Best Boston Restaurants for Gourmet Burgers

Burgers are a food with limitless flavor options. They can be baked, grilled or pan seared, stuffed, topped and smoldered. That being said, the best burgers are sometimes hard to come by. With fast-food patties clouding people’s judgment, gourmet burgers are sometimes overlooked. With a Five Guys and Burger King in every town, who can blame us, right? Wrong. The power and potential of a truly authentic gourmet burger should never be overlooked.

The Best Boston Restaurants for Gourmet Burgers are usually kept a secret, and for good reason. If everyone knew, they would all be there. These hidden gems are not hard to come by if you do your research. But first, you must know what you are looking for.

Luckily, we have compiled a list of 2 ways to tell a truly authentic gourmet burger:

1. Beef, it’s what’s for dinner: Now for a normal, run of the mill burger any meat will do if it is cooked in delicious fats and what-have-you. But, for a gourmet burger not just any meat will do. We recommend ground round beef for the ultimate gourmet burger base. There are several different grades of ground beef, just as there are different grades of beef. With ground beef the grades are:

Ground Beef – 73% Lean, 27% Fat

Ground Chuck – 80% Lean, 20% Fat

Ground Sirloin – 85% Lean, 15% Fat

Ground Round – 90% Lean, 10 % Fat

For gourmet burgers, or just lean burgers in general, we recommend the least amount of fat. (This fattiness can be replaced with toppings and fillings, don’t worry!). The Best Boston Restaurants for gourmet burgers always use lean meat in their burgers.

2. Prep and Cooking: Now, again for any normal burger any greasy spatula and flip of the wrist will do. Not for a gourmet burger. There are steps that need to be carefully adhered to in order to ensure a truly delicious experience:

-Don’t Handle the Meat Too Much: The heat from your hands begins to melt the fat and makes the patty too dense. Move it lightly from hand to hand and loosely make a patty ¾- to one-inch thick (no thicker, or you will have to cook it too long).

-Don’t Press Down on the Burgers When Cooking: This compresses the meat, making it denser, and also squeezes the juices out of the meat.

-Make an Indentation in the Top: Have you noticed that your burgers tend to form rounded tops when cooking, causing the condiments to slide off? So did the folks at America’s Test Kitchen. They found that by pushing down slightly in the center, creating a round area about ¼ inch lower than the surrounding meat, made the burger come out flat. (These cooking instructions will work for any burger you want, not exclusively an authentic gourmet burger).