I honestly don’t think it makes a hell of a lot of difference. And I don’t smash them right away. I make a ball, let that fry up a little bit, flip and then SMASH the hell out it, flip, and then gently smash again. But I don’t think it matters much – that’s just my routine. I like to squeeze a bit more fat out of them to really get them fryin. Half the other time, I smash it on the counter between two sheets of wax paper and just fry & flip. And you can flip as much as you want. “Only flip once” is just superstition. The biggest thing for me is just not to mix salt INTO your meat – it completely changes the texture from a hamburger to a sausage. Makes it rubbery. That doesn’t necessarily make it BAD, it’s just not a texture I want from a hamburger.
I open the package of freshly made 1/4lb. Angus burgers from the supermarket down the street. Perfectly portioned, perfectly made. Unless it is a social gathering around the grill, I see little advantage in making my own.
I have a bag of those. (Well, a couple left in the bag.) They shrink more than homemade, and homemade taste better.
But they’re good when I’m lazy. (Also, I don’t want to thaw a pound of meat for one burger.)
If I’m just having a hamburger, I’ll stop at a fast food place. When I eat hamburger patties at home, they are usually as part of a chili size. So the subtleties of taste are going to be lost under the mound of chili and cheese and onions.
Smashburgers are fine, but I prefer a chunkier burger. As someone mentioned upthread, tastes vary.
Then your tastes are different from mine. Because I’ve NEVER had a restaurant burger better than a home made one. And our homemade technique is dead simple (gently shape ground meat into a burger shape, drop in hot frying pan, which you’ve sprinkled with salt and pepper) I rarely find restaurant burgers to be close to as good as home made.
Of course. Do note that I was responding to someone telling me not to smash them and passing on dubious wisdom about why not to do that. For a thick burger, you don’t really smash. I was specifically describing thin fast food style griddled burgers with crispy edges. My technique with a 1/3 burger is different.
I can think of at least 3 places around here that do burgers that will beat any home-made attempt, hands-down. Had one for lunch on Monday, in fact. That’s also discounting the fact that for a lot of us, the wastage involved in producing a one-off makes home-made much more expensive than eating out.
I can say this as well. In fact, it can be difficult to get a rare hamburger in a restaurant.
What wastage? Buy as much meat as you plan to eat. I guess I sometimes have a leftover bun go stale, but they freeze pretty well. I think we typically have zero waste on burger nights.
Last summer for the first time I got a burger press. (I always felt disdain for these as one more unnecessary gadget).
It was a huge game changer! Especially when making a lot of burgers at a time (for a big crowd), it is SO much faster. 30 burgers? No problem.
But more than the time saving, it makes them all uniformly round, and of uniform size, so they all cook evenly. It’s not just nonsense. It really does help. (Do get waxed paper squares, though, so you can get them all out quickly and have almost no cleanup).
Buns go stale, lettuce goes bad, tomatoes are a joke to keep, and I don’t know the recipe for Tartan’s dressing.
Yeah I never have found a REALLY good frozen patty.
My usual approach is to mix my ground beef with an egg (it’s best to remove it from the shell, BTW) along with pepper, onion flakes, and instead of salt, I use a splash of soy sauce. Very tasty.
I use two pie plates, which naturally nest into each other, to do this – just put a square of wax paper or parchment paper in one plate, place the ball of ground beef on top, place another square of paper, and then the other pie plate. If you smash the top plate straight down, you wind up with a perfectly round quarter- to third-inch patty depending on the amount of beef. (This is similar to Johnny L.A.'s method, too.)
Buns freeze, I don’t usually serve lettuce or tomato when I make burgers at home (when I get them at a restaurant I pull them off the burger and eat them as a mini side salad) and I have no idea what Tartan’s dressing is, but ketchup keeps for a long time.
But yeah, I guess if you want to cover your burger with a lot of stuff, it makes sense to buy them from a place that has a good supply of fresh versions of all that stuff.
I think it’s because my favorite form of burger is “plain” that I care a great deal about the quality of the meat. And I buy better burger meat than most places use.
That can be a key point. The barer the burger, the more the little things count.
For the record: Tartan. Best burger for many and many a mile in any direction.
Ditto, except I make larger burgers. Smashburgers cook rapidly, so you’re basically looking at about 2-3 minutes per side for a juicy medium or medium-rare. Sure beats fussing around seemingly forever trying to get it cooked through. I converted my son, who likes to cook. He was into pub-style burgers, but when you’re cooking for five people, it’s just too much trouble, IMO.
I’m trying to be good. 
When my husband was alive, he lived for burgerfries, 5 days a week if he could. We tried every version, even bought a grinder to make our own hamburger, and every seasoning and kind of meat. We tried Morton’s Steakhouse burgers, which was one pound of hamburg mixed with an egg, salt and pepper, and 2 TB. of tomato juice. I was unimpressed. My favorite burgers are Burger King junior Whoppers. I do like burgers made from ground lamb or ground pork or ground chicken, properly seasoned, more than beef. Ball Park Franks makes frozen ‘flame grilled’ hamburger patties that are very tasty, indeed!
Yeah for me and my tastes, that’s venturing into non-hamburger territory once you start putting egg and bread crumbs in there (I know you aren’t doing the bread thing). The texture isn’t right — once again for my tastes — with any type of binder. It’s simple stuff. Just meat and some seasoning on the outside. But all those types of burger concoctions can be good. I won’t say no to them if offered—I’ll just not make it that way.
I was responding to @solost who felt his homemade burgers didn’t match up to his own expectations -
Not my own preferences. Some people want to replicate the flavor of a specific sort of burger, or fast food, even if you or I might want something that tastes more of the specific ingredient. Since they went on to talk about being happy with Costco ground sirloin burgers, I went with my best guess: fat, salt, smoke. Or other additives, as MSG has been mentioned in the thread already, which IMHO is no harm, no foul, I use it as well if I make a dish that’s lacking that certain zazz.
And I do know of several burger joints that do a better job than I do myself, specifically the Owl Cafe of NM fame - I just can’t quite match up to their griddled green chile burgers, although I do well enough.