How Many Patties Can You Shape Out Of A Pound Of Hamburger?

Whether you're planning to serve burgers at your next backyard BBQ, or you've just searched through your freezer for something to thaw for dinner and came up with ground beef, you'll want to calculate just how far you can stretch that pound of raw hamburger. You don't want the patties to be so insubstantial that you can barely taste them between the buns, but at the same time, you'll want to stretch the meat as far as possible (ground beef — especially the organic kind — can be expensive, after all).

The general answer is that you can make four hamburger patties per pound of ground beef, using a quarter of a pound for each burger. With this ratio, you can safely gauge whether you have enough to feed your family, or make an informed decision about how much more meat you'll need to buy in order to feed a crowd (a good rule of thumb: assume each person will eat two hamburgers over the course of the party).

While the quarter-pound rule can help you plan a burger bash in advance, say you're about to make dinner, but then some friends stop over for an unexpected chat and you want to invite them to stay for the meal. If they say yes, but you only have a pound of ground beef to feed your family of four, what do you do? Here's an idea: Make sliders, a la White Castle, instead of larger hamburgers. You'll need miniature slider rolls, but this trick can stretch that pound of ground beef into up to 12 mini-burgers. With the addition of toppings (layered in the correct order, of course), plus a few sides to go along with your sliders, you've got a filling meal — and you didn't have to rush out to buy extra pounds of beef to pull it off.

If you've only got regular-sized buns, try making thin and crispy smash burgers, which obviously use less beef per patty than a standard thick burger. In a pinch, you can also add fillers to your ground beef, some of which can actually help bind the meat together so your burgers don't break apart on the skillet or the grill. Try adding breadcrumbs and an egg before mixing and rolling out your patties, or make this cheeseburger bulked up with mushrooms (it even has one-third less fat).