The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science

After the dreaded bulge, the second most gruesome fate of a
pub burger is poor cooking, which in the worst cases results
in an exterior that’s charred beyond recognition with a still-
cold center. It’s exciting to see flames leaping up around the
patties, but it’s not doing you any favors in the flavor
department. Those flames are from fat dripping out of the
patties, hitting the hot coals below, and vaporizing, leaving
a sooty, acrid deposit on the surface of your burgers.
Pressing down on the patties as they cook exacerbates the
problem.
The easiest way to deal with it is to cook in stages, using a
two-level fire—that’s a fire where all of the coals are banked
under one side of the grill (or in the case of a gas grill, one
set of burners is turned to high, the others are shut off).