For The Most Flavorful Burgers, Add Mushrooms To The Meat
Making flavorful burgers always starts with the meat itself. That not only means using the right cut of beef — ideally chuck, round, or brisket, as First We Feast shares — but also the right blend of fat. The higher the fat percentage the juicier and more flavorful your burger will be, the outlet explains, so it's best to stick to a blend of ground beef that's 60% to 80% lean.
If you really want to take the flavor up a notch and don't want to rely on toppings or sauces, Snappy Living and Readfield Meats & Deli both recommend mixing different seasonings, spice mixes, or fresh herbs directly into the ground beef. But while this is an easy way to build flavor, it will ultimately change the overall taste of your burger. If you want the burger to retain a neutral flavor, therefore, there's one savory ingredient you'll want to consider adding above all others: mushrooms.
What happens when you combine mushrooms and ground beef?
You'd think that adding a plant-based ingredient to ground beef would result in a burger that tastes less meaty, but the opposite is actually true. Per Moku Foods, mushrooms and meat, despite their obvious differences, have one very important amino acid in common. It's called glutamate, and it's responsible for a savory flavor usually referred to as umami. When you mix mushroom and ground beef together, you're essentially getting double the savoriness from two different sources of umami.
Per Umami, mushrooms are also naturally absorbent, and that means that any seasoning you add or any fat that renders out of the ground beef, will eventually get soaked up, locking in more flavor into your burger. Any variety of mushrooms will do the trick, but for burgers, restaurant chef Nick Mezzina shares with Food & Wine that you'll have the best luck if you use shiitake, oyster, or cremini mushrooms.
The best way to incorporate mushrooms into a burger
Most burgers that use mushrooms, like a classic mushroom and swiss burger, call for slicing them up, but for this combination method, you'll actually want to toss them in the food processor. According to Umami, mushrooms when finely chopped have a texture nearly identical to ground beef, making the two ingredients easy to blend together. Mushrooms, however, seep more liquid as they cook, so it's important to use more ground beef than mushrooms in order for the burger to hold its shape. A ratio of two to one will produce a consistency closest to that of a traditional meat patty, Umami states. If you don't use enough mushrooms, your burger will pretty much taste the same, but if you add too much, it'll be mushier than you'd want.
Chef Nick Mezzina recommends sautéing the blended mushrooms and then chilling them before mixing them with ground beef (via Food & Wine). Just make sure not to overmix, because as HuffPost highlights, this can result in a tough final product that is sure to overshadow even the tastiest burger.