Ina Garten's Secret To A Great Burger

As Ina Garten styles herself a contessa, you might think she'd turn up her nose at anything as mundane as a burger. However, Garten does enjoy burgers. While Garten's favorite burger comes from a pricey D.C. steakhouse, upon occasion, she'll make burgers at home. One recipe she uses is her blue cheese burger which features a patty made with ground chuck and ground sirloin. The recipe also calls for a few ingredients you might not think of adding to a homemade hamburger. These are egg yolks and butter.

While a burger with a fried egg on top is a lovely — if slightly divisive — thing, that's not what Garten is doing here. Instead, she mixes raw yolks with the ground meat, then wraps each patty around a chunk of butter, chicken Kiev-style. The blue cheese (sliced, not crumbled) goes on top of the cooked burger. Sliced tomatoes and arugula are also added. Garten does not add ketchup, though, since perhaps chez Garten doesn't stock such plebian condiments. 

While Garten doesn't say why she adds eggs and butter to this burger, binders such as eggs can help burgers stay together throughout the cooking process. As for butter, it adds a great deal of flavor to this delicious burger. In fact, adding butter to burgers might be the only thing Garten and Paula Deen agree on since Deen also adds a lot of butter to her burgers.

Ina Garten's blue cheese burger isn't the only hamburger recipe she's come up with, although it seems to be the only one where she adds eggs and butter to the ground meat. Her other burger recipes, though, are typically Garten. Her Niman Ranch burgers, for example, call for beef from the Niman Ranch, although in a pinch the so-called contessa will allow you to use another premium, grass-fed brand. The recipe also insists upon "good" dijon mustard, "good" olive oil, and "good" mayonnaise being used. (Again, no ketchup is used, "good" or otherwise.) This recipe also calls for onions that you've spent half an hour or more caramelizing.

Those same onions also appear in Garten's recipe for smash burgers which are served smothered in Gruyère and served on potato buns. (The Niman Ranch burger recipe specifies English muffins, but the blue cheese burgers don't stipulate any specific bread type.) Garten does, however, have one other recipe where she combines eggs with a mixture of ground meats: A fancy meatloaf seasoned with fresh herbs and topped with garlic sauce instead of ketchup. Again, why no ketchup? Well, according to an old clip that's been recirculated by social media mockers, Garten once called the condiment "spicy," and she was referring to plain old ketchup, not a chile-spiked variety. If she really feels this way, she might think the sauce is simply too much for her poor burgers to handle.