Why Is My Burger Still Pink?

Here we will talk about why your burger is still pink after it was supposedly cooked thoroughly. We will also give the results of our experiment with cooking two burger patties with a fair amount of thickness, using some basic differences. We chose to do this experiment and make the burgers thick in order to help solve why your burger is still pink in the middle after you have tried different techniques and methods.

Our experiment involves two different cooking methods with time and temperature as the main factors for both of the burger patties. It explains and proves why your burger patty is still pink, instead of giving you a technique to use without a clear explanation to why you should do it. Hopefully this will help you better understand why your burgers are end up this way; so you can fix any burger burger patty that is still pink after cooking on the future, regardless of the thickness.

Temperature

The temperature isn’t everything. Low or high heat can still result in a pink burger. The temperature isn’t the only thing that affects the cooking of the burger. It can still come out pink regardless of high or low temperature. Either way from the testing that we have done with cooking burger patties that are thick on low and high temperatures, we found that one of the only things that really effects the burger still being pink in the middle after cooking is the amount of time that it cooks.

The burger patty that we tested this with was about an inch in thickness. For our experiment we tried cooking the thicker burger patty at a lower temperature (275 degrees Fahrenheit) for an extended period of time (3 minutes on both sides) and the patty was still very pink underneath the outer layer.

For a patty this thick for a burger, we had to cook the patty for triple that time just to get majority of the pink gone (10 minutes on one side and 10 minutes on the other). In the end, when the inside was finally all brown and no longer pink, the burger had not only lost a lot of its juice and tenderness, but it also was dryer than a regular good quality burger.

Afterwards another burger patty was cooked with around the same thickness (it was actually slightly more than an inch in thickness but about the same as the first), but at a higher temperature. Instead of cooking the burger slower at 275 degrees Fahrenheit, this was done at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. The burger was cooked for 3 minutes again on both sides. The result was exactly the same as the first burger, with the inside being very pink.

So from this, we can see how the temperature that the patties cooked for had little effect on whether the burger would be pink or not on the inside after a specified time. They both yielded the same results for the alloted time, and they both looked the same on the inside.

Time

So why is my burger still pink?

The reason why your burger is still pink has do with the time more than the temperature, that the burger is cooking for. Regardless if the burger is being cooked to rare, medium-rare, medium, or well done; if the burger doesn’t cook long enough, it will still be pink in the middle once it is ‘done’ cooking.

Granted that a medium-rare or rare burger will look pink inside, but the point is that you need to cook the burger for a longer period of time for it to longer be pink.

For our experiment, the burger that was cooked at the lower temperature with the same thickness had a harder time cooking to the point that it was no longer pink, even though it was given more time to cook at the lower temperature. Also, the burger still had some sections that were still significantly pink, while other parts were no longer pink at all. Even after flipping the burger to try and reach these spots, they took forever to brown.

The conclusion for cooking the burger at a lesser temperature is that it resulted in more pink spots in the burger, even after cooking for a long time.

With the burger that cooked at the higher temperature, the burger was a lot easier to deal with, and did not experience uneven cooking with pink spots left after it finally turned brown in the middle. This is because the temperature was high enough to penetrate to the center of the meat better, as opposed to cooking it at a lower temperature.

The burger also did not lose its tenderness and juicy flavor like the same burger did that was cooked at a lower temperature for an extended time to achieve the same effects of the burger no longer being pink. Both of the burgers were cooked on the exact same grill.

Evenly Cooking For A Less Pink Burger

Besides the fact that the higher temperature yielded a more evenly cooked burger, it can still be a factor for your burgers if other things besifes the temperature are effecting the patty. The problem could be that the meat is just simply not cooking evenly, because of the way the patty is formed on the grill.

Use a burger press to evenly smash down the burger patty so it cooks evenly across the entire burger before it is placed on the grill to cook.

Why is my well done burger still pink?

A well done burger, technically speaking, is a burger that has an internal temperature of atleast (or around) 160 degrees Fahrenheit inside of the burger. At this point the well done burger would be brown inside and not pink. If the outside is cooking faster than the inside, then you are possibly searing the meat.

Searing the meat is a technique done to make a desirable crust on the outside of the meat, which doesn’t cook the meat effectively on the inside. In order to avoid a well done burger that is still pink in the middle, the temperature needs to be lowered. Like any food, there is a point where the temperature is just simply too high and the cooking time becomes almost irrelevant.

Aim for 350 degrees Fahrenheit to 400 degrees Fahrenheit for a 1 inch thick burger. This will allow the inside to cook, without the outside becoming well done first or cooking too fast.