Glorious Food: What Makes a Great Burger?

A growing part of London’s dining scene revolves around restaurants trying to reinvent the classic burger and chips. Hugely successful chains like Five Guys, Honest and Byron dominate the city centre but why pay £10+ for a glorified Big Mac that doesn’t even come with chips?

Burger Meat

Is a burger just a burger? Consider the variety available just in different meats and add to that the options of ground textures. The finer grinds of McDonald’s hardly compare to the dense mincemeat of more premium products, which are generally supplied by local farms with high standards of animal welfare. Family butchers Great British Meat Co. claim that “when you eat a Byron’s burger you’re supporting provenance, welfare, and more importantly you’re supporting British farms.”

Burger Size

Burgers are not health food. These luxuries are not valued for their nutrition but for their taste, so larger portions can be very attractive to big appetites.

Five Guys in particular upholds the principle that size matters, providing two patties as standard alongside very generous portions of chips. While a Big Mac contains 563 calories a Five Guys burger of two patties holds around 700 and the bacon cheeseburger carries a mighty 920. Even the Five Guys “little fries” portion of chips has 716 calories.

It can be confusing to see cash-strapped students recommending a place where a meal can cost as much as in a normal restaurant but when you consider that that meal means you don’t have to eat for the rest of the day the logic seems clearer.

Chips

Burgers need chips. The problem is that the boom in gourmet burgers has turned the fatty patty into an aspect of nouvelle cuisine presented on paper with perhaps a slice of gherkin. Chips pad out the dining experience, so restaurants can make a nice income charging extra for a serve as a separate “side”.

To justify the expense they should be hand-cut chunky chips with rosemary salt rather than thin and soggy things sold by fast food chains.

 

Bread

Everyone has been tempted by a Wetherspoons-style deal of a burger, chips and pint for under a tenner but the downside is usually a fluffy and thick loaf of a bun.

Walk into a Five Guys and you will see the care with which staff turn each bun on a hot grill to lightly toast the outside immediately before serving. Even McDonald’s takes this simple step to maximise taste and texture so that the bread is a wrapping rather than padding.

 

Serving Rare

Serving burgers rare is an ongoing issue for diners and caterers alike. The traditional steak hache found in many French restaurants is usually served rare despite being formed of minced burger meat that would normally have to be cooked through.

A report by the Advisory Committee on Mircrobiological Safety of Food (ACMSF) advises that cooking at 70°C for two minutes at the centre of the meat is sufficient to achieve the required reduction of pathogens, as an estimated 10 million bacteria are reduced to just 10 after cooking.

That means that if the right equipment and expertise are available burgers can be served rare with minimal risk although young children, the elderly and people with weak immune systems are advised to have burgers cooked through.

Byron Burgers is investing in specialised equipment for cooking rare burgers safely. “We have always served our hamburgers medium so they are pink and juicy but recognise that some customers prefer their hamburgers cooked medium rare,” the chain says. “Recently, we have identified a particular type of cooking equipment which delivers an even more consistent and better quality medium-rare hamburger. Some of our kitchens already have this and we’ll be installing it in the remainder of our restaurants very soon.”

Milkshakes

Burger chains have a fixation on milkshakes to add to their customers’ fat intake, and many like Five Guys and Byron provide creations such as blended Oreo biscuits suspended in mixes thickened with ice cream. A McDonald’s chocolate milkshake contains half your daily sugar intake and a quarter of your saturated fat intake but, once again, this isn`t health food and should be enjoyed as an indulgence.

On the other hand one of the joys of a burger restaurant over a fast food chain is that it is licensed. That means you can have a beer with your burger even if it may come at a hefty £4.50 for a small tin of hipster pale ale.

 

By Stewart Vickers @VickHellfire

 

 

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