Home › Beef Recipes › Best Hamburger RecipeOkay, so calling it the best hamburger recipe is a little bit presumptuous of me. And I know that there are lots of hamburger recipes out there and that everyone has their own best hamburger recipe.
But this one is my own personal favorite. It’s very simple, but it has a little something extra than a burger made just with ground beef. But not so much that you get tired of it.
And it has my favorite ingredient: garlic. Just enough to give the burger that mouthwatering taste, not enough to be overpowering at all. Yum!
So here it is, my own best hamburger recipe.
My Best Hamburgers
Preparation Time: 15m Cooking Time: 15m Total Time: 30m
Servings
Serves 6.
Ingredients
2 lbs ground beef
2 cloves garlic, very finely minced
1/4 cup onion, very finely minced
1 tsp Montreal steak spice
Instructions
- Preheat the grill to high heat.
- Mix all the ingredients together in a bowl.
- Don’t overwork the meat or mix it with your hands – use a spoon. Otherwise, you can make the fat in the meat melt and squish the meat too much, which will make your burger more dense and less juicy.
- Separate the beef into 6 to 8 even portions.
- Form each portion of beef into a patty. Again, don’t handle the meat too much, and form the hamburger patties gently. You want to press them down very gently.
- Making the hamburger patties is one of the most important parts in hamburger recipes. For tips on how to do it just right, check out our article on how to make a hamburger.
- Make the hamburger patties as flat as you can, and between half an inch and an inch thickness. The smaller the bun, the thinner the patty should be.
- When the grill is hot, place the hamburger patties on the grill. Cook them on one side until the beef is browned 1/3 of the way up, about 5-8 minutes. Flip the burgers, and cook for another 5-8 minutes, until they’re just firm.
- If your burgers are 1/2 an inch thick, they’ll only need 5 minutes or so per side. Thicker burgers, an inch thick, can take more like 8 minutes per side.
- You can also monitor the internal temperature with a meat thermometer. Hamburgers should be cooked until they reach an internal temperature of 165F.
- Don’t move the burgers until it’s time to flip them. They’ll start off sticking to the grill, but they’ll release eventually.
- Serve the burgers on buns with any toppings and condiments you like!
Tips
- For this recipe, you can use lean ground beef or not. Fat always adds a bit of flavor, but even if you use lean meat, the onion, garlic and spices will give your hamburgers an awesome flavor.
- When cooking hamburgers, it’s best to use fresh ground beef that was never frozen. When it thaws, the beef sometimes ends up kind of wet and doesn’t stick together as well. You can fix that with breadcrumbs, but then the burger won’t be as flavorful.
- Hamburger patties have a tendency to round up as they cook. Make them as flat as you can, and then press an indentation in the center of the burger. It’ll help keep the burger flat when it cooks.
- Hamburger patties shrink as they cook, so make the patties wider than your buns. The more fat in the meat, the more the patties will shrink.
- This recipe is for a well-done burger. When meat is ground up, all the bacteria on the surface ends up inside the meat, and it can multiply. So to be safe, ground meat should always be well-done.
- If you have very freshly ground beef from a reliable source, like yourself or a good butcher, you can cook the burger for 4-6 minutes per side to get a medium rare burger.