the best burger for a single person because you can literally only make one at a time it doesn't work if you try to make too many and in the process i think we're going to try and debunk a few burger myths things things people say you always have to do and there's a time we'll explain why you shouldn't shouldn't this is like a jedi yoda moment do i get to ride on your back here [Music] what you'll hear a lot of people say is that chuck uh which comes from the you know the shoulder of the steer is the best is the best meat for burgers yeah chuck is a very good sort of all-in-one meat it makes it easy like it has you know chuck is one of these mussels that works hard throughout throughout this deer's life it has a lot of good marbling a lot of fat a lot of flavor development um but if you think of a burger as like a nice blended whiskey or a nice blended wine you know you want to take different elements and make sure that the flavors between them are balanced as you blend them what we got here is brisket what we got over here is sirloin and then right here we got a short rib so let's taste some of these burger varietals i say we start with the chuck which is the one that you're probably most used to eating um and it's gonna have that sort of balance and that tastes like pretty classic burger wow all right let's move on to the short rib here there's a lot of richness but not not too much depth you know it's like it feels like all like it's very rich yeah it feels it's like sort of like like edm you know it's just it's got like base one but there's nothing much above it yeah all right let's move on to the brisket you get like a sort of like a sourness to it yeah people describe it i think it's like serum flavor like like blood minerally yeah um and now let's taste some top sirloin here yeah so you can't just do a burger like that no dry so where brisket i think has this sort of crumbly texture sirloin um binds better um it stays more tender yeah yeah so what i what i like to do is i like to combine um about 50 sirloin just to have that sort of like black blank canvas and that tenderness um along with about 25 brisket and 25 short rib it makes so much sense we're using relatively cheap cuts of meat right you know we're not using a burger yeah it's a burger burger should be it's ground beef yeah it's the most democratic food in the world we're just gonna cube this up you know nice inch inch and a half chunks so what we're doing is we're cutting into cubes and we're tossing all the cubes together into a bowl so that when we grind them um you know everything's sort of evenly mixed together one thing you might be asking is when should we put the salt into the obviously you need a salt you need salt in a burger to make it taste good you know been debated for the longest time but it is it's a big one i think someone in the 50s or 60s was like this is the point you salt it exactly so yeah so a lot of people will tell you put salt in right now i think this is a big mistake i have two burger patties um one of them was made with beef that was salted okay and the other one was made with beef that was unsalted so we're gonna do a quick little experiment um for that i think we should probably head outside i have your two burger patties identical except for the fact that in one of them the salt was mixed into the meat and in the other one the salt is only on the exterior okay both of them are cooked um so now i want you to hold that tray there um so i'm gonna throw first this is the patty that uh is salted only on the exterior ready you got it did you hit my nerds okay so you feel it that was the unsalted burger the burger that was only salted in the exterior and you saw i mean it it fell apart just from the force of me throwing it before it even got anywhere near you right and that's what you want in a burger at least that's what i want in a burger i want it to be really so tender that it just basically just falls apart in your mouth like barely barely held together now i'm going to show you what happens if you salt your meat before grinding it or before forming the patties ready you eat that it gets this sort of rubbery texture which is in a sausage a good thing that sort of rubbery snap that you get in the sausage but not really what you want in a burger don't salt your patties before you grind it but do assault your friends with burger patties you just threw a burger patty at me yeah i think you're i mean i'm pretty clean we're good now let's get to grinding the meat actually all right i think that's plenty for what we do the next myth we're going to talk about is that your burgers need to be formed and shaped in a very specific way yeah you know for this burger we're actually gonna not really form it at all rather than picking up the meat and forming into patties all we're gonna do is kind of gently shape it into a patty like this super lightly what i like to say is that once once the beef has been ground we never pick up the beef again with human hands the goal that we're going for here is maximum surface area for crispness and browning and that's really why we don't want to press it flat because you know the smoother surfaces the less surface area to volume ratio you're going to have and so the more nooks and crannies you have it's like an english muffin the more nooks and crannies you have the the crispier and better uh exactly so for you burger makers at home the key thing to remember is you want to handle your meat as little as possible [Music] my two basic toppings on a burger i don't know what yours are if i had to pick just two toppings it would be pickles and onions a green tomatoes when they're in season and if it's going to be lettuce for me it needs to be shredded iceberg all right so we got our lettuce we got our tomato um now we're going to go into this onion now if you look at an onion there's two different ways you can cut it if you imagine this is a planet and it's going rotating around this axis we can cut it orbitally which is the way like a satellite would orbit around it right around it yeah and you'll get onion rings or you can cut it from pole to pole um it actually makes a pretty significant difference uh which direction you cut it um and the reason for that is because um onion cells are not symmetrical they are they're sort of elongated in one direction i happen to have this prop ready um so imagine this when you were a kid did you have like a microscope did you ever look at onions under it i did i mean you see it looks almost like this it has these like sort of elongated cells and those cells run this way they run from pole to poles so the cells are much longer that way than they are the other way and the thing about onions and other alliums is that um that sort of pungent flavor the thing you know the thing that makes you cry the thing that gives you that pungent flavor in your nose um those chemicals um they don't exist in a raw onion um what happens is when you cut open onion cells there's these precursor chemicals uh that come out and they interact with each other and then they form these sort of pungent aromas afterwards after slicing so the more cells you break in an onion uh the more it'll make you cry exactly the more it'll make you cry the more of those bad flavors takes all that stuff out and puts it in the air exactly imagine you're slicing this onion pull to pull it like this yeah just go down there we go so if you're slicing it that way you're essentially just cutting like a single row of cells so right now you've released about whatever you know one cell's worth maybe two cells worth of stuff in this little section but if you're cutting across the equator yeah you're cutting all those cells um and that's exactly what happens when you cut when you cut an onion across the equator so all this stuff gets released you get a much stronger pungency by cutting it across the top that's so cool man so i got here tiny little skillet um so essentially about the same size as the burger right and this is planned you want us i want that and this this is precisely why a burger like this is ideal for people at home by themselves not great for a restaurant not great if you're cooking for a crowd because you really need that you need to cook it one at a time it needs to be in a small skillet and i'll show you why so we'll put a little oil in the pan salt this is kosher salt after this meat has been ground um we have not picked it up with our beer we haven't seasoned it and we have not picked it up with our bare hands carefully flip it over spatula only no hands carefully so we got our pan kind of smoking hot here it's at around 400 degrees right now we're gonna take our burger patty as it cooks uh fat's gonna render out of it and it's gonna sort of start to fill the pan a little bit and so it's like deep frying in its own fat you know so you get all that extra flavor you get all that crispiness if you did this on a flat tub or a bigger pan all that fat just drains away how long do you say per side about a minute about so yeah we're this side is pretty much done it's you can tell it's loose it's crumbly yeah and you can see all these little bits of brown beef that are sort of fried in their own fat i'm gonna put the onions directly on here so that they have a little bit of a chance to steam this is gonna keep it all together exactly what i'm doing right now is i'm just gonna lay a little towel over this um so that it's sort of steamed yeah exactly just to soften up that bun a little bit trapping some of that onion in jersey they use a piece of parchment paper they kind of make a tent okay so now we're ready to assemble i'm going to put a little mayo down there that's hot it's nice as opposed to toppings i'm more of a bottomings right type of guy so i like to put my little bed of lettuce and this is for like tectonic shifts right exactly has to keep to keep everything stable oh you can see the crust on there the cheese is melted oh baby you can see these edges right like that looks completely different from like a smash burger but yeah how many nooks and crannies are and just like sort of the roughness of it cheers man you taste how juicy so this this is a well done burger yeah there's not a hint of pink in it but because of the method of cooking like it comes out no like super super juicy there's so much texture going on like it's super crispy man it's like a burger like croissant with like the flakiness of the beef man that's the solid burger dude solid salt burger things there's a lot of like so-called hard and fast rules about cooking anything cooking burgers um but yeah you know sometimes sometimes breaking the rules gets you to really delicious delicious results yeah this proves culinary school and half the books i've read wrong the burger forest is really with you well thanks thanks dude i appreciate it [Music] [Applause] [Music] what's your um what's your midichlorian count what's up burger world it's alvin kyle of the burger show smash that like button hit that subscribe button if not for me for the segway

Channel: First We Feast

Views: 2,022,910

Keywords: First we feast, fwf, firstwefeast, food, food porn, cook, cooking, chef, kitchen, recipe, craft beer, complex, complex media, Cook (Profession)sean evans, the burger show, kenji, j kenji lopez, burger myths, the burger show kenji, alvin cailan, eggslut, alvin calilan eggslut, burger show, first we feast the burger show, the burger show first we feast, alvin cailan burger show, the burger show alvin cailan, star wars, internet food legend, j kenji lopez alt, smash burger the burger show

Id: weFT03Mcah0

Length: 12min 39sec (759 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 19 2019