by Filmgirl37

Created on: February 23, 2007   Last Updated: September 14, 2010

Cooking the perfect burger is an art. The first thing to do is to decide what kind of meat or burger patty material that you wish to use. If everyone you are cooking for is a meat eater, you can use ground beef or ground turkey. If someone you are cooking for is a vegetarian, you can use a combination of soy products and vegetables to create a patty mixture.

The next step is to ensure that your patty is compressed into a uniform thickness throughout. If you are an experienced cook or a chef, you can do this manually. But, if not, you can use meat pounders or other automatic tenderizing tools to assist you. The more uniform your patty is, the easier and more evenly it will cook and the better it will look at presentation time.

Once you have formed even patties, the next step is to decide what heat source you wish to use. Season permitting, you can grill your patty on an outdoor grill and, if the weather is not cooperative, you can grill indoors using a cast-iron grill pan. An alternate method is to fry your burger in a regular frying pan using a few tablespoons of extra-virgin olive oil. A lot of people prefer the grilling method because if done properly this will create a less greasy, more smoky flavor and nice uniform lines on both sides of the burger.

If you choose the grilling method, you must place your patties in the grill pan or on the grill a few inches apart and cook them evenly on both sides. To cook a standard sized patty all the way through usually takes about 5-6 minutes per side on a medium to high heat. To get the nice lines, commonly associated with grilling, the trick is to turn your patty a quarter to a third turn a few times during the cooking process.

Should you decide to fry your burgers or cook them in oil, preheat your frying pan on a medium to medium-high heat BEFORE placing the extra-virgin olive oil in the pan. When you do place the oil in the pan, apportion it according to your grade of beef. The leaner the grade, the more oil you need to use; the fattier the grade, the less. While a leaner grade of meat is healthier, it requires more help from the oil to cook than does a fattier grade which can oftentimes be cooked either in its own fat or the grease from that fat.

Keep in mind, too, that whichever grade of meat that you use, you still need to use the oil sparingly and to consider the type of pan that you are cooking in. Using too much oil will create splattering during the cooking process and will create excess grease that will negatively

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