Form Your Burger Patties With Chilled Meat For Extra Juiciness

Grilling burgers is a core summer activity, and truth be told, most of us could go for a thick, juicy handheld any time of year. A well-made beef patty piled with cheese and toppings is great as a quick weeknight meal or served on a platter at a weekend cookout. Unfortunately there are a lot of common mistakes people make when cooking burgers. If dry patties are an issue, one way to maintain some extra juiciness is to form them with chilled meat.

Ground beef is a bit of a different ballgame than working with, say, cuts of steak, which are better cooked when they've been allowed to warm up to room temperature. The difference is that because the meat is ground, all of the connective tissue in the muscle is pulled apart, so you're relying much more on the fat to make the patty stick together. When the meat warms up to room temperature, the fat starts to loosen up and the burger loses some of its structure. When it's placed over the heat of a stove or grill, the fat melts. Now, if the burger is already kind of loose, all that juiciness escapes. So if your kitchen is warm, or your burger patties are sitting on a plate next to the hot stove, you could be drying out your burgers before they're even cooked and not realize it.

Another reason to start your burgers with cold meat is that you have to touch it to form patties, which will also warm it up. Beef fat, which is also called tallow, is solid at room temperature, but just like butter, it softens up when it's no longer cold. If you start with room temperature burger meat, the heat from your hands will soften the fat even further. The trick to forming perfect patties is to handle them loosely, limit contact with your hot hands, and try not to squish or press them too much, which will ruin the texture and moisture. Hopefully you're also working with the best type of beef you can find, with 20% to 40% fat to start, because anything too lean will come out dry.

Starting with cold burger meat has one other distinct advantage: temperature control. When you start out with a cold patty, the center of the meat stays cooler longer, which gives you enough time to sear both sides of the burger without overcooking the center. If you find that you tend to overcook burgers, try popping the formed patties back in the refrigerator for about 20 minutes before they're cooked so the center is nice and cool and the meat isn't falling apart before the meat even hits the heat.