A long-standing dream of mine came true this week: Steak n Shake, the greatest of American hamburger restaurants, opened up in New York City. I got to spend some time with Ken Faulkner, the VP o f Operations, and was again flabbergasted at how hard it is to make hamburgers well. A few weeks earlier, I had the pleasure of hanging out with Tom Ryan, the head of Smashburger. Ryan is the CEO, but is essentially Ken Faulkner’s opposite number, the true author of the hamburger at each place.
What both have in common is a commitment to making hamburger the best and hardest way, which is to cook them, quickly, on a flat metal surface, and serve them fresh. You would be amazed at how rare this is. The typical fast-food hamburger is cooked, indifferently, and then either flash-frozen or put away in a drawer somewhere for later use. It’s a gray puck, a tasteless protein canvass that is then dressed up and moistened with an avalanche of crappy condiments. Ketchup supplies sweetness, mustard sourness, mayo fatty mouthfeel, and lettuce texture and moisture. Don’t ask me what the tomato brings. I have never eaten it with my hamburger and I never will. If you could get a Quarter Pounder right from the griddle, it would probably be pretty good. But you almost never get it that way.
But the endless care and effort it takes to do it well! Lay twenty patties on a hot grill, and by the time you have turned the last one, the first is almost overcooked - and you haven’t even put cheese on it yet. These technical issues don’t matter much to us, since how many of us are called on in our private lives to cook 20 or more hamburgers at a time?
Unless, of course, are dumb enough to try to host a hamburger party at your house.
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A day after experiencing the glories of the new Steak n Shake - it’s haiku-like single, its lush and balanced double, its big, savory new 6 oz “Signature” burger - I decided to invite some friends over and try to replicate the experience. I didn’t bother with the fries: I have a small apartment, and there is no room on my counter for the Fry Daddy which alone makes deep frying possible. No, this was all about the hamburgers, made in quantity, fast, and served direct from the griddle.
First, I invested in two double-burner griddles. These are heavy, rectangular objects that fit over two burners, and give you the broad cooking plane you need to flip burgers freely. You can’t really do more than one burger in a regular pan: it’s only hot in the very middle, a small area where only one burger can fit. Moreover, even a sloped pan side impedes you from playing free with your spatula. The griddle needs to get hot, and you need to wipe it down with a little clarified butter or tallow, unless you are using a nonstick surface.
If you are, don’t. Nonstick surfaces are bad for cooking burgers. Burgers need to stick to the surface if you want them to brown. In a Teflon pan, they just float on top of their own steam, like a hovercraft. You need to have a good ventilation system, too: otherwise your small apartment will fill with greasy smoke, and it will smell bad even after everybody leaves. Make sure that you don’t wait until all the burgers are done to undo the bag of Wonder buns, either. The cheese should be opened out, kept cold, and fanned out on a plate for ease of grabbing. Everything should be planned ahead for a minimum of improvisation; you should instead be like Steak n Shake, and have every detail worked out in advance.
Needless to say, I didn’t do this, and my party was a disaster. I botched the cooking, over cooking some burgers while undercooking others, because I didn’t account for the hot spots on the grill. I forgot about the buns until it was too late, and they were unwarmed and, in some sad cases, rudely torn apart. I fumbled frantically with the cheese, trying to separate it out long after it should have gone on, resulting in some embarrassingly unmelted cheese slices. And of course the burgers stunk up the whole house. Yes, it was a disaster, and proved why I am not a Steak n Shake grill operator. Far from the sad drones they’re portrayed as, those cooks are master craftsmen, navigating a challenging and volatile element. I’m determined to do the same. But maybe next time I’ll pay a little more attention.