A patty of ground beef cooked on a flat griddle or over a grill, served in a soft round bun with some combination of onion, pickle, lettuce, tomato, cheese and sauce: the burger has been built that way for over a century, and most of what goes wrong with it still happens at the griddle. It is an American dish with a German-sounding name: the Hamburg steak, a seasoned patty of chopped beef, was on menus in New York by the 1870s, and the bun arrived somewhere in the Midwest around the turn of the twentieth century. Several towns and fairs claim the first one and none can prove it. What is not in dispute is that White Castle in Wichita standardised the small griddled patty in 1921 and that the drive-in chains of the 1940s and 1950s made it the most widely eaten sandwich on earth. On BiteCritic the burger is rated as a dish, so a smashed diner patty and a thick pub burger are judged by the same questions: meat, cook, bun, balance.

The meat decides most of it. Chuck at roughly twenty percent fat, coarsely ground and handled as little as possible, gives a loose patty that stays juicy; lean mince packed hard turns into a dry puck. Seasoning is salt and pepper on the outside just before cooking, because salt worked through the mince tightens it like sausage. The two methods produce different burgers. On a hot flat-top the patty is smashed thin for the first thirty seconds so the whole face browns into a crust, cooked two to three minutes a side and flipped once; over a grill a thicker patty is left alone until it releases, then flipped once and taken off between 55 and 60°C at the centre for medium. Cheese goes on for the last minute under a lid or a splash of water so it melts. The bun is toasted cut-side down in the fat.

Pick the burger up before you judge it: it should hold together and not slide apart, and the bun should be soft enough to compress but not collapse. The crust on the patty is the first thing to look for; a grey, steamed surface means a cold or crowded pan. Inside, pink is right for a thick patty and irrelevant for a smashed one, which is cooked through by design. The bun should be warm and toasted, never cold or stale, and the ratio matters more than the size: a tall tower that needs a skewer is a presentation choice, not a better burger. Mark down dry meat, a patty that tastes mainly of seasoning mix, cold cheese sitting unmelted on top, soggy bread from untoasted buns or too much sauce, and lettuce doing the structural work. Fries are a side, not part of the score.

Mathys Pomier

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