The Science To Keeping Your Burger From Shrinking On The Grill This Summer

Firing up the grill for the first barbecue of the summer is a special occasion. There are plenty of all-stars on any good cookout menu, but no food is as iconic as the classic hamburger. It's a simple patty of ground beef, but when handled correctly, there's nothing better.

One of the biggest enemies of an impeccable burger is shrinking. What starts out as a perfectly shaped puck can shrink up and bulge in the center if it was made improperly. Most people counteract this issue by making the mistake of flattening the burgers with the spatula. It can also be avoided completely by opting for smash burgers instead, but that requires a griddle. We're looking for the smoky beauty of a burger straight off the grill.

The main culprit in the case of shrinking burger patties is the meat's proteins. When you overwork the ground beef while shaping the patty these proteins will break down slightly and cross-link. That means a bunch of tiny strands of your burger are now wound together, and continue to tighten once they hit the grill. Adding salt to the ground beef before shaping the patties will exacerbate this. 

The best solution to this problem is to start with well-shaped burger patties. The key to this is keeping things loose. Some shrinking will naturally occur in almost any meat as it's cooked, but doing this will keep your patties tender and juicy instead of dense and springy.

Rather than forming your ground beef into a dense, tight hockey puck, try to assemble the burger as loosely as possible while still helping it to take shape. One way to make this easier is to wet your hands lightly. This will help keep the meat from sticking to your hands and allow you to have a lighter touch while making the patties.

Your patties are still going to shrink slightly on the grill; make sure that you shape them slightly wider than your buns so that they fit perfectly once they've cooked. Making a small dimple in the center of the patties will also help prevent any bulging in the middle. This way, you'll have a flat, even burger that doesn't have excess bun around the edges. It'll also boast a tender bite.

Forming the perfect patty will help prevent extreme shrinking, but there are other scientific reasons why your burger is shrinking.

When barbecuing a burger, the sides of the patty are cooking quickly due to radiation. As those sides start to cook, they lose their moisture and begin to contract. This is happening throughout the burger while it cooks on the grill, but it's specifically this heat on the sides that causes bulging. Those sides act like a belt and tighten around the center of the patty, making things denser than before.

Your burger is also shrinking because it's losing its fat content. You should be using a ground beef mix that's about 80% lean meat to 20% fat content to keep your burger juicy and moist while it cooks. This is because the fat basically melts away and coats the meat as it cooks to create a more tender burger. That fat is also what causes flare-ups on your grill as it drips off the burger. This makes the burger seem smaller after it's cooked because 20% of its content essentially melted away.