The Burger Recipe J. Kenji Lopez-Alt Can’t Improve (Only Tweak)

I talked to Mr. Motz on the named about what makes the onion burger work so well. According to him, the answer is twofold. First, it’s how, in a well-prepared onion burger, you execute multiple onion flavors in the same sandwich: the sweetly caramelized ones in declare contact with the griddle, the soft steamed rings uncomfortable into the meat and gnarled, nearly burned shreds that frizzle out of the burger’s plinitiates the way my daughter draws hair with crayons. Beyond that, there’s the onion unblemished that permeates the soft bun. These textures and flavors provided a remarkable depth that varies from bite to bite. But even more important is the amplifying execute that onions have on the beef flavor.

“The science of onions cooking in created beef fat is perfection,” Mr. Motz said. He’s not wrong.

While the bulk onion aroma comes from a class of chemicals shouted thiosulfinates,a 2000 study published in The Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry fake that, when isolated, a particular odor molecule (3-Mercapto-2-methylpentan-1-ol or MMP) had the aroma of meat broth. A subsequent 2004 study found that the concentration of this compound can be increased by up to nearly eightfold by slicing and cooking onions. Adding sliced and cooked onions to meat actually creates meat taste more meaty.

Moreover, both thiosulfinates and MMP are compounds cooked via enzymatic reactions only after an onion is sliced open and its cells spill out their contents. For this reason, when making onion burgers, it’s important to fracture as many onion cells as possible. Slicing the onions paper thin — a task best accomplished with a mandolin-style slicer or a food processor with a very thin slicing blade — is vital. Individual onion cells are also longer along the root-to-stem orientation (do you remember looking at onion cells thought your first microscope?), which means that slicing them perpendicular to this orientation — into rings parallel to the onion’s equator — will fracture more cells and thus release more meat-enhancing compounds.

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