Smash burgers are slowly taking over the world

For most of us who live in India, getting an authentic hamburger is next to impossible.

In most of the world, a hamburger is a minced beef patty in a bun. In India, for obvious reasons, you won’t find a good beef patty (even in those states where serving beef is legal).

 

The fast food chains have learned to get around this by improvising. McDonald’s tried a goat burger when it first launched but the product was rejected by the market and it switched to chicken and vegetable alternatives. Burger King has had some success with a lamb patty but it is not at all like the burger that the chain has made famous all over the world.

 

   A high-quality, non-fast food burger is also hard to find in India. It should be made from the sort of beef that goes into a steak and served so that the centre is moist and juicy while the outside is slightly crusted.

 

   Most steakhouses abroad will offer a top quality burger and over the last two decades, the burger has gone more and more upmarket as great chefs have added extras to the dish. Joel Robuchon put foie gras into the small burgers he served at his L’Atelier chain. Daniel Boulud introduced luxury burgers to New York and the trend spread to the rest of the world.

 

   And then there are high-end fast food chains. The burger at Danny Meyer’s Shake Shack is such good value that there is much speculation about the formula used to constitute the beef mince. Places like California’s In and Out Burger or even Five Guys have their own cult followings.

 

   But when we talk about burgers in India, we usually mean pheeka imitations of the real thing. Why, for instance, would you need to create a vegetable burger when India already has the vada pav, which is far superior to any restaurant burger made with beetroot or assorted mashed vegetables.

 

   To be fair, there are Indian chefs who have always tried to make burgers that are as close to the real thing as is possible in India. At Tres, in Delhi, Chef Jatin Mallick makes a very good steakhouse style burger with buffalo meat. In Mumbai, such chefs as Gresham Fernandes and Hussain Shahzad have overcome the odds to make decent burgers.

 

   But the good news is that it has just got a lot easier for Indian chefs to make good burgers.

 

   Until recently, a restaurant burger needed a plump and juicy patty to distinguish it from the fast food versions, which kept costs down by using cheap meat to make thin patties. (The flavours in fast food burgers come from the sauces that are slathered on to the largely tasteless patty.)

 

   But that was before the smash burger took over the world.

 

   If you have not eaten a smash burger, here is what it is: it is made by squashing a ball of mince on a griddle with a spatula or a hard press. This gives you a patty that is much thinner than a regular restaurant patty. This may be its most distinctive feature.

 

"The lesson in all this is that if you use the smash burger technique and eschew pre-packaged patties you don’t really miss the beef burger."

   Because the patty is thin, it cooks more quickly (about three minutes versus seven or eight minutes for a traditional burger patty) and gets crisp around the edges. The fast cooking and the flatness of the patty allow browning (or what scientists call the Maillard reaction which adds flavour to food) to take place and the crusted cooked patties can be delicious.

 

   The smash burger is not really a new kind of burger. It was popular in Michigan and parts of the American Mid-West for decades. But it only became a craze after a company called Smashburger was launched in 2007 and spread all over the US. Part of the burger’s appeal was that it did not require expensive beef, any kind of ‘Angus’ (in America, this is a meaningless term applied to many kinds of beef) will do. Burger places have always bragged about their char-broilers and barbecue grills but you don’t need expensive equipment for a smash burger; you can cook it on any basic hot-plate or griddle.

 

   Smash burgers are slowly taking over the world because a) they can be much cheaper than restaurant or steak house burgers, b) they are quicker to make, c) they are very tasty and d), they are easy to eat: a restaurant burger with a fat, juicy patty is hard to fit into your mouth.

 

   What, you may well ask, does all this have to do with us in India?

 

   Well, first of all, by finishing off the steakhouse element, the Smash Burger ends the reliance on high quality beef once and for all. It is easier to make a smash burger with buffalo meat than it is to make a buffalo steakhouse burger. The broader Maillard reaction adds many flavours and because you don’t have to make a fat juicy patty you don’t need to worry too much about the beef quality.

 

   I asked Hussain Shahzad, the chef at Hunger Inc. (Bombay Canteen, Pappa’s, Veronica’s, O Pedro, etc.) why he liked a smash burger. He responded “In India, it is far easier to do a smash with a coarse grind of meat (buffalo or goat) because you have a larger surface area for the Maillard reaction. This leads to a better developed complex crust and more flavour. The meat we get for our burgers here is not always the best in flavour so we often have to do things to make it tasty.”

 

   Jatin Mallick, whose steakhouse burger at Tres is easily the best in Delhi now has a new restaurant called Dos (which he runs along with his chef-partner of long standing: the legendary Julia Carmen D’Sa) but has not put his celebrated Tres burger on the Dos menu. Instead he does smash burgers at the new place. Because the food at Dos has bigger flavours than the more European-influenced Tres, Jatin uses two smash burger patties (made with buffalo meat) with chilli and manchego cheese for the signature Dos burger.

 

   It is a delicious burger but it is not my favourite of the Dos burgers. I prefer the one Jatin makes with goat. Because he is not trying to make a steakhouse burger, Jatin uses thinner smash patties and it actually tastes much better than I ever imagined a goat burger could.

 

   The lesson in all this is that if you use the smash burger technique and eschew pre-packaged patties you don’t really miss the beef burger. The flavours created by this technique, along with the crispness around the edges of the patty are so satisfying that you don’t need the mouthfeel and bite of the fattier beef patty.

 

   There are consequences in this for all of us, not just for restaurants. For a start, you can now make great burgers at home without worrying about finding beef or buffalo meat. Knead coarse mutton keema, (you can add spices or herbs to taste but not salt which interferes with the cooking process), create a ball of the mince and then place it in a hot pan. Once the keema ball is in the pan you flatten it with a spatula and cook it for two minutes till it browns. Turn it over and cook for another minute and that’s it: you now have a restaurant quality smash burger without having to involve any cattle or buffaloes.

 

   Finally, a burger made for goat lovers like us Indians!