The Real Reason Your Grilled Burger Is Dry
Everyone from vegans to carnivores has likely enjoyed some form of burger in their lives. And while veggie burgers don't cook quite the same way as real meat, (Inspired Taste recommends cooking them in a skillet, as grilling them risks them falling apart, as One Green Planet tells us) companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible are certainly trying to make non-meat burgers as close as possible to the real thing. But in the meantime, the proof is in the meat.
According to a guide from Ziploc, burger can be cooked to rare, medium rare, medium, medium well, and well done. When cooking real meat burgers, you have to be incredibly precise in order to get it to the level you prefer. But some common mistakes could leave you having to scrap that meat in favor of new patties, leaving you hungry, annoyed and burgerless. And no one wants that for you, not even the veggie eaters. Here's why yours may be dry and what you can do to salvage it.
Best burger tips
There are many factors that go into creating the perfect burger, but the most important ones are those that help give it its juicy, delicious texture that's expected with every bite. Is a dry burger even worth it?
One way to avoid a dry grilled burger is with your meat choices. Taste of Home recommends grabbing ground beef (as opposed to ground sirloin, round or chuck) with higher fat content (70-30 lean-to-fat ratio, to be exact), as leaner meat will be drier.
While choosing the right meat is important, the kicker comes when you work with the meat and additions to give it whatever flavor you're wishing to infuse. "Over-handling the meat" can make it "dense" and "dry", creating more of a rock than a meal component, and ruining your flavor-boosting efforts. Taste of Home's suggestion? "Combine any add-ins in a separate bowl first," writes Nicole Doster. "Then, gently work the mixture into the ground meat by pressing it in with two forks. Stop as soon as the ingredients look evenly dispersed."
Armed with this knowledge, we hope you're able to go forth and grill up some phenomenal burgers for you or the whole family!