COOLER-COOKED
CHEESEBURGERS
Can a burger really benefit from sous-vide cooking?You bet it can—at least when it’s a fat pub-style burger.
Many chefs avoid cooking burgers sous-vide because the
vacuum-sealing process can compress meat, turning burgers
dense and tough. With the water-dipping bag-sealing
method, however, this is not a problem.
We are still left with one question: what’s the best way to
sear the burger post-cooking?
Deep-frying is the method favored by Dave Arnold at the
French Culinary Institute (he also adds clarified butter to the
bags when cooking burgers, but I’m not such a fan of the
flavor). It creates a wicked crispy crust, with the advantage
that the crust forms evenly on all sides of the patty—top,
bottom, and all the way around. It’s also splatterless and
won’t smoke out your apartment the way searing can. The
problem with it is that deep-frying oil temperature maxes out
at around 400°F—even lower if you consider that the
temperature of the oil immediately surrounding a piece of
frying food is significantly lower than the rest of the pot.
This brings us back to the same old problem with traditional
cooking methods: By the time a decent crust has formed, a
good ⅛ to ¼ inch of meat has overcooked and turned
leathery around the edges.
Pan-searing does not have that problem. As long as you
use a heavy-bottomed pan and let it preheat until it’s really,