The trick to how restaurants cook burgers so fast has to do with the equipment that they use to cook the burgers, and the methods that they use too. When most people think about cooking fast, they think of speed in the terms of moving physically fast. However, when it is time to actually cook the burgers, waiting for them to cook just has to happen. This process can’t be sped up.
Trying to cook burgers really fast by using really high heat, will only result in cooking the outside of the burger without fully cooking the inside. So this isn’t what restaurants do to cook their burgers faster. Their burgers still have to cook at the correct temperatures and times to make them good quality.
So, how do restaurants cook burgers so fast?
Grills
The trick to how restaurants cook their burgers so fast is with the usage of commercial grills. These grills allow a large number of burger patties to be placed on the grill simultaneously so that they can cook for many people at once. Usually flat-top grills are used to cook burgers fast, but other types of grills can be used by restaurants as well.
These grills can be very large and come as one whole piece, or they can be bought as pairs or more of the same grill to be used as backup if needed for faster cooking and extra room. Restaurants always try to make sure that they have enough room to cook all of their food at once for their guests.
This allows all of the food to finish nearly at the same time, which looks good in the guests’ eyes, as it makes the restaurant look really skilled, fast, and effecient.
These grills are set at the highest temperature possible to ensure that the burgers cook as fast as possible (but not at the cost of burning the outside of the burger with an undercooked middle).
Basically, if a bus full of kids shows up to eat at their restaurant, they are able to throw every patty on the grill without losing out on time by having to wait for room for more patties to cook. This let’s the restaurant cook food faster for bigger orders without losing out on time due to their number of single orders ordered in a small amount of time.
If one burger is placed on the grill to cook, instead of 30 burgers all at once, then the time doesn’t change for how fast a restaurant is able to cook those burgers. The only time that would be taken from this is preparing each burger patty to be placed on the grill. This is solved by a method called preparation.
Preparation
Preparation is how restaurants cook burgers so fast. This means that they will already make their burgers by having all of the grounded meat made into the patties before it is time to actually cook them on the grill. This cuts down the cooking time for mass orders. It allows a restaurant to only have to reach into a container and place the patties on the grill to cook, instead of having to make each patty into a ball first to make them, then smash them.
This is how restaurants prepare for their busiest hours, and are able to quickly cook their burgers for a large number of people all at once.
Restaurants will prepare the meat by grinding it in a meat grinder, forming the grinded meat into balls, weighing the meatballs of grounded meat, and molding them beforehand into burger patties. From here, they can be placed into containers to be grabbed quickly when it is time to cook, and placed on the grill quickly to cook.
Cooking Methods
Restaurants will even use different cooking methods by purposely making their burger patties thinner so that they cook faster. Because the patties are made thinner, the high heat penetrates to the center of the burger faster and easier, which results in a burger cooking faster altogether. Restaurants will even smash the patties on the grill to make them thinner just so that they cook faster.
Some restaurants use panini press grills in combination with thinner patties to cook their burgers really fast. Burgers cooked this way can finish in as little as 2 and a half minutes. These thin patties can be stacked on other thin patties to make bigger burgers.
Because the thin patties are cooked separately like this, they can all be laid unto a large grill, as mentioned earlier, all at once. This means that a restaurant is capable of making a thicker bigger burger faster than someone that would just cook a thicker patty on a grill for a big burger. The time is reduced significantly, because the patties are thinner, they all are cooking at the same time, and they all finish cooking at a lesser time.
If all of the thin patties finish in 2 to 3 minutes cooking for example, then they can all be stacked unto a bun in nearly that same alloted time. This makes it superior in efficiency and speed when compared to a lot of thicker patties cooking on the grill all at once.
This is due to the heat penetrating to the middle of the burger faster, which also allows the thin patties to be cooked more safely at higher temperatures. The optimal temperature for these thinner patties goes up, which means that restaurants can make burgers faster by using this cooking method.
Near the end of the meat patty cooking, restaurants will use conveyor belt conventional ovens to send their burger buns through to quickly toast them for the final steps of making the burger. These ovens are also very large, which follows the same cooking methods in comparison to the size of their grills and the number of orders. A lot of buns have to be made at one time, so they may use one big oven to send all the bread through, or many ovens to get the same job done in a timely manner.
The burger buns have to be sent in to cook last to prevent the bread from drying and becoming hard while waiting, if they are cooked before the meat.
