Why Pressing Down On Your Burger Patties While Cooking Is A No-Go

Burger night is one of the best nights of the week, or of whatever cadence at which you observe the cherished culinary tradition. The most frequent celebrants have likely already mastered mixing their meat, seasoning it to perfection, and forming ground beef patties for maximum tenderness. But there is still one major burger making mistake that even our beefiest butter hack can't fix: pressing the patties.

Tempting as it may be to make like the models in your local hardware store circular and smush those patties, step away from the spatula. The best and most common compliment a burger can receive is in regard to its juiciness. International smashburgers aside (a totally different cuisine category with a specified title for a reason), all pressing does is compress your carefully blended, flavored, and shaped meat, ejecting its precious moisture and rendering what could have been a real beauty of a burger into a dense, dry puck. Your only reward for pressing will be a live view of all that liquid escaping. And not only has nobody ever marveled over a burger's density, but dryness is the item's chief complaint. Fortunately, the best thing you can do to stave it off and collect those juicy accolades is literally nothing. Just don't press down on your beef patties.

While passivity is key, there are some more active steps you can take to ensure plump, juicy burgers. And it all starts at the grocery store. The fattier your ground beef, the more moisture it's going to retain. A ground beef ratio of 20% fat to 80% lean is ideal. Any less and you're hovering toward that unwanted dryness, while more may net a greasy mess. Back at home, you want to make sure not to overwork the ground beef. Mixing hamburger meat too much degrades the protein, releasing fluids too soon when your goal is to lock them in.

If you are working with a slightly leaner ground beef variety, maybe some that was leftover or simply purchased in error, that aforementioned butter hack, where you add a pat of butter to a shallow indentation on the patty's surface, will help reintroduce some of that prized fat. And, sorry, well done devotees, the rarer the finish, the juicer your burger is going to be.