The Resting Mistake To Avoid When Grilling Burgers

Grilling season is the best time of year — you can step out of your congested kitchen and cook dinner in the open air. And tossing some burgers and hot dogs on the grill means dinner is ready quickly. While it's pretty easy to whip up a decent burger, there are some tricks of the trade that you might want to consider before you fire up that grill. Most importantly, if you're not letting your burgers rest for at least five minutes after grilling, you're missing out on the juiciest version of those beef patties.

Resting meat is essential to cooking it to perfection for a few reasons: Resting finishes the cooking process, and it allows the juices to redistribute. And in addition to resting, there is one other big way to ensure your burgers are a crowd-pleaser: Don't press down on them while they cook. Doing so could make for a dry patty, and sometimes even the best burger sauce isn't enough to make up for that.

You might be ready to bite into a burger the moment it comes off the grill, but it's best if you have a little patience. While burgers cook, their juices shift; the muscle fibers get tighter from the heat, forcing the juice to the meat's center. And in order for those juices to redistribute, the meat has to come off the heat. Once the meat comes off the heat, those juices need time to disperse from the center to the rest of the meat, and if you don't give them time to do that, you'll bite into a pretty dry burger.

An easy way to ensure you let the meat rest is to avoid adding any cheese or other toppings to the patties until they're off the heat. Then, add the perfect cheese for burgers, and in the time it takes the cheese to melt, the burger's juices will redistribute throughout the patty. You'll have nicely melted cheese and a juicy burger, both of which make for the perfect first bite.

Ground beef is delicate. It's easy to overcook it on the outside while leaving it too rare on the inside, but keeping it on the grill for too long can quickly turn it into a hockey puck. Resting the meat helps avoid over- or under-cooking; the internal temperature of the burgers will continue to rise as the meat rests, so if you take them off when they're slightly underdone, they'll still wind up perfect.

Another big mistake you'll want to avoid is pressing down on the meat patties while they cook. Once that meat starts to heat up, pushing the burgers down on the grill will release its juices, and they'll never come back once they're gone. The result will be a dry burger. So to keep those juices in, touch the burgers as little as possible while they cook, including only flipping burgers once during cooking.