How to Reverse Sear Hamburgers on a Charcoal Grill

welcome to a view to a grill i'm johnny today i'm going to show you how to reverse sear hamburgers on the weber kettle now let's start by preparing our hamburger patties i get the three pound pack of 80 20 because out of this three pound pack i know i'm going to get at least eight hamburgers and then to make it easy on myself i'll get a knife and i like doing this because it kind of makes it easy on me dividing these up into eight equal hamburger patties i'll get my pan and my baking grid and just spray that with a little bit of oil to keep the patties from sticking and now i'll just form my patties i'm using a patty press but you don't have to if you don't want to if you want to form these by hand you can do that i like to use the patty press because it guarantees uniform patties i'll line the patty press with a little bit of saran wrap just to make it easier to get the patty out so that the patty doesn't stick to the bowl of the patty press now if you do choose to use a patty press like i'm doing try not to pack the ground beef into the bowl of the patty press because you still want these to be loosely formed patties that's why you see me switching from the press to my fingers and then i'll take the lid of the patty press just to flatten it out a little bit and then once you're done you should have a patty that looks a little bit like this once you get all the patties pressed out and onto the baker's grid it's time to season now i will pre-season these with just a little bit of salt dry brine and then put them in the refrigerator until it's time to cook them now that the patties are ready to go and dry brining in the refrigerator it's a good time to set up the grill i'll start setting up the grill by cleaning the old charcoal and you can see this is leftover lump once it's clean it should look like this now if you want to see a video on the entire process that i use on cleaning and lighting my weber kettle check out the link above in today's cook i'm going to be using bnb lump and just for a little smoke flavor i'm going to add one chunk of oak i'll get that chunk of oak and just kind of push it in the center of my piled up lump charcoal to start up that charcoal i'm going to be using the superior trading company fire starters i'm starting to really get to like this branded charcoal i find it's a very dependable and fast we'll just get that lit and today i am just using the small weber chimney starter and if you're interested in buying anything that i'm using in this video check out the affiliate links below every time you guys click on one of those and buy something it really helps me and upgrading my stuff around here so that i can give you the best content possible and i really appreciate every time you do that for me now while the fire is starting it's a great time to clean our grill grates now you don't need sparkling clean grill grates but clean grill grates help when it's time to turn your hamburger over if the grill grate is clean it's going to release the protein easier making your cooking experience better once you see the charcoal ash over it's time to get it into the weber kettle now today i'm using a slow and sear to create my two zone cooking but if you don't have a slow and sear you don't need one you can still create two zones of cooking yourself you can either use the weber kettle baskets as seen in this video or you don't even have to use baskets at all you can check out this video to see how to do it with no aftermarket products at all we'll get the lid closed and just make sure our vents are open so that the old charcoal that we have in the kettle will light because of the new lit charcoal we just put in now while the fire is going in the weber kettle let's get the hamburger patties out of the refrigerator and get them seasoned today i'm just using my very own spg plus onion powder mix and now in about the time it takes you to go inside get the patties out get them seasoned on both sides your fire has probably had enough time to ignite and we're ready to go now i'll get the lit charcoal all spread out just to make sure that we have as even a heat distribution as possible the easy part since we did all of our preparation on that grid we can then pick up the entire grid put all the patties on at the same time now we'll get the lid closed and i'm going to make sure that the top vent is wide open and i'm going to close the bottom vent just about halfway in this reverse sear i want to put just a little bit of smoke onto the patties just a little bit and i don't want the fire to get way too hot now as you can see the fire is not blazing hot it's just a little bit over 400 degrees and that is on the slow and sear side that is on the fire side what's going to happen is that heat is going to rise up go over to where the vent is which is right over our meat put some smoke on the meat and exit out of the kettle we're going to let these burgers sit on the indirect side for about 10 minutes before we check them for the first time so it's been about 10 minutes let's give them our first look today we're talking about a couple of visual cues you can go by to know when it's ready to start searing the burgers our first visual cue to know is that when we see the burger starting to release its juice now if you notice on this patty the juice is cloudy and it's a dark pinkish red color i know by this visual cue that we're about ready to start searing these burgers the second visual cue that you can look for to know when to start searing your patties is when the edges of the burger start turning a little bit brown all right and you want to catch this early catching it late means that the burgers are going to be too far along to get a good sear on them so that you still have a juicy finished product and the way you do that is just check on your burgers right so after about 10 minutes you're going to look and if you don't see these visual cues going on you're going to close the lid three or five minutes later you're going to check them again so you keep checking them often until you get to these visual cues so now i want to get this fire hot i'm going to leave the lid open and open up the bottom vent just so that we can get maximum airflow coming from underneath and then i'm just going to wait for i don't know five minutes we're just gonna the burgers aren't going to be cooking as much now because we have the lid open there is no heat circulating over the uh the burgers so i'm not worried about these over cooking while i'm waiting for the direct side of the grill to get hot now that the fire is hot i'm going to spray a little oil on my rag and just wipe it onto the grill grates just to make it easier for the patties to release later when it's time to flip or turn now we'll get our patties on i'm only going to do three at a time i don't want to crowd the grill when you crowd the grill it makes them harder to flip and to keep up with while they're there so you're giving yourself a better chance to be able to control your cook with fewer patties over the fire while you're grilling the burgers you're going to want to pay attention to where your hot spots are and right here i noticed that this is a hot spot so i'm just going to rotate these patties over the hot spot so that i make sure that i get a nice sear on each one of the hamburger patties and here's one thing i don't want you to be afraid of you always hear about flare-ups well when you're doing something like hamburger patties sometimes flare-ups are your friend when the fire is engulfing your patty it's putting a sear on it so don't be afraid of flare-ups as long as your patties are juicy and they're sweating out that juice the flame is not burning the patty initially the flare-up is your friend later down if you leave your patties on there too long it will burn your patties but not as long as you're doing this technique correctly you know burger king used to say flame broiled patties and then you'd see those patties going through that conveyor belt and all the flames were around them and they talked about how flame broiling them made them taste better well this is kind of like the same concept now let's talk about a visual cue on when you know when it's time to cheese your patties when your clear juices mix in with the bloody juices and it's about a 50 percent ratio of clear to bloody or just a little bit more clear to bloody i don't know 55 to 45 60 to 40. all right so our first batch of three are done and now we're just going to do these in batches in between batches you want to make sure that you expose some of the metal on the grill grates so i'll clean the grill grates just a little bit we're just going to finish these up in batches until they're all done and we have them all back on the indirect side now i have everything over on the indirect side i'm going to close the lid and go get my cheese i already have the cheese ready on a plate because i don't want to be going for too long because with the lid closed those burgers are going to start cooking again today i just have a mixture of mustard cheese along with some sliced american cheese and some colby jack cheese now we're back outside i'm going to open the lid and just start cheesing all of my patties with the lid closed and your fire being extremely hot it's only going to take a minute or two for the cheese to completely melt and start developing these little brown bits on the edges we'll get the lid closed and let the cheese melt now you know you've done it right when you see that your cheese has completely covered these patties just like a little warm blanket now since we used a baking grid i can take all of the patties off at the exact same time and put them on a train and there you have it a great looking set of patties right off the grill now if you haven't already hit the subscribe button why not go ahead and take the time to do that right now thank you for watching a view to a grill i'll see you guys next time take care y'all

Channel: View to a Grill

Views: 43,216

Keywords: how to grill hamburgers, how to reverse sear hamburgers, how to bbq hamburgers, hamburger recipe, grilled hamburgers on the Weber Kettle

Id: CYkrgBVZ5tg

Length: 11min 34sec (694 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 07 2021