Have you ever ordered a burger at a restaurant? If you have, chances are you’ve always been impressed with how amazing they look, smell, and taste. Restaurant burgers are hefty things, served on big, solid plates with delicious accompanying sides to leave you completely satisfied once you finish your meal.
Then you go home, and a few days later, you try to recreate the restaurant burger experience, but somehow – you fall short one way or another. If this has ever happened to you, you’re not alone! It’s a fact that restaurant burgers do taste better, and in the article below, we are going to explore the reason why this is so.
How to make burgers taste like a restaurant?
So you want to elevate the flavors of your burger and turn it into a restaurant worthy meal? You’ll need to first realize that restaurants run an entire crew of kitchen hands with an experienced chef at the helm.
Your home cooking cannot replicate the work of many skilled kitchen hands working together, but you can definitely start by thinking about why restaurant burgers always taste better than homemade ones.
Here are the 5 reasons why burgers seem to always taste better in a restaurant:
- The equipment
- The produce
- The experience of the chef
- Cooking methods used
- The psychological effect
1. The equipment
If you didn’t already know by now, there’s a huge difference when it comes to a commercial restaurant kitchen, compared to a regular home kitchen. Even if you possess a level of cooking skill that qualifies you as a home chef, chances are, you won’t have a kitchen that is as big, or as well-equipped as a commercial restaurant kitchen is.
Most mid-tier restaurants ensure that the cooking equipment that they use – from the numerous burners, pots, and pans, to the humble spatula – is top of the line. This means that they can cook and serve the highest quality food to their customers.
These tools are seasoned to perfection, thanks to experienced chefs at the helm, who know the ins and outs of maintaining kitchen equipment to the highest standard.
In the end, this high quality kitchen equipment plays a huge part in why restaurants make such good burgers. For example, a commercial griddle that is well seasoned and heated to the perfect temperature produces a nice sizzle and a perfect outer crust every single time a burger patty is placed on it.
Trying to recreate this high-temperature sizzle at home will cost you a fortune in the griddles and burner alone, not to mention the ventilation – as cooking perfectly juicy burgers at high temperatures produces a lot of smoke!
2. The produce
Similarly to high-quality kitchen equipment, restaurants also use the highest quality ingredients they can source. This means that the beef that they use for their burgers are bought not just from regular supermarkets, but by vendors that the chefs personally know and trust.
Burger patties are also exclusively handmade in restaurants (well, reputable ones at least). This means that the chef has the responsibility of getting the best cuts of beef, grinding it up, and forming the burger patties to be cooked to order during a service.
Most restaurants choose to use a high fat to lean ratio to make burger patties, as this produces a tasty and very juicy burger patty. Once the fat is cooked through during the grilling process, it imbibes the burger with intense flavor and keeps it in the middle of the burger patty while the exterior is seared to a nice crust during the searing process.
In most cases as well, restaurants put their own special spice mixes into the ground beef while preparing the patties, as this elevates the flavor of the burger in a subtle yet significant way.
3. The experience of the chef
Experience of the chef plays a big part in how good the food in a restaurant is. And when it comes to working in a restaurant, burger making is arguably one of the most essential skills a chef should have, as burgers are a very common menu item in a majority of restaurants, from family-run diners to michelin-starred venues.
One of the reasons why the burger that you order from a restaurant tastes so good probably has a lot to do with how experienced the chef is. A good chef oversees the entire burger from start (sourcing the beef, making the patties, and storing the patties) to finish (grilling the patties, searing the patties, and serving the finished burger).
If you’re not prepared to do all the above for your perfectly grilled homemade burger, you’ll probably find it hard to match the restaurant burger experience!
4. Cooking methods used
Unless you have a full size commercial kitchen in your home, your choice of cooking methods are limited to what you have. In a restaurant kitchen, chefs have a wide range of methods and equipment that they can use to create the ultimate restaurant burger for their customers.
Restaurants keep their well-seasoned cast iron griddles at high temperatures in order to create the perfect sear on their burger patties, which is definitely something that is hard to recreate in a home kitchen.
These griddles also have a special ingredient that they use to make great-tasting burgers. Restaurants cook dozens of burger patties every single day, and all of the juices, fats, and flavor of these burgers stick on the griddle after they are taken out to serve.
Now, they don’t scrape all of this residue off at the end of the day. In fact, they leave it as seasoning for the griddle, further intensifying the flavors of each successive burger they cook. This is what makes the depth and complexity of flavor found in restaurant burgers so hard to recreate in a regular home kitchen.
5. The psychological effect
It’s true that when you have your food served to you by a polite waiter, on a clean plate, while sitting down in a nice restaurant, the food that you eat just seems to taste nicer.
Though it is yet to be scientifically proven, if you think about it, the psychological effect of eating a chef-prepared burger does seem to cause one to think that the food tastes better than it is supposed to.
Conclusion
So, those are the 5 reasons why restaurant burgers tend to taste better. It’s pretty much a combination of chef experience, high quality of ingredients and cookware, and creative cooking methods that make all the difference between a perfect restaurant burger and a regular homemade burger.
Photo altered by simplelifesaver.com | Photo attribution: Tobias Nii Kwatei Quartey
