It is fun and very tasty to make your own beef burgers from scratch. All you need is a meat grinder. You will need beef with a lot of marbling, like chuck (as I used here) or shortribs. Without fat, the burgers won’t have a lot of flavor.
With a meat grinder…
…it only takes a couple of minutes to turn a piece of beef into burger meat.
I used food rings to shape the burgers. Since I was going to cook them sous-vide and the food rings were too high, I decided to cut out circles of parchment paper and put two burgers on top of each other in each ring.
Please note that these burgers are 100% beef. There is nothing else in them, not even salt.
I like my burgers medium rare, which implies some food safety risk if you just grill the burger. And so I decided to cook the burger sous-vide first, in order to pasteurize the meat.
The food rings help to maintain the shape of the burgers when you vacuum seal them.
The burgers were cooked sous-vide for 4 hours at 55C/131F. This is enough to pasteurize them. Longer would also have been fine, too. As the meat is ground, the tenderizing effect of sous-vide is not really necessary.
I took the sous-vide appliance onto our boat (which has electric power) to cook them sous-vide on the boat. (This photo and all the remaining photos were made on the boat with my iPhone.)
After cooking sous-vide, the burgers only need a short time on the grill over VERY hot charcoal. I used a grilling basket to easily flip the burgers. As there is no filler, they can fall apart quite easily.
After grilling, I seasoned both sides with salt and freshly ground black pepper. A good quality burger doesn’t really need any sauces or other condiments to enjoy the full beefy flavor.
As you can see, the meat is nicely medium rare on the inside.
Flashback
We love Mexican food and we love fish, and these are my fish tacos.
Stefan's Gourmet Blog 
This is so interesting! I never would have thought about cooking burgers sous vide. I just saw Gordon Ramsay yell at someone for not seasoning the meat before forming it to a burger shape. I guess he doesn’t believe in just seasoning the outside!
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Salt will change the texture, especially if it is going to be mixed with the meat for such a long time. It is good either way and a matter of preference. I guess I may have to do another side by side experiment 🙂
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I think you might have to! But I see his point.
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Also, it probably depends on the burger thickness. Like yours, mine are really thick, so probably some interspersed seasoning is a smart idea. Although that’s not what we do 😬 If burgers are thin, then seasoning on both sides probably works great!
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Hello Stefan – I hope your server is kinder to me this time around and allows me thru’ 🙂 ! I make my own minces most of the time and have no hesitation in eating any patties medium rare. Like to form such into shapes by hand and just grill atop a serrated stove-top pan ! But then you have not talked about pappy bread rolls either, have you 🙂 !! And, yes, there may be home made sauces on the side . . .
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Stefan dearHeart – my apologies for this on a weekend ! Just wanted to clarify ! Two of my last three comments have not reached your page tho’ they were shown as having been posted from my side. ??? No other blogpost has been affected. As you are aware I have been a ‘bother’ to everyone for a number of years and methinks know how to send a comment J ! Am only posting this at the thought you just may have been jack of seeing my name on your page but have not wanted to let me know ? No problem there . . . I can just ‘read’ if you so want !!!! best to Kees and you . . . hope the heatwave to which you are not accustomed is passing . . . best Eha
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Hi Eha,
Both of your comments had ended up in my spam filter and have now been posted to the site. I don’t check my spam filter on a regular basis, because it hardly ever happens that something ends up there that shouldn’t. If this happens again, the best way would be to send me an e-mail, as this comment could also have ended up as spam.
You are such a regular commenter that I should have noticed it when nothing showed up on the previous post. The heatwave here is still at a level that we are accustomed to, and a great excuse to go out on the boat and barbecue 🙂
Hope you are well,
Stefan
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