Here's how to make the best hamburger recipe ever by the co-founder of Honest Burgers, Tom Barton...
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
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 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 on 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 So 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.
01:37 So I've sliced those up nice and thin and then this is our chuck steak.
01:41 So this is a kind of, you know, standard stewing steak, sort of slow, slow cooking.
01:47 Really, really good for burgers as well, it's got a nice flavour.
01:51 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.
02:12 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.
02:47 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.
03:01 So 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.
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 That's 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 pounds 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 and 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.
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.
04:41 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.
05:15 We did about a kilo.
05:16 Really important now we go put them in the fridge.
05:19 They need to set.
05:21 Like I said, if you try and cook these now, they're going to fall apart.
05:23 So we need to put them in the fridge, get them to set.
05:25 Four hours, six hours, something like that.
05:28 And then they'll be ready to go.
05:30 Alright, so burgers are ready.
05:32 They've been chilled in the fridge, so they're nice and firm.
05:35 They're going to hold together when we cook them.
05:39 I'm going to say something controversial now.
05:42 Even on a beautiful hot sunny day like today,
05:45 I'd still be cooking my burgers inside in a frying pan.
05:49 It's the best way, I really mean that.
05:52 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.
06:00 So we want to get a pan super hot like this.
06:03 You drop the burger in and it's going to literally sear all that flavour in.
06:07 And you don't want to just get this really dark crust on the burger.
06:11 That is like gold, alright.
06:12 You want to keep that in there.
06:13 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.
06:19 Barbecuing just doesn't work like that.
06:21 So you don't even have to put any oil in the pan.
06:23 We're just going to go straight in because there's so much fat in the burger it's going to hold.
06:28 And now we're going to season very liberally with salt and pepper.
06:34 And you do have to go pretty 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 So 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 kind of humble beef burger today.
06:55 So there's not crazy amounts going on in there.
06:57 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.
07:07 We're going to be cooking this for about three minutes each side.
07:10 That's going to give us a really nice medium pink in the middle.
07:14 Honest, we do that. We go down to medium rare as well.
07:19 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, to cutting plants, to our very own butchers
07:30 to make sure that it's safe for us to do medium rare burgers.
07:35 For me, it's the only way.
07:37 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 and lovely flavor and moisture in the burger.
08:28 You've seared it that side.
08:30 As soon as you start pressing down now, you're literally squashing all of the lovely flavor out of the burger.
08:35 So you've got to treat it with a bit of love.
08:37 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.
08:46 And you look at it, it's really lovely juices coming off there. It's nice and medium.
08:50 We're going to move over to our chips.
08:52 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.
09:00 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.
09:08 We quite like the kind of rustic look and we love the taste of the skin, you know, nice and crispy.
09:13 We cook these in our prep kitchen and then we do like a final fry in the restaurants to get them nice and crispy.
09:20 This is our seasoning.
09:23 We put this on our chips straight away, so fresh out of the oil.
09:26 And all you've got in here is rosemary, so fresh rosemary, lemon zest and Maldon sea salt.
09:32 And you can make this at home really, really easily.
09:34 All you need is a pestle and mortar and load of time.
09:37 And you literally just grind away as long as you can.
09:40 You can get a really lovely colour, lovely flavour.
09:42 And it's a real nice kind of citrusy rosemary smell.
09:45 Works amazingly with chips.
09:47 So I'm going to drop these in now.
09:50 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.
10:06 So be very gentle, pop it on there.
10:11 So we've got lettuce, beef, chopped beef, not minced, red onion relish and our toasted bun.
10:19 And then what burger would not be complete without some chips.
10:24 So we're just going to drain the oil.
10:29 Decent amount of rosemary salt on there.
10:35 It's really important that you season straight out of the oil so you get it nice and coated.
10:46 Nice generous portion there.
10:48 And there we go, that's our beef burger with rosemary salted chips.
10:51 [MUSIC PLAYING]
10:54 (upbeat music)