Technique #62: Grind Your Own Meat for Superior Burgers

Store-ground meats are often over-processed to a fine pulp in a commercial meat grinder, so it can be challenging to keep them from cooking up tough. Grinding your own meat is easy and doesn’t require any specialty equipment. We found that a food processor is just as good a tool for grinding meat as a home-model meat grinder, with just 20 pulses producing a coarse grind that’s ideal for burgers.

Cutting the meat into 1⁄2-inch pieces and briefly freezing them before processing ensures ideal results for a loose and tender, not pulverized, texture. A great thing about grinding your own meat is that you can customize it and combine more than one cut to engineer your preferred mix of flavor and fat. Sirloin has a solidly beefy flavor that we love, but it's leaner than many other cuts, so we like to add a bit of butter; you could also incorporate short ribs for rich juiciness or skirt steak for texture and earthy flavor.

For leaner poultry burgers, grind a portion of the main ingredient to a paste and use that as a binder to hold together the patty; grind the rest to a chunkier texture. For these lean proteins, choose dark meat, which has more fat, and add a pinch of baking soda to keep the burgers tender and moist during cooking (this is achieved because baking soda raises the pH, which makes it more difficult for the proteins to form a pasty glue).

Be extra-gentle when it comes to shaping the patties, since less handling equals more tender burgers. And only season with salt on the outside, since incorporating salt into the meat mixture would toughen it. Freezing the tender patties briefly before grilling helps ensure they hold together while cooking.