This Mixing Mistake That's Making Your Burgers Chewy

When you try to describe the best kind of burger, you'll almost always use two words: tender and juicy. That's because you want the burger to melt in your mouth while you eat it, and you don't want the meat to be too dry. There are plenty of tips and tricks that go into cooking a burger, but for the most tender patties, it starts before those burgers hit the grill. Besides, you might even be making one big mistake that's constantly resulting in chewy burgers: mixing the meat too much.

Cooking the patties properly is important, but so much of a burger's quality starts with the raw meat. You want to choose burgers with a high enough fat content (such as 20% or higher) for maximum flavor and tenderness, but the moment you hit the beef with salt and start moving that meat around, its protein makeup starts to change, which could render it chewy. The trick is to mix it gently and just until the seasonings are combined into the meat — aka, the less movement, the better.

Once you've chosen the beef you want to cook with, you should always season it with some salt for added flavor. Other seasonings can join the mix, too, but from there, fold the meat into itself as opposed to vigorously mixing it to help those seasonings reach every part of the patty. When it's time to shape them, push the meat together with enough force to form a patty, but don't work it any more than it absolutely needs.

"As soon as you add salt to ground meat and mix it, you begin to release myosin, which is a motor protein bound up in the cells of the meat," John Adler, the vice president of culinary at Blue Apron, told TODAY. He also said that adding salt to the meat "breaks down the cellular structure of the meat, and if you mix too much, you activate too much myosin, and you get a very chewy and very dense burger." 

So, while salt is great for seasoning, you have to be careful about how you incorporate it. The best trick to ensuring the seasonings get evenly distributed is to use the widest bowl possible. This allows you to spread the meat out, which helps those seasonings get distributed more evenly from the start and ultimately means less necessary mixing.