Making a Hamburger

Exploing Meat Science Making a Hamburger

Practical Activity

Hamburger making process at the workshop

These student attended an oorala Youth program Experience day

Their Meat Science workshop provided an opportunity to make hamburgers. This video gives you an overview and explains the process the students followed. 

Now it is your turn to make hamburgers. These students were given a recipe, but perhaps you have your own.

At the very least you  will need:

    • minced meat
    • breadcrumbs
    • salt, pepper and herbs to suit your own taste

Download the Make Hamburgers activity sheet to assist you in the process. 

While you will be buying your minced meat at the supermarket, these students watched as Peter Gilchrist measured out the meat. The meat was not ground into smaller pieces. It was in chunks.

 

The students used a very large mincer to make the pieces of beef smaller and more easily mixed with other ingredients. Note that the meat is both red and white. Do you know what the white parts are? This is the fat. In hamburgers it is important to have about 20% fat. This creates the juiciest and most flavourful burgers. Fat helps the burger from falling apart. The fat acts as a binder. The more you mix the meat/fat the stronger the binding gets.

Bread crumbs are used in hamburger recipes to help retain the meat’s moisture. They absorb the moisture during cooking and release the moisture back into the meat while it rests before you eat it. 

Salt, pepper and other herbs or spices may be added to the mix. However, salt removes water from the meat and dissolves some of the meat proteins, causing them to bind the insoluble proteins together—not good for a tender burger. So you might wait to salt and pepper your burgers until just before they hit the pan or grill. 

Shape the burgers into patties to fit your bun size.

Cook on the BBQ. Chefs recommend that you should not need to constantly check, prod or flip your burger. One chef recommends that you “rotate it 180 degrees, flip it, then rotate it once more.”

Place on a bun. An Aussie burger has lots of condiments and toppings, like the addition of egg, beetroot and pineapple, but sometimes too much of a good thing is, well, too much. 

Enjoy you BBQ hamburger, but also remember to observe BBQ Food safety. 

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