• last year
Here's how to make the best hamburger recipe ever by the co-founder of Honest Burgers, Tom Barton...
Transcript
00:00 I'm Tom from Honest Burgers, I'm one of the co-founders and I'm going to show you today how to make a humble beef burger.
00:06 Alright, so like every good burger, it starts with great beef.
00:14 This is ours here, we use two cuts, both readily available in a decent butcher's.
00:19 We've got chuck steak and rib cap.
00:22 One of the things we do which is quite unique in our butchers is we don't mince our burger,
00:28 which is quite, that's kind of a common ground is a minced burger.
00:32 And when you mince something, you basically squash it through a tiny little hole, right?
00:37 And when you do that, you squash a lot of the goodness out of the burger and you break the texture down.
00:42 So a lot of burgers will be minced like twice, three times, four times sometimes.
00:47 The more you mince it, the less natural the texture is, the more rubbery the texture is.
00:53 What we do is we chop, just like kind of steak tartare or ham and steak hash,
00:59 you end up with a really natural, lovely texture and you keep all that really amazing fat and all that amazing juiciness in there.
01:06 So all you need at home is a very sharp knife, chopping board and like I said, decent amount of chuck steak and rib cap.
01:14 So I've got one kilo's worth here, so I've got about 800 grams of chuck and 200 grams of rib cap.
01:21 And the best way to chop it nice and fine is to start slicing it really, really thin.
01:28 The thinner you go now, the easier it will be to get it chopped really, really finely.
01:33 Kind of like the thickness of rastra bacon, if you can.
01:36 So I've sliced those up nice and thin and then this is our chuck steak.
01:40 So this is a kind of, you know, standard stewing steak, slow cooking, really, really good for burgers as well.
01:49 It's got a nice flavour, but yeah, it's quite tough, so you need to do something with it.
01:54 Obviously what we're doing now is we're chopping nice and fine.
01:57 There is a bit of natural fat in chuck, sometimes more than others, obviously, it's a natural product,
02:03 but we're getting the majority of our fat from the rib cap.
02:08 And you can see the chuck has got a bit of fat running through it, but like I said, most of it's coming in from the rib cap itself.
02:17 Loads of fat, that can be sometimes 50%, if not more.
02:21 We've sliced it nice and thin.
02:23 I appreciate this might seem like a lot of effort to go for a burger, but trust me, it's worth it.
02:29 You get a really amazing steak-like texture.
02:33 So what you've got to do now is you take in those long, thin strands
02:37 and you're basically just going to cut them really, really fine.
02:42 You want to just go as much as you can really, you can't really overdo it at this stage.
02:48 Because you need to get it nice and fine, you need to get that fat nice and fine.
02:52 So when you mix it together with the leaner bit, with the chuck, it all kind of blends together.
02:59 So that's what you're kind of after.
03:02 We think that a decent burger literally needs nothing more than good quality meat and salt and pepper.
03:12 And really, really, really important that you don't add salt at this stage or pepper.
03:19 Because what ends up happening is the salt will literally just suck the moisture.
03:24 So we don't want to do that with a burger, and it will happen in a burger in a couple of hours if you leave it in.
03:30 That's when you start to break the texture down, you start getting a really rubbery texture.
03:35 And worse than that, obviously you're sucking out all of the really lovely flavours.
03:39 So the other good thing about these cuts of meat is they're not crazy expensive.
03:43 One of the best things about burgers is you really don't want to put expensive meat.
03:48 Probably a butcher you might be paying six quid, six pound a kilo, something like that.
03:57 So now we've got our meat cut up nice and fine.
04:00 You need to give it a good mix because we've got loads of fat in the rib cap, but not a huge amount in the chuck.
04:06 So you want to get that fat evenly distributed.
04:09 Get it nice and stuck in, and it's good to do with your hand as well, alright?
04:12 If you use your hands, the heat from your hands, they help the fat kind of start to melt a little bit.
04:18 And that's what we're using as our glue.
04:20 So what I'm going to do now, this is an American technique, it's called smashing.
04:24 So you take a ball, we're going to say that's roughly 150 grams.
04:28 I know that because I've made many of these in my life.
04:31 And you basically just bang it together.
04:34 By doing this, again you're getting a bit of heat in there.
04:38 You're going to get the fat starting to glisten a little bit, so you know the fat's kind of melting.
04:43 And then as soon as we're confident, take that onto our board, in between the paper.
04:51 And then one of these, you can pick up one of these online, they're about 25 quid.
04:55 Nice firm press.
04:58 And then we've got our first burger right there.
05:04 So we're going to get about seven patties out of this mix, we did about a kilo.
05:16 Really important now, we go put them in the fridge.
05:19 They need to set, like I say, if you try and cook these now, they're going to fall apart.
05:22 So we need to put them in the fridge, get them to set, four hours, six hours, something like that.
05:27 And then they'll be ready to go.
05:29 Alright, so burgers are ready.
05:32 They've been chilled in the fridge, so they're nice and firm, they're going to hold together when we cook them.
05:38 I'm going to say something controversial now.
05:41 Even on a beautiful hot sunny day like today, I'd still be cooking my burgers inside in a frying pan.
05:49 It's the best way, I really mean that.
05:51 If you're going to go to all that effort on texture, on flavour, on sourcing good quality meat,
05:56 you put it in a barbecue, you're not going to get all that flavour in there.
05:59 So we want to get a pan super hot like this, you drop the burger in, and it's going to literally sear all that flavour in.
06:06 And you don't want to just get this really dark crust on the burger, that is like gold, alright.
06:11 You want to keep that in there, so it keeps all the juiciness, all the flavour, all the reasons for us chopping, not mincing.
06:17 It's going to keep it in there.
06:18 Barbecuing just doesn't work like that.
06:21 So you don't even have to put any oil in the pan, we're just going to go straight in,
06:24 because there's so much fat in the burger it's going to hold.
06:27 And now we're going to season very liberally with salt and pepper.
06:35 And you do have to go really big on the salt and pepper, because there's nothing running through there.
06:41 So you're only going to have a salt crust on the top and a salt crust on the bottom.
06:45 Trust me when I say it, you've got to go quite big on the salt and pepper.
06:50 We're going to just do a really humble beef burger today, so there's not crazy amounts going on in there.
06:56 But because we've got this amazing beef, we're going to get all that flavour through.
07:00 So we've just got some shredded little gem lettuce on a toasted glazed bun.
07:06 We're going to be cooking this for about three minutes each side.
07:09 That's going to give us a really nice medium pink in the middle.
07:13 Honest, we do that, we go down to medium rare as well.
07:18 It is pretty complicated serving medium rare burgers and serving medium burgers.
07:23 We go to a hell of a lot of effort, right the way back to the farms, to the abattoirs,
07:27 to the cutting plants, to our very own butchers to make sure that it's safe for us to do medium rare burgers.
07:35 For me it's the only way. Obviously, it's completely up to you how you cook your burger.
07:40 I'm going to just give this a little scrape now.
07:44 You should see a really, really lovely dark brown sear, which is exactly what we're after.
07:50 And then, like I said, another big load of salt, load of pepper.
07:56 So what we've got here is just a reduced, really, really reduced onion relish.
08:02 We put a load of brown sugar in here. This is red onion.
08:06 You can use white wine vinegar, red wine vinegar, balsamic vinegar.
08:10 You need something in there to kind of counteract all the sugar.
08:13 So I remember seeing my dad cook a burger on a barbecue and he would be pressing it down as hard as he could.
08:20 God knows where that's come from, that technique. It's mental.
08:23 You've got all this lovely fat, lovely flavour and moisture in the burger.
08:27 You've seared it that side. As soon as you start pressing down now, you're literally squashing all of the lovely flavour out of the burger.
08:35 So you've got to treat it with a bit of love. You can see it's just about starting to bubble at the top now.
08:40 So I'm going to take this off now.
08:44 So we're going to leave that burger to rest now. And you look at it, it's really lovely juices coming off there.
08:48 It's nice and medium.
08:50 We're going to move over to our chips. So chips for us are just as important as the burger.
08:55 We were never going to serve a frozen chip with our burger.
08:58 We've always made them from scratch. So these are our chips.
09:03 So these are homemade in our prep kitchen.
09:06 And you notice we put the skin on. We like quite like the kind of rustic look and we love the taste of the skin, you know, nice and crispy.
09:13 And we cook these in our prep kitchen and then we do like a final fry in the in the in the restaurants to get them nice and crispy.
09:20 This is our seasoning. We put this on our chips straight away.
09:24 So fresh out of the oil and all you've got in here is rosemary.
09:28 So fresh rosemary, lemon zest and Maldon sea salt.
09:32 And you can make this at home really, really easily. All you need is a pestle and mortar and load of time.
09:36 And you literally just grind away as long as you can.
09:40 You can get a really lovely colour, lovely flavour and it's a real nice kind of citrusy rosemary smell.
09:45 Works amazingly with chips. So I'm going to drop these in now.
09:49 So it's got to be really careful with a fryer.
09:52 You can make these on the stove at home. Just be really careful.
09:56 Make sure you've got a thermometer in there because we all know what happens when you heat oil up too hot.
10:01 So we've got some lovely resting juices going on the burger now.
10:04 We know that's going to be nice and pink. So be very gentle. Pop it on there.
10:10 So we've got lettuce, beef, chopped beef, not minced, red onion relish and our toasted bun.
10:18 And then what burger would not be complete without some chips.
10:23 So we're just going to drain the oil.
10:26 Decent amount of rosemary salt on there.
10:32 It's really important that you season straight out of the oil so you get it nice and coated.
10:42 Nice generous portion there.
10:47 There we go. That's our beef burger with rosemary salted chips.
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