Ignoramus25655 said:Crafting Mom said:Ignoramus25655 said:I like the taste of fast food hamburgers. I'd like to know if I can
simply buy ground meat, form it into patties, and fry them. Somehow,
from my past experience, it results in completely different sort of
taste and texture. So, what is the secret? How could I make fast food
style hamburgers at home? Any ideas?
look at the list of ingredients on a Mickey Dee's burger or whatever fast
food place you like. Most of them add lots of salt, msg, and a bit of
corn syrup to their sauces and meat mixtures.
Thanks, McD claims to use 100% ground beef, which I am sure does not
account for taste additives.
There are no additives in McD's burgers. It's only meat. Their sauces
may well contain all the effluents of hell, but the burgers are just meat.
To get their texture, you need to make the burger more dense than is
the usual way for home cooks. The way they're formed will determine
how "fast food-like" they are.
Start with the notion that most chains freeze their patties. All of
them form them by extrusion which means that they're smooshed together
under a lot of pressure. You can duplicate that at home by roughly
mushing it together for a minute or so.
The next big thing is the shape of the patty. Most home cooks make
them so they're thin at the edges and thick in the middle. That's
exactly backwards. Shape the edges to be about 1/2-inch thick and the
center between 1/4" and 3/8" thick. As the patty cooks, it shrinks
because it's rendering fat and water-based juices, and because the
protein is shrinking. It'll shrink to a constant thickness as it
cooks. You can do this same shaping thing for any size burger (within
reasonable limits) to get that uniform thickness.
Don't smoosh on it with a spatula while it's cooking. That makes
juices leak out and done not one good thing for the burger.
The rest of the presentation is obvious. Bun. Condiments. Lettuce,
tomato, etc.
Happy burgers.
Pastorio
