This will cover the reasons why restaurant burgers taste so good. It will go into the many different things that restaurants do to their burgers to make them taste better than home cooking. It will hopefully expand your knowledge on what you can do to create your own burgers to make them taste better too, and fix them if they are really tasteless/bland.
Some restaurants keep it really simple by focusing on one key thing that they will do to make their burgers taste better, while others will do multiple things to one burger to make it taste the best possible in every way they know how. Generally, the restaurants that do more things to their burgers (considering that they know how to make these extra additions) the better their burgers taste.
All of the ways that restaurants use to make the best burgers in flavor, range from cooking methods to additional ingredients, but usually less more towards the addition ingredients.
Restaurants use good meat.
In order for burgers to taste the best, restaurants will use grounded meat with 20 to 30 percent fat (or more in some cases). The fat in burgers is what holds a lot of the flavor, and it is what makes burgers taste so good.
When beef or any other meat is grounded into meat for patties, it usually has atleast 20 percent fats, which greatly helps in the flavor of the burger. When the meat has been grounded, it spreads the fat distribution over the entire burger patty, giving the optimal flavor.
Restaurants use seasonings to make their burgers taste good.
The most basic and overlooked way that makes burgers taste good is the seasoning of the hamburger patty. Restaurants add these seasonings unto their hamburger patties on both sides before they are cooked. Some restaurants will not only season both sides, but also will season the outer edges to ensure maximum flavor.
Of course, restaurants use special seasoning many times that they will call a secret recipe, but the power of salt and pepper is also the only thing that certain restaurants stick with. A simple sprinkling of salt and pepper on the entire patty before cooking can be just as good. Also, restaurants will even take a brush with room temperature liquid butter, and dip the brush in the butter and cover both sides of the burger patty with it during cooking.
Besides salt and pepper, restaurants may use paprika, cayenne pepper, onion powder, or garlic powder mixed with the salt and pepper. Paprika is the most common.
Restaurants use good burger buns.
Restaurants don’t just focus on making their hamburger patties taste good with good seasonings and butter, they also flavor their buns. The buns are often flavored with a coating of butter before they are baked into buns or before they are toasted for as buns for a hamburger.
The butter on the buns prevent the buns from soaking and hiding the flavor. Putting the flavor in the buns ensures that every bite has good flavor, when the bread also is flavorful too. In fact, some restaurants actually will only primarily focus on using really flavorful specially made hamburger buns, while sticking with a basic salt and pepper seasoning for their patties.
Some restaurants will even make their burger buns in house so that they can put additional things in their buns like sugars and honey.
Restaurants use American cheese in their burgers.
Most restaurants stick with American cheese (that square sliced yellow cheese stacked in slices that are peeled off from one another). It is placed on the burger at the end of its cooking after it is flipped on the other side, and engraved into the burger patty after it has melted. It is the best cheese for making burgers taste the best.
Restaurants use good sauces for their burgers.
This is one thing that is overlooked, but crucial. Once the base of the burger is made, to get the most flavor a good sauce is used besides the regular ketchup. A lot of the custom sauces made by restaurants do have ketchup in it as the ingredients, but most of the time it isn’t only ketchup.
The same thing goes for the mayonnaise. Yes it is used, but only to be mixed into other ingredients. Restaurants will often use a combination of ketchup, mayo, and mustard, along with other ingredients to make a flavorful delicious sauce for their burgers to send them over the edge for greatness in flavor.
Restaurants use this sauce on the bottom and top of the hamburger’s buns to get the maximum flavor.
Restaurants use bacon on their hamburgers.
Bacon is a common and easy way to add a lot of extra flavor to a hamburger. This is used by restaurants to not only make some of the best hamburgers, but many other types of sandwiches too. The sauce, bacon, and cheese combo with the seasoned hamburger patty makes a simple hamburger taste really good.
Restaurants don’t take out the fat from their most flavorful burgers, and neither do they do it with their bacon. All of the strips of bacon are placed right on top of the cheese just like they are after being slowly cooked (fried).
Restaurants use flavorful and fresh vegetables.
Flavorful fresh vegetables are used as the veggies in the burgers by the best restaurants. The vegetables are usually really high quality and straight from a good farm. Instead of just chopping up the vegetables and putting them on the burger, restaurants will sometimes add more flavor to them by deep frying them, frying them, roasting them, or boiling them.
The vegetables are cooked in sauces that taste really good, to get more flavor out of them. Tomatoes are commonly done this way out of all the available vegetables. Onions are also done this way too to get more flavor.
Restaurants may even take vegetables and marinate them in a sauce mix overnight before using them the next day for veggies on burgers.
