When you stick four food editors in a kitchen and tell them to create the perfect burger, you're bound to wind up with four wildly different ideas of just what makes a burger so perfect. (That's exactly what happened when we set out to come up with the world's best chocolate chip cookie, after all.)
So instead of competing against each other this time around, we made it our mission to create the very best version of your four main burger categories: thick, thin, veggie, and oozing with cheese.
Lauren, a native Californian, was dead set on recreating an In-N-Out double-double—one that even Shake Shack enthusiasts would appreciate. Jump to Lauren's burger journey.
June's focus was a thick, flavorful hunk of ground beef. She set out to make a burger so good, you'd want to eat the patty on its own. Jump to June's burger journey.
Makinze, the bravest (and sweetest) person in our test kitchen, and a self-professed cheese connoisseur, volunteered to tackle a type of burger none of us had ever tried to make: the cheese-filled Juicy Lucy. Jump to Makinze's burger journey.
Lena is a vegetarian most days, so she tasked herself with creating the ultimate veggie burger with a texture that wouldn't get mushy (and would even please meat eaters!). Jump to Lena's burger journey.
Buns, toppings, and sauce are all important, sure, but they can also trick you into thinking that a mediocre burger is good. And let's face it, there are a lot of not-so-great burgers being flipped on the grill during summer. For this challenge, our main focus was on the meat itself, which meant that everyone (besides Lena) ate a lot of it. All for the sake of YOU, our reader. You're welcome.
So we want to know: Which one are you most looking forward to making this summer? Let us know by voting below. And if we've inspired you to embark on your own burger quest, we've got you covered. Our personal journeys to burger greatness (below) are filled with tips (Kraft cheese melts best!). Plus, we created a no-fail guide to cooking your burger exactly to your liking. Once you get the patty perfect, here's how to choose the most epic toppings. You're gonna kill it this grilling season.
VOTING IS NOW CLOSED. AND THE WINNER IS: LAUREN'S DOUBLE-DOUBLE! READ ABOUT ALL FOUR COOKIES AND FIND THE RECIPES BELOW.
Lauren's Burger: The Double-Double
by Lauren Miyashiro
When you ask a person what their last meal would be, they act like it’s the toughest question they’ve ever heard. For me, it’s easy. I choose a cheeseburger.
Normally, I go for a big and juicy medium-rare patty. But because I’m pregnant and undercooked meat is a big no-no (😩), I decided to go the thin and crusty route for this challenge. My goal: to recreate an In-N-Out Animal-Style Double-Double.
Luckily, In-N-Out isn't super secretive about their "animal-style" technique. Slathering the patty with yellow mustard while it’s cooking is public knowledge at this point. The difficult part is creating patties that are thin enough to stack. Here’s what I learned is best: Divide a pound of ground beef into six patties. Season both sides of the patties, but don't overdo it—the mustard is salty. While cooking the burgers, use a metal spatula and some muscle to flatten the patties as much as you can. (This also helps develop the crust.)
As for the sauce, I tried (and tried...and tried) to match the taste of In-N-Out’s secret spread. But I failed miserably each time. So I gave up and turned to Chick-fil-A instead. You can’t beat mayo + barbecue sauce + honey mustard + lemon juice.
Caramelized onion (with a splash of vinegar), American cheese, iceberg lettuce, a slice of tomato, and a potato bun are the other components. Admittedly, it's not the most authentic copycat, but damn, it’s a good burger. Last meal worthy, for sure.
June's Burger: The Bacon-Beef Burger
by June Xie
When it comes to making the perfect burger, flavor is the name of the game. If an ingredient isn't flavorful, don't use it. A truly good patty should be delicious enough to eat on its own without any condiments: crackly crunchy crust giving way to juicy flavors and tender textures on the inside. With this in mind, I was inspired by Scott Slater's 50/50 burger to create my perfect burger.
The 50/50 burger is 50-percent beef and 50-percent bacon. Because salting your beef mixture during the mixing stage causes proteins to coagulate prematurely, most recipes call for only salting the patty surface right before cooking in order to avoid producing rubbery burgers. Although fine in theory, this superficial layer of seasoning never cuts it for me: The patty often tastes bland and flat and just too beefy. The 50/50 burger doesn't have this problem: Fifty percent of the patty mix is already smoked, cured, and perfectly seasoned. Minced by hand, the plump dice of fatty, salty pork melts into the patty as it sears away on a hot cast iron skillet, drawing out the natural sweetness of both meats while checking the gaminess of lean beef.
I kept the rich patties to a manageable (and truly binge-able) size of four ounces each to optimize the crust-to-meat ratio. One tip I learned along the way: Avoid mashing the patty mixture too much to keep it slightly aerated. This ensures that your burger maintains a tender structure.
With such a flavorful patty in hand, I recommend keeping the toppings simple: a dollop of homemade special sauce with all my favorite condiments and a few thin slices of naturally sweet and spicy yellow onions. You could even swap buns for crunchy, refreshing iceberg lettuce to make the whole thing gluten-free.
Makinze's Burger: The Best-Ever Juicy Lucy
by Makinze Gore
When I was tasked with making the Juicy Lucy, I thought, “Cool, I’ve never had a Juicy Lucy before, so...great.” The burger was created in Minnesota, and I felt that warranted a trip to Minnesota. Alas, that didn't fit into my grocery budget, so instead I watched countless videos and read up on many recipes. At its core, this is a simple burger. The main goal: Get melty cheese inside the patty. No frills. No fuss. Toppings aren’t even that important.
I technically did six rounds of testing for my burger, but round two caught on fire so we aren’t counting it. So, for my five versions, the main two variables I needed to perfect were the patty size and the cheese.
Let’s talk about cheese for a second—after all, this is a Juicy Lucy. You can’t just put any type of cheese in there. You need one that melts quickly and stays melty. For my first couple attempts, I used a generic, off-brand American cheese. The first turned out melty, but it was so thin, I thought it needed more cheese. Adding more only made the cheese too hard to melt without overcooking the burger, though. I decided the cheese slices themselves were too thin. Kraft American cheese is the perfect thickness, and, let’s be real, it's heavily processed. It's perfect. One slice of cheese, folded into four squares and stacked on top of each other, is the ideal method.
And so it was time to perfect the patty size. Juicy Lucys are thin, and each burger needs two patties. First, I tried dividing a pound of ground beef into eight 2-ounce patties. Simple, I thought, but those turned out to be too thin. When biting into the burger, the meat was lost. There was nothing there. So I altered it to yield only six patties, making each patty 2.67 ounces—a strange number that feels really picky, but truly you just need to eyeball dividing the beef into six equal balls.
I have a major problem with burger patties that are too small for the bun. It really irks me, ya know? Meat shrinks as it cooks, so instead of being picky on the weight of the patties, I decided to focus on their diameters. In testing, I found that patties flattened out to 5” shrink to the perfect size to fit a standard hamburger bun. This yields a really nice thin patty that only needs a total of five minutes to cook to medium. It’s all around perfect.
Lena's Burger: The Meat Lover's Veggie Burger
by Lena Abraham
As a very infrequent consumer of meat, I’ve eaten a lot of veggie burgers. The truth is, most of them suck. They're often super dense, mushy in the center, and under seasoned. So I made it my goal to create the complete opposite of that—a patty that's full of umami flavor, perfectly seasoned, and most importantly, NOT MUSHY.
Few foods in the vegetarian world contribute as much satisfying umami goodness as mushrooms. My recipe uses two types: fresh shiitake mushrooms and dried porcini mushrooms. Together, they make up the flavorful foundation of my meatless patties.
These mushrooms, along with roasted onions (more umami!), red quinoa, and black lentils make up the bulk of the burger. (Life hack: You can hydrate the dried mushrooms and boil the quinoa and lentils in the same pot.) Add a dash of soy sauce (dare I say…more umami), an egg white to bind, and that’s about it!
I wanted to keep the flavors simple, but these patties would be delicious with a number of add-ins: Chopped fresh or dried herbs work, as do many spices, really. That’s what’s so great about veggie burgers: Unlike their meaty counterparts, each element of the patty can be seasoned individually so that the final product is seasoned all the way through, not just on the outside
To avoid the mush-factor, I opted for two thin, small patties rather than one large one. That way, you get that nice caramelization on the outside without a thick layer of uncooked patty in the center. Plus, double the patty means double the cheese! Topped with some crunchy lettuce and lots of brightly flavored special sauce, it’s sure to satisfy vegetarians and meat-lovers alike. See ya never, mushy veggie burgers. ✌️
