Classic Beef Burger
A thick pub patty with a dimple pressed into the middle so it stays flat, cooked once on each side and never pressed. Nothing is mixed into the meat but salt.
- Prep
- 15 min
- Cook
- 12 min
- Resting
- 3 min
- Total
- 30 min
- Serves
- 4
- Revisions
- 1
Allergens
- Cereals containing gluten
- Eggs
- Milk
- Mustard
- Sesame
- Sulphites
Named from the ingredients as written, including those carried in from sub-recipes. This is not a guarantee — check the labels on what you actually buy, and note that a product’s recipe can change.
Ingredients
Serves
Patties
To build
Method
Patties
Divide the mince into four and shape each into a patty about 2.5cm thick and slightly wider than the bun, handling it as little as possible.
Press a shallow dimple into the centre of each with your thumb. Meat contracts from the edges as it cooks and pushes the middle up into a dome; the dimple is what cancels that out, and without it the burger will not sit flat in the bun.
Salt and pepper both faces just before cooking, never earlier. Salt on standing mince draws out water and starts to cure the surface, which makes the texture springy and sausage-like.
Nothing else goes into the meat — no egg, no breadcrumb, no onion. Those belong in a rissole. A burger is beef, and the only reason to bind it would be mince too lean to hold itself together.
To build
Butter and toast the cut faces of the buns in a dry pan until golden, and set them aside.
Patties
Heat the oil in a heavy pan over high heat until it shimmers.
Lay the patties in dimple side up and cook for 4 minutes without touching them.
Do not press them with the spatula. Every press squeezes out the juices onto the pan, where they burn, and there is no way of putting them back.
Flip once, lay a slice of cheese on each and cook for a further 3 to 4 minutes for medium, or until the centre reads 71C/160F.
Mince must be cooked through — unlike a steak, its surface bacteria are distributed all the way through it — so a pink middle in a burger is a different proposition from a pink middle in a steak.
Rest the patties for 3 minutes on a warm plate.
To build
Mix the mayonnaise and mustard and spread it on both bun halves.
Build in this order: bottom bun, sauce, lettuce, tomato, patty, gherkins, onion, top bun. The lettuce under the tomato is a barrier that keeps the bottom bun from going soggy.
Nobody has rated this recipe yet.
Sign in to rate this recipe. One rating per person, and you can change it.
What to expect
- Taste
Beef, salt and browned crust, with the sharpness of gherkin and mustard cutting it. A good burger tastes of very few things clearly rather than many things faintly.
- Aroma
Searing beef and toasting bun. The cheese adds nothing to the smell and a great deal to the eating.
- Texture
Coarse and yielding, with a distinct crust. The whole difference between this and a smash burger is that here the interior is the point and there the crust is.
- Sound
The patty hitting a hot pan, and nothing else. Notably not the hiss of juices being pressed out, which should never happen.
- How the flavour moves
Crust and salt first, then beef and fat, then acid from the pickle at the end resetting it for the next bite.
- Serve it
Hot patty, cold lettuce and gherkin, warm toasted bun.
- Goes with
Chips, and something pickled. A cold lager or a simple red.
Cook's notes
- Difficulty
Beginner, with three rules that are all about restraint.
- Cost
Low to mid.
- Equipment
A heavy frying pan or griddle and a probe thermometer.
- When to make it
Any evening.
- Best season
Tomatoes are the only seasonal thing in it, and a winter tomato is worth replacing with something else entirely.
- You know it is done when
A deep brown crust across the whole face rather than a browned ring around a grey middle, and juices running clear when pressed at the edge.
- And it feels like
Firm with give. Springy means it was overworked; crumbly means it was too lean.
- Food safety
71C/160F at the centre, probed from the side. This is the one place where a burger differs seriously from a steak, and it is worth knowing why rather than just being told. Wash hands and board after handling raw mince.
- Where it goes wrong
- Pressing the patty with a spatula, which squeezes the juices onto the pan.
- Salting the mince in advance, which cures the surface and makes it springy.
- Mixing egg, breadcrumb or onion into it, which makes a rissole.
- Lean mince, which cannot be saved.
- No dimple, so it domes and will not sit in the bun.
- Not resting it, so the juices end up in the bottom bun.
- If it does go wrong
Domed: no dimple. Dry: too lean or overcooked. Bouncy: overworked. Falling apart: too lean rather than too little binder — resist adding egg. Bottom bun soggy: put the lettuce under the tomato and toast the bun properly.
- Making it ahead
Shape the patties several hours ahead and keep them cold and unsalted.
- Keeping it
None. Cooked patties keep a day and are not the same thing.
- Reheating
Poorly.
- Freezing
Raw shaped patties freeze for two months with greaseproof between them.
- Leftovers
A cold patty in a sandwich with mustard.
- Scaling it
Cook in batches so the pan stays hot. Four is a comfortable maximum in one pan.
- Substitutions
Any 15 to 20% mince. Chuck is the classic and short rib mince is better still if a butcher will do it. Do not use anything sold as lean or extra-lean; it produces a dry burger and there is no technique that fixes it.
- Dietary swaps
Contains gluten and sesame from the bun, milk from the cheese, and eggs, mustard and sulphites from the mayonnaise. The patty itself contains only beef, salt and pepper. Nut free as written.
- Shopping for it
A butcher will mince chuck coarsely, which is noticeably better than supermarket standard.
- Keeping the cost down
Standard mince rather than premium, and the bun matters more than most people expect.
- Sustainability
Beef has the highest footprint of any common protein by a wide margin, and 175g a head here is a substantial portion of it. This is one of the few dishes where a plant patty is a genuine like-for-like — a burger is a shaped disc in a bun with sauce and pickle around it, and the format carries a substitute far better than a stew or a ragù does. If it stays beef, the useful lever is frequency rather than sourcing.
- Nutrition
Rich, and honestly so.
- Worth it?
Three small acts of restraint — do not mix, do not salt early, do not press — and a homemade burger stops being a disappointment.
Where it comes from
- Origin
The United States, late nineteenth century.
- Also called
Hamburger, after Hamburg — via the Hamburg steak, a patty of chopped beef served without bread.
- Said out loud
Straightforward.
- What the name means
From the city of Hamburg, not from ham. The 'burger' suffix as a productive word is a much later back-formation.
- History
Chopped beef patties travelled to the United States with German immigrants as Hamburg steak, and someone put one between two pieces of bread. Several places claim to have been first, in a period between roughly 1885 and 1904, and the records are thin enough that the question cannot be resolved. What is clear is that the sandwich form spread through fairs, lunch counters and diners and was fully established by the 1920s.
- Why it matters
The most exported dish in this collection, and one of the very few that is genuinely global.
- When it is eaten
Any time. Cooking for people, cooking for one, or feeding teenagers.
- The traditional way
A patty of ground beef cooked on a hot griddle and served in a soft bun.
- How it changed
From thin and griddled, to thick and grilled as a restaurant aspiration, and now back towards thin with the smash burger.
- Regional variations
Endless. This site also has Smash Burgers, which is the thin griddled style and a genuinely different dish rather than the same one made worse.
- How this version differs
The dimple, the salt applied only at the pan, and nothing mixed into the meat. All three are small and all three are why homemade burgers usually come out domed, springy and grey.
- Sources and credit
Disputed and unresolvable.
Mayonnaise
Beef Tacos
Chicken Burger
Chilli con Carne
Meatloaf
Smash Burgers
Steak Diane
American
Main courses
Lunch
Dinner
Beef