NEVER Grill Your Burgers Again — Try This Old FARM Trick

Find All my recipes in one place! Otis Granger Cook Book: https://otisgranger.com/ There's a burger on a grill somewhere right now — thick, round, flaring up every time the fat drips. It's coming off black outside and raw in the middle, or gray and dry all the way through, with two stripes on it where it touched the grate. It isn't your fault. Somebody handed you a grill and told you that's where hamburgers go. In the kitchen drawer of almost every farmhouse I clear there's a heavy piece of cast iron with a wooden knob, sometimes shaped like a pig. The family says it's a doorstop. It's a bacon press — and in our house it pressed a lot more than bacon. I'm Otis. Forty years of barns and estate auctions across the Midwest, and the kitchen is the last room I clear. Saturday night was hamburgers for eleven people on two pounds of beef, every one with a crackling edge, and my mother never put one on a grill. In this one: 1 — the meat: 80/20, cold, and why a pound makes four 2 — the ball: loose, and never salt the meat 3 — why the grill fails a burger (stripes, flare-ups, and a raw middle) 4 — the pan: cast iron, screaming hot, no oil 5 — the smash: once, right away, and never again 6 — the flip: scrape, don't lift, and keep the crust 7 — the bun: steamed right on top of the burger 8 — what she did with the onion, which I've never once seen in a modern kitchen Paper-thin onion piled on the raw ball and smashed right into the meat in a hot skillet. It fries in the beef fat and turns sweet and crisp, and a pound of hamburger feeds more people. A Depression-era trick. That's the farm trick. Honest, said plainly in the video: 160°F for ground beef, no guessing. Use the guard on a mandoline. And if you love a thick backyard burger, keep it. Were burgers in your house off the grill or out of the skillet — and what did your mother stretch the meat with? Tell me, and tell me her name. I read every one.