It is perhaps unfair of me to fault Mother Flipper for slightly overcooking their burgers, missing by less than a minute the liftoff from the flat-top griddle to juicy medium rare. This has happened twice, first in February at its original home ground at Brockley Market in Southeast London and again yesterday at its Eat Street debut behind Kings Cross Station.

In the US you wouldn’t expect short order cooks at diners, truck stops and burger stands to make the distinction between pale and deep pink, especially burgers below the 5-ounce and 4-dollar barriers. So why hold their UK counterparts to a higher standard?

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I could answer my own question by noting that Mother Flipper asks £5 for its cheeseburger, roughly 8 dollars. But prices for satisfactory beef and authentic plastic cheese are higher here. Good cheap burgers (with this notable exception) don’t really exist in London. Comparing US and UK burgers according to price is problematic.

To learn the reason why I make such a big deal about seven small degrees, estimating internal meat temperatures from 55-degree (Celsius) for medium-rare to 62-degrees for medium, you have to inspect the pavement.

I tried two Mother Flipper cheeseburgers yesterday. The first, cooked a notch above medium though I asked for medium-rare, was nicely constructed with beautiful ketchup/mustard art on the bun, very tasty and, importantly, a safe object to hold in my hands. No leaks. I didn’t embarrass myself. But the second, cooked as ordered, was a thing of danger and looming dry cleaning bills, bleeding beefy juices from every pore of its patty.  Unable to wait to find a place to sit I devoured it walking away from the stall, leaving a trail of grease and mourning every lost drip.

The Soho version of Bistro du Vin burger, pictured at the top of this post, was an abomination. It arrived as you see it, with a wide crack extending from one side to the other. My initial guess was that a chef had cut the burger open to check it for doneness and broke the fat patty in half, spilling its juices. But the cooking process might have had something to do with its fragility. I finished the job with a steak knife, slicing the burger in two to analyse the damage. What a horror! The burger was impossible to pick up and eat, not that you’d want to. Its meat was hard, mealy and dry – nothing like the crumbly, juicy version on St John Street. It was seasoned with whole peppercorns, not the ideal texture for a burger, and nothing about it tasted right. I dropped the mostly uneaten burger onto its serving board and surrendered.

The hostess came by to ask me what I thought of the burger and I told her. She summoned Keith Shearer, the executive chef of MWB Group Holdings, which operates the restaurants at all Bistro du Vin and Malmaison locations as well as pubs like London’s Fox & Anchor.  Shearer explained he’d been forced to respond to the very real dangers of serving rare or even medium rare burgers. With steaks the exposed surface area of the meat gets seared and bad bacteria gets killed. But when beef is minced any surface contamination gets dispersed throughout the interior. If the burger is cooked medium-rare, as most Bistro du Vin diners want it, the internal temperatures are not sufficiently high to kill all bacteria.

Shearer’s solution is to fry cuts of beef before they are minced, ostensibly killing any bad stuff on the surface before it can be pushed to the interior. The burger is essentially cooked twice, a grave risk to good taste if not good health.

Shearer attributed the peppercorns in the mince and the deep crack in the burger to greenness – that of the young chef who prepared my burger. The restaurant only opened last week. The executive chef offered to prepare me a replacement himself, medium-rare. He raced to the kitchen and returned with a burger 12 minutes later. A photo of the dismal result appears below.

The version seen above was requested to be on the rare side of medium rare.

If you insist on telling the swerving server how you want your burger cooked and he or she responds with an ambiguous nod, then it is probably time to run for the hills.

Mrs youngandfoodish and I witnessed these two early indicators of a subprime burger at The Canonbury in N1. Over the weekend I’d been scouting locations for upcoming #BurgerMonday meetups and eatups and had heard this completely renovated and upgraded pub was sourcing its mince mix from two of London’s best butchers. The refurbished garden terrace behind this Georgian building in leafy Islington seemed a ideal setting for a juice-dripping jamboree.

I halved the Canonbury burger we’d ordered medium rare to inspect and photograph the interior and reference its coloration to the burger doneness colour strip I carry with me at all times. Sadly, the chef had either overcooked the burger or photoshopped it to remove its pinkness.

Rather than ask the server to return the medium-well burger to the open kitchen I decided to do so myself. I brought the burger, with its serving board, to the kitchen, laid it down on the pass and, in the gentlest tone I could muster, asked the chef if she would agree this burger was not medium rare.

In the gentlest tone she could muster she noted that you can’t touch-test a burger for doneness as you can with a steak (true) and that  it’s difficult to get it right (also true). You had to accept that a burger might be darker or redder than was desired.

I nodded, took a deep breath and feigned a retreat. “But,” I continued, trying my best not to sound like a pushy New Yorker, wouldn’t you get acquainted with the intensity of your grill after cooking 20 burgers? Wouldn’t you gain familiarity with the outer appearance of the burgers as they cooked on the grill and what the darkening shades said about their interior colour?”

“You could say that,” replied the chef, with vinegary sarcasm. This time I did retreat, thinking it best not to inquire if she’d made this alarmingly compact, Jack Dee-dry, hockey puck of a grey-as-the-Swansea-dusk hamburger with frozen meat. I was thinking ahead: I wanted to alert you to the early warning signs of a subprime burger and preferred to type it out with unbroken fingers.

rare

medium-rare

medium

med-well

well done

Looking at them now these almost look more like Mark Rothko paintings than hamburgers.

Because thick hamburger patties don’t toughen much as they cook, grill cooks cannot apply the finger test to check for doneness as they can with steaks. Most err on the long side, which is why burger lovers from LA to London have grown accustomed to getting medium-rare when they order rare, medium when they order medium-rare and so on. 

The burger I was served at The Counter was that rarity, a rare that’s actually rare (see photo above). They know what rare is and, judging by the waitress’ question, they also know most of us are no longer so sure. I emailed The Counter to find out if the waitress was acting on her own and got this response from Mike Miklos, the Director of Education and Team Development: 

The server probably could have phrased her question better, but what she was trying to say was that “you’re really going to get a rare burger”…Many times our customers order a “medium” thinking it will have no pink, when it arrives they think it’s raw. Since everyone has their own perception of what “medium” or “rare” is we try not to even use those terms and [instead] describe the amount of redness.