Ina Garten's Method For Making The Juiciest Burgers

Celebrity chef Ina Garten seems to have a trick for everything in the kitchen. She started out as the owner of a specialty foods store and eventually transitioned to becoming one of Food Network's most popular chefs. She is known for elevating her recipes in simple ways, and when it comes to cooking burgers, Garten relies on a tried-and-true ingredient for keeping them as juicy as possible: butter.

Cooking a juicy burger depends on a few things. The type of beef you use comes first. Higher-fat beef will offer more juice, so choose something with 20% or 30% fat ground beef for the best results (or else it will end up being dry). Garten prefers to use ground chuck, which is a fattier meat, and after forming her patties, she adds a slice of butter to the center of each patty and presses it into the raw burger meat until the butter is fully encased in the meat. Then, the butter melts while the patty cooks, which helps keep it nice and moist.

Butter is full of fat, so in addition to keeping the patties moist, it also adds flavor to the burger. Garten uses unsalted butter in her recipe, but this could depend on how much you choose to season your burger. A well-seasoned burger won't need any additional salt from the butter, but either variety works.

Garten builds her burger patties with egg yolks to help bind them easily, plus she adds steak sauce to the meat for extra flavor. The trick to keeping burgers tender is to not overwork the meat. Just lightly fold them until the patties are formed, then don't touch them while they cook. In addition to using a fattier ground beef, never press down on the patties while they cook, especially if you're using a grill. Otherwise, those juices will release and fall through the grill grates, which will work against building that juicy burger.