A French approach to the hamburger

An acquaintance of mine , a San Francisco chef who is also a skier and an occasional model, was flown by a national magazine to a photo shoot in the Chilean Andes. He immediately hit it off with a French model on the trip ,and was about to go in for the kill when he let slip what he did for a living. “ Oh .“she reacted”. You are American chef? You make zee ‘amboorger?”
Typical French snobbery , right? We have the best and most innovative chefs and dishes in the world right now! Thomas Keller with his Butter- Poached Lobster! Mario Batali and his Fennel Pollen- Dusted Sweetbreads! Wylie Dufresne and his Foie Gras Terrine …with White Anchovies! As a matter of fact we even sent Alice Waters to Paris to teach those Frogs how to grow and cook organic! How dare they!
But the minette had a point. The burger is, inescapably, our national dish the way Couscous is the national dish of Morocco and Tunisia and Paella that of Spain.
Gumbo is certainly the most unique, deeply flavored and complex dish to come out of America (link)and a good clam chowder is unbeatable ,but these are both regional creations. A serious case could be made for barbecue , which is original to this country and has its advocates , who are often as loony and pedantic as Civil War reenactors, but again ( and the comparison should be a tip-off) it is really a dish native to those states that lost the War of Northern Aggression.
Everyone in this country eats hamburgers , though. Even vegetarians , the poor things, consume them in the form of veggie burgers or soy burgers or whatever combination of textured vegetable protein and nuts, mushrooms and sawdust they are made of. They’re the center piece of picnics and grills , the lifeblood of fast food ,and a feature of every vaguely American restaurant ,even the finest white tablecloth joint. The ’21 ‘ Club in
New York sports ‘the ‘21’burger with choice of potatoes’- for $30!
If this is true , then why is it so hard to get a good hamburger in America?

The fact is,in a restaurant a burger gets more abuse than a road-gang convict. In a fast-food joint or a bar kitchen it sits in a pool of its own blood for days or is flung right out of the freezer and-clack!-onto the griddle, where the cook smashes it with the bottom of his spatula , flattens it with a weight to cook it faster., and slaps it on a puffy , oversize bun.
And in finer restaurants it’s not much better. The quality of meat and garnish might be superior to the humble demotic kitchen and the price tag higher, but still…
In my own restaurant, you could tell when a customer ordered a burger by sound alone; by the extra hard slam of the refrigerator door and the extra hard slap of the meat on the cutting board. Trained cooks, especially cooking school graduates, usually hate cooking hamburgers and will put as little care as possible into their execution.Along with their names on their school-issue chefs jackets, it might as well say-‘I went to cooking school , so I don’t cook burgers.’
So what’s the solution? A French approach to cooking the hamburger. By that , I don’t mean butter-basting it and serving it with celeriac puree or Sauce Perigord , nor do I suggest stuffing it with foie gras and short ribs and serving it with pommes soufflés,as Daniel Boulud does.
By a French approach I mean internalizing a certain French attitude, that of the rigorous purist who takes pride in his cultural heritage, who employs the exactitude of the academie francaise grammarian, the unbending watchfulness of the douanier and the sensual precision of the affineur.
France , after all , is a country that has mandated by law the ingredients in a baguette.
Therefore , I propose the following strict guidelines for making a good hamburger which I hope one day to see passed into law:

A burger is composed of only fresh ground chuck ,salt and pepper:
A little olive oil on the outside is permitted, but if it the burger is seasoned with dried herbs, Cajun seasoning, Lawry’s seasoned salt, or is cut with milk, buttermilk, onions, garlic, teriyaki sauce ,breadcrumbs, tomato juice, White Zinfandel, Cabernet Sauvignon , or bbq sauce , it’s a patty or swiss steak or Salisbury steak or a meatloaf ,but it’s not a hamburger.

A burger is cooked to between 115 and 130 degrees internal temperature
A burger beyond medium is prison food.
We were astonished to see, on the Food Network’s Build a Better Burger Contest, that only one of the finalist cooked her burgers below well done. No wonder they needed all that filler.


A burger is about 6-7 ounces in weight and 1-1/2” to 2’ high before cooking
A thinner , smaller hamburger will inevitably overcook .

A burger is not exactly fast food
A burger is best if it comes to room temperature before cooking , is cooked over medium, not super high heat and is allowed to rest in a warm place for half of its cooking time before serving. This whole process might take as long as an hour.

There should be an equal proportion by volume of bread to meat
Bread is cheap and meat is expensive. A burger should not be a tiny patty of meat on a huge puffy bun. The bread should be roughly the size of the cooked patty and the combined height of the two pieces of bread should equal the height of the cooked patty.

A burger is not a piece of carbonized meat
Those tv shots of grilled food enveloped in orange flame look exciting but the truth is that the grill should touch the meat as little as possible. As Gary Danko says, when the flame touches the meat, that’s carbonization. I prefer my burgers sautéed., and will turn them three or four times during cooking so they get gentle caramelization.