📚 Burger Guides & Blog
Deep, original guides on everything from how much beef to buy to nailing a crispy smash crust. No filler — just what actually helps you cook better burgers.
Technique & reference guides
The Complete Smash Burger Guide
This is the deep version. If you want the six-step sequence at a glance, the Smash Burger Hub has it laid out start to finish — this guide is what sits underneath those steps: why the smash works, what the beef and the surface are actually doing, and the details that separate a lacy, crispy-edged patty from a grey one.
Read →The Complete Grill Burger Guide
Grilling adds smoke and char that no skillet can match — but it's also where burgers most often go wrong: dry, flare-up-charred, or falling through the grates. Here's how to grill a juicy, flavorful burger every time.
Read →Burger Equipment Guide
Burger gear is one of the easiest places to waste money, because almost every problem it claims to solve is really a heat problem or a technique problem. Only three tools change the burger itself: something heavy and flat to cook on, something thin to get under the patty, and something that tells you the temperature. Everything else is convenience — genuinely useful convenience in some cases, a drawer full of single-use plastic in others. This guide splits the difference honestly, with a price tier for each tool and a plain list of what you can skip.
Read →Specialty Diet Burger Guide
Here's the good news if you eat gluten-free, keto, dairy-free, paleo, or Whole30: a burger is one of the most diet-friendly meals there is. The patty itself — quality beef and seasoning — fits almost every plan. It's only the bun, the cheese, and a couple of sugary sauces that need swapping. This guide shows exactly what to change for each diet.
Read →Technique
Best Meat Ratio for Burgers
The number on the ground beef package — 80/20, 85/15, 90/10 — is the ratio of lean meat to fat, and it matters more than almost anything else for how your burger turns out. For most burgers, 80/20 is the answer. Here's why, and when to choose something else.
Read →Griddle vs Grill for Burgers
Griddle or grill isn't really a question of which is "better" — they make genuinely different burgers, and the right one depends on the style you're after and how many people you're feeding. Here's the real tradeoff, so you can pick with intention instead of just using whatever's in the yard.
Read →How to Keep Burgers Juicy
This is the get-it-right-from-the-start page. Juiciness isn't something you rescue at the end — most of it is decided at the shop and on the counter, before the beef ever meets heat, and the rest is about not undoing that while it cooks. Here are the seven rules in the order they matter, and the reasons behind them.
Read →Burger Seasoning Guide
Burger seasoning has one rule that matters more than every spice blend combined: <strong>where and when the salt goes</strong>. Get that right and plain salt and pepper beats most 12-ingredient "burger blends." Here's the timing rule, why surface-vs-mixed-in changes the texture of the meat itself, and what to reach for when you do want more than salt and pepper.
Read →How Long to Cook Burgers
Everyone tells you to cook a burger to 160°F (71°C) — nobody tells you how many minutes that actually takes. Here are real times per side, broken down by how thick your patty is and how you're cooking it. Treat the clock as your guide and the thermometer as the referee: times get you close, temperature tells you when it's done.
Read →Frozen & Make-Ahead Burger Patties
Freezing patties is the single best prep move for burger night — you can shape them weeks ahead and cook them straight from the freezer without thawing at all. But it only works if you freeze them right and thaw them safely, and there is one rule with no exceptions: never thaw meat on the counter. Here's the whole workflow, from shaping to the grill.
Read →How to Reheat Burgers
A reheated burger has two enemies: a patty that dries into a puck and a bun that turns to rubber. Both come from the same mistake — microwaving the whole assembled burger. Take it apart, reheat the patty gently with a little steam, toast the bun separately, and rebuild. Here's each method ranked, with times, temperatures, and the food-safety number that matters.
Read →Air Fryer Burgers
An air fryer makes a genuinely good burger: even, hands-off, no splatter, and it cooks frozen patties without thawing. What it will not do is give you a real seared crust, because crust comes from meat pressed against hot metal and an air fryer only blows hot air. Here are the times and temps by thickness, plus how to get some of that crust back.
Read →Burger Temperature Chart
One page, every burger temperature you need, in Fahrenheit and Celsius. The headline numbers: ground beef is safe at 160°F (71°C), poultry burgers at 165°F (74°C), and reheated leftovers at 165°F (74°C). Below that you'll find the full doneness scale, what each level looks like, and why ground beef plays by different rules than steak. Print it and stick it on the fridge.
Read →Smash Burgers
Smash Burger Mistakes to Avoid
Smash burgers are simple, but a few small mistakes are the difference between a crispy, lacy-edged masterpiece and a gray, dry hockey puck. Here are the seven errors people make most — and how to fix each one.
Read →Smash Burger Ball Weight
How much beef you roll into each smash ball decides everything downstream — how wide it smashes, how much crust you get, and whether you build singles, doubles, or triples. The classic answer is a 2 oz (about 55–60g) ball, and here's why that size is the smash sweet spot, plus when to go bigger or smaller.
Read →Best Griddle Temperature for Smash Burgers
Heat is the number-one variable in a smash burger — get it right and you get lacy, deep-brown crust; get it wrong and you get gray, steamed meat. The target is a genuinely screaming-hot surface, roughly 425–475°F (220–245°C). Here's how to hit it, how to check it, and why "hot enough" matters more than any other step.
Read →Buns
Best Burger Buns
This is the decision page: you know what burger you're making, and you need to know which bun to buy. Below is the match-up for every common build, the three questions that decide it, and where to go deeper — because toasting, brioche-versus-potato and gluten-free each have a page of their own.
Read →Best Bun for Smash Burgers
A smash burger puts more demands on a bun than almost any other burger: thin, crispy-edged patties, plenty of rendered fat, melty cheese, and usually a griddled onion or sauce. The bun has to be soft enough to compress with that thin patty but sturdy enough not to dissolve. For most people, the answer is a potato bun — here's why, and what else works.
Read →Brioche vs Potato Buns
Brioche and potato are the two most popular "upgrade" burger buns, and they're more different than they look. Brioche is rich, buttery and a little fancy; potato is soft, sturdy and gently sweet. Neither is universally better — the right one depends on the burger. Here's the honest breakdown.
Read →How to Toast Burger Buns
Toasting the bun is the highest-return, lowest-effort upgrade in all of burger cooking. It takes 30 seconds and does two jobs: it adds toasty, buttery flavor, and it builds a barrier that keeps juice and sauce from turning the bun to mush. Here are the four ways to do it, ranked, plus the one thing that matters most.
Read →How to Prevent Soggy Burger Buns
A soggy bun that falls apart in your hands is one of the most common ways a genuinely good burger gets ruined — and it's entirely preventable, because it all happens during the build. This is the build-it-right page: seven things to do at the toaster and the assembly line, in order, so the bun is still holding at the last bite.
Read →Best Gluten-Free Burger Buns
Gluten-free burger buns have gotten genuinely good, but they behave differently from wheat buns — often denser, drier, and more crumbly — so a few technique tweaks make the difference between "great" and "falls apart." Here are the styles worth knowing, how to handle them, and the simple lettuce-wrap fallback that never lets you down.
Read →Toppings
Best Cheese for Burgers
Cheese is the most important burger topping, and the "best" one comes down to a trade-off between two things: how well it melts and how much flavor it brings. American wins on melt; sharp cheddar wins on flavor; several others own specific burgers. Here's how to pick, and how to get any of them to melt properly.
Read →Best Onions for Burgers
This is the variety page: which onion to actually put in your basket. Yellow, white, red, sweet and shallot are not interchangeable — they differ in sugar, in bite, in how they behave under heat, and in how long they last in your kitchen. Here's what each one is genuinely good for on a burger, and how to buy and store them.
Read →Raw vs Grilled Onions
Raw or grilled onion is one of those small burger decisions that completely changes the eating experience. Raw brings crunch, freshness, and bite; grilled brings sweetness, softness, and depth. Neither is better in the abstract — they suit different burgers. Here's how to choose, with a clear side-by-side.
Read →Best Pickles for Burgers
Pickles do a specific and important job on a burger: they cut through the richness with a hit of acid, salt, and crunch. Get the pickle right and every bite tastes brighter and more balanced. Here's which pickle to use, how to cut it, and the trick to keeping it from making your bun soggy.
Read →Best Bacon for Burgers
Bacon on a burger only works if it's cooked and cut right — floppy, chewy bacon slides out the side and undoes the whole point, which is a crisp, smoky, salty crunch in every bite. Here's the best bacon to buy, the best way to cook it, and how to lay it so it stays put.
Read →Fried Egg on a Burger
A fried egg turns a burger into something richer and a little decadent — the runny yolk becomes a sauce that coats everything. It's a brunch-burger classic for good reason. The key is a runny yolk and a set white, plus a build that doesn't collapse into a mess. Here's how to do it right.
Read →Best Cheese for Smash Burgers
Ask any smash burger devotee and the answer comes back fast: American cheese. It's not nostalgia — the way American melts is uniquely suited to a thin, crispy smash patty. Here's why it wins, when to reach for something else, and the exact timing that gets you a perfect drape of melt.
Read →Entertaining
How Much Ground Beef Per Person for Burgers
The short answer: plan on about 1/3 pound (150g) of ground beef per adult for burgers. But appetite, patty size, kids, and whether you're serving sides all change the math. Here's the full breakdown — and a calculator that does it for you.
Read →Burger Party Checklist
A burger party is one of the easiest parties to throw — and one of the easiest to fumble by forgetting one dumb thing (it's always the buns or the propane). This is the complete checklist: what to buy, what to prep, what to have ready, and when to do each piece, so the host actually gets to enjoy the party too.
Read →Memorial Day Burger Cookout
Memorial Day is the season opener, and that changes what can go wrong. The food is the easy part — the thing that actually derails a late-May cookout is the equipment, which has been sitting untouched since last September. This guide is about waking the grill up, cooking for cooler weather, and shopping for what's genuinely in season yet.
Read →4th of July Burger Cookout
The 4th is the hottest, biggest cookout of the year, and those two facts drive everything. This guide is about the two things that only really bite on July 4th: feeding a genuinely large crowd off one grill, and keeping food safe when it's 90°F in the yard and dinner has to survive from the afternoon through to the fireworks.
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