Julius Skrrvin
I be winkin' through the scope
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/25/dining/how-to-make-a-great-burger.html?_r=0
How to make a great hamburger is a question that has bedeviled the nation for generations, for as long as Americans have had griddles and broilers, for as long as summertime shorts-wearing cooks have gone into the yard to grill.
But the answer is simple, according to many of those who make and sell the nation’s best hamburgers: Cook on heavy, cast-iron pans and griddles. Cook outside if you like, heating the pan over the fire of a grill, but never on the grill itself. The point is to allow rendering beef fat to gather around the patties as they cook, like a primitive high-heat confit.
“That is the best way to do it,” said George Motz, the documentary filmmaker who released “Hamburger America” in 2005 and has since become a leading authority on hamburgers. The beef fat collected in a hot skillet, Mr. Motz said, acts both as a cooking and a flavoring agent. “Grease is a condiment that is as natural as the beef itself,” he said. “A great burger should be like a baked potato, or sashimi. It should taste completely of itself.”
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George Motz, of the documentary film "Hamburger America," prepares a burger at his home in Park Slope, Brooklyn. CreditBenjamin Norman for The New York Times
Michael Symon, the ebullient television Iron Chef, a host of ABC’s “The Chew” and a proprietor of a small chain of Midwestern hamburger restaurants called B Spot, agreed. Mr. Symon’s restaurants each serve more than 1,000 hamburgers a night, he said, all of them finished on a flat-top griddle coated in beef fat.
“Use a skillet,” he said on a speakerphone, on the way to a flight to Detroit, where he is opening a B Spot. He was emphatic about the subject. “A grill is too difficult,” he said. “A hot skillet is what you want.”
We will return to the business of how to use that skillet, for — as Mr. Symon hastened to add — the surface on which you cook is only one component of hamburger excellence. There is also the size of the hamburger. There is the kind of meat used to create it. There is the bun. There is cheese or there is not. There are tomato debates, lettuce quarrels (on top or on the bottom?). There are questions of ketchup, of mustard, of pickles, of onions.
Some of these things are matters of personal taste, but for people who know burgers well, there is little disagreement about the best practices for making an exceptional one.
It is best to start at the beginning. Great hamburgers fall into two distinct categories. There is the traditional griddled hamburger of diners and takeaway spots, smashed thin and cooked crisp on its edges. And there is the pub- or tavern-style hamburger, plump and juicy, with a thick char that gives way to tender, often blood-red meat within.
The diner hamburger has a precooked weight of 3 to 4 ounces, roughly an ice-cream-scoop’s worth of meat. The pub-style one is heavier, but not a great deal heavier. Its precooked weight ought to fall, experts say, between 7 and 8 ounces.
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Mr. Motz uses a cast-iron skillet and flattens the burger in the pan rather than shaping.CreditBenjamin Norman for The New York Times
“Most of the time, 7 ounces is more than enough,” said Geoffrey Zakarian, the chef and owner of the National Bar and Dining Rooms, in Manhattan, which serves a fine hamburger of roughly that size. Mr. Zakarian cautioned against hamburgers of more than a half-pound in weight. “You want to get some heat to the inside of the burger,” he said. “You don’t want some giant, underdone meatloaf.Whichever style you cook, pay close attention to the cuts of beef used in the grind. The traditional hamburger is made of ground chuck steak, rich in both fat and flavor, in a ratio that ideally runs about 80 percent meat, 20 percent fat. Less fat leads to a drier hamburger. Avoid, the experts say, supermarket blends advertised with words like “lean.”
Too much fat, on the other hand, can lead to equally troubling issues, and a mess in both fact and flavor. “You get up around 30 percent fat,” Mr. Symon said, and there are risks. “Things happen,” he said. “Bad things. Shrinkage.” Home cooks should experiment, he said, with blends that contain from 20 to 25 percent fat.
Restaurateurs, sometimes driven by the marketing efforts of celebrity butchers, tout hamburger blends of chuck and brisket, hanger and strip steak, short rib and clod. In New York, Pat LaFrieda Meat Purveyors has built a carriage-trade business on the back of whimsical blends of beef for hamburgers, in particular the custom Black Label blend put together for Keith McNally’s Minetta Tavern, in Manhattan. The specifics of that blend are kept secret by Mr. LaFrieda, but he has allowed that about 30 percent of it is dry-aged New York strip steak.
Tom Mylan, one of the owners of the Meat Hook butcher shop in Brooklyn, occasionally cuts bacon into his burger blends, and sometimes accompanies these with chunks of Cheddar and sour-cream-and-onion-flavored potato chips. In his recent cookbook, “The Meat Hook Meat Book,” he calls that particular mixture the “Fat Kid Blend, World of Warfare edition.”
“If you’re an antisocial stoner agoraphobe,” Mr. Mylan writes, “this is for you. Fire up the Xbox and dig in.”
, everyone should have them 
