The ultimate cheeseburger
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What defines the “ultimate” cheeseburger according to Tim Hayward?
Food writer Tim Hayward, welcome back to the show.
Hello there.
Tim, uh our listeners know that you think a lot about the important things in life. We've discussed the ideal toasty, we've discussed precise ratios for the perfect rasher sandwich. Today we're going to talk about how to make the ultimate cheeseburger. Now, are you a fan of the posh kind of gourmet burger, Tim?
Well, I mean they've got their place. They're a thing, aren't they? And and you have the meat uh uh s sort of rare in an attempt to be like a steak. But to be honest, I'm really a fan of the proper sort of smash burger, something where actually it's much more about crushing the meat down and browning the outside. And if you do something like that, then you really do need cheese in there to give you some kind of lubricity for want of a better word. Yeah.
I like it. I like so what you're saying is basically like that you need the you need the alchemy of everything coming together, rather than th those posh burgers can be kind of Just a bunch of separate things, can't they?
Like that's in that's an incredible observation. That's absolutely true.
Only you only you would have that thing.
No. I mean you you could take you could take a good gourmet burger, you could take it up but you could deconstruct it on the plate like a posche chef and you'd have a nice plate of food. But that's not the oh God, what's there's a wonderful word for it? Gestalt. The combination of the things together is what makes it gorgeous.
Yes. This you see, we're talking about burgers, but this is such a hybrid conversation. You said gestalt, like this is this is quality stuff. So look, we'll get to the cheese, which you have very particular views on. But let can we talk about the meat first, the patty, as the Americans might say. So a lot of the posh burgers now, as you say, big and thick. I think a bit dry a lot of them like. Wha what what kind of patty are you talking about?
Well the big thick ones that are sort of almost more like a ball than like a flat surface.
How does the smash‑burger technique differ from thick, gourmet patties?
The idea with those is you get plenty of browning on the outside, what they call the Maillard reaction, which gives you that lovely caramelized, crunchy sort of exterior. But on the inside it's still going to be hopefully like nearly raw, nearly rare. And obviously lots and lots of restaurants don't want to serve it that way because actually it's quite a risky way to serve uh meat. Minced meat, you c it's very difficult to keep that rare. Uh sort of legally as well. Yeah. So um if y if if a if one of those is cooked to current restaurant standards it's probably gonna be pretty dry all the way through and that's a big old lump of meat to chomp away on. Whereas the the s the the thinab a smash burger is it's they're terribly, terribly fashionable at the moment.
So basically you take a small ball of the same mints You put it on the on the on the griddle and you smish it out really, really thin.
Yeah.
And it's it's the secret of, dare I say it, the Big Mac. Which is actually, you know, those two pucks of meat in there, they're never about being juicy. They're about being on either side of a kind of sauce and a kind of cheesy stuff that together give you the juiciness, the meaty flavour. But they don't rely on it being juicy in the middle of the meat. It's much easier to cook, much cheaper and easier to produce.
Okay, so you're not thinking about the quality of the meat you're getting here or wagyu or anything else. It's it's it's back to alchemy with the cheese. Now Yeah. Uh, you say the classic cheeseburger doesn't need to involve actual cheese.
Okay, so so the Americans the Americans uh have a kind of a milk mountain, I guess like any country that does dairy does. Uh and what they tend to do with it is is we produce an enormous amount of cheddar, which is fine as our commodity cheese. But uh but uh in the States they make various grades of cheese product. Um and they're all g they're all given different names depending on how little uh cheese they actually contain. And there's something called ch ch cheese like non dairy product, uh which is the kind of rubbery
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