The Science Behind Adding Eggs to Burgers

If you're making your own hamburgers, adding eggs to the meat of the hamburger can help hold the meat together to make it easier to cook. Without the right binder, hamburgers can fall apart in the pan or on the grill. Adding fried eggs is a typical topping for hamburgers with additional meats as toppings, such as bacon. Breakfast burgers with lightly salted fried eggs are delicious.

Eggs are a great way to bind ingredients together and make them easier to cook. The egg white provides most of the structural integrity, but the yolk also does some of the structural integrity. In addition, the yolk helps with what could otherwise be a gummy texture. It's important to handle the minced meat as little as possible when making burgers, as crushing it can cause proteins to clump together and make the burgers less tender.

Letting the burgers sit in the fridge for half an hour or so will also help them stay together. As an alternative point of view, adding a small amount of breadcrumbs and egg can also turn out very good. If you can add a new dimension of flavor to your hamburger by improving on classic flavors, you're ready to go. However, if you add a lot of other things to your burgers, you run the risk that they taste like meatloaf (or have the consistency of).

Heston Blumental had a good trick where you take the minced meat and spread it on a transparent film, salt it and then roll it into a sausage (keeping the film out), put it in the fridge for 2 to 4 hours to let the salt do its job and then cut the burgers into slices. If the sausage is a little thin, cut thicker slices and pat them a little. So why is adding eggs such a universal way to unite ingredients? This is something you can explain with science. Eggs act as binders for meats because they contain proteins that help hold ingredients together.

The proteins in eggs are able to form strong bonds with other proteins, which helps keep ingredients from separating during cooking. It's important to remember that once the meat stops being a cow, each processing and packaging step presents an additional possibility of contamination. This is probably the number one mistake that everyone is guilty of (including me). People are afraid of fat, so they make their burgers VERY lean, which doesn't stick together well.

To compensate for this, people start adding breadcrumbs, eggs, milk and other binders. No matter what type of burger you're making, adding eggs is an easy way to ensure that your burgers stay together during cooking and don't fall apart in the pan or on the grill. Whether you're making breakfast burgers with lightly salted fried eggs or classic hamburgers with additional meats as toppings, adding eggs is sure to make your burgers delicious.

Valerie Jhanson
Valerie Jhanson

Avid food enthusiast. Freelance coffee fan. Professional tv ninja. Hipster-friendly travel guru. Extreme thinker.