What I Learned About Burgers, Salt, and Myself By Totally Botching a DIY Shake Shack Kit
It seemed like such a good idea at the time. My kids were practically drooling in anticipation. We were going to make Shake Shack burgers at home.
This happened a few months ago, when my family, being residents of a county that was enduring a scary early spike in COVID-19 infections, began sheltering at home in the most austere way we could. I rarely stepped outside. We had everything from diapers to eggs delivered to our front stoop. The notion of going out for burgers was incomprehensible, but I learned that you could get a Shake Shack kit through Goldbelly, and this news sent ripples of joy through our household. (Apparently my teenage children had grown much wearier of my “Italian improv” cooking than I had realized.)
I should be grateful. That kit wound up teaching me about myself and the tricky nuances of cooking a proper Shake Shack-style burger. But I learned these lessons by messing up. If we’re being honest—and my kids had no problem with being bluntly so—I botched the job. Perhaps my mistakes can be your guide as we head into the Fourth of July weekend.
The instructions were perfectly clear, by the way. When you get the Shake Shack kit, it comes with eight patties of Pat LaFrieda beef, eight Martin’s potato rolls, eight slices of American cheese, a pouch of ShackSauce, and a sheet that tells you how to cook and assemble the burgers. I sort of skimmed this sheet. My bad.
My family and I have ordered many other items from Goldbelly, a company founded by entrepreneur Joe Ariel that sends you meals from beloved local spots around the country. We’ve gotten muffaletta sandwiches from Central Grocery in New Orleans. (You unwrap them and slice them.) We’ve splurged several times on bagels and cream cheese and Gaspe Nova smoked salmon from Russ & Daughters in New York. (No instructions necessary, at least not in this house.) We’ve gotten cheesesteaks from Pat’s King of Steaks in Philadelphia. (Already cooked and flash-frozen, so you unwrap them and heat them up in the oven while you get the cheese sauce all melty in a warm pan.) Easy. Delicious.
“In our early years, I would sometimes question these things,” Ariel told me. “Now we’re seven years in. A big part of what we do is packaging science.” When you can’t easily travel anywhere and you’re uneasy about sitting at restaurants because of a surging pandemic, the ability to conjure up, on the counter of your home kitchen, a sandwich that flew in from New Orleans or Philadelphia? Well, that can feel like an act of spiritual self-care.
It’s not always easy, though. Maybe some residual snobbery regarding fast food led me to assume that a Shake Shack burger would be a fairly basic dish to cook at home, but I now believe that everyone who works at a Shake Shack outpost is a culinary virtuoso who deserves a gigantic raise.
The main thing I did wrong (as my kids were all too happy to remind me) was that I didn’t smash the patties enough. This smashing part is not optional. If you don’t do it, you wind up with a thick, rounded patty that tastes fine (the meat is high-quality, after all) but feels all lopsided from a surface-area standpoint. For this specific style of burger, you’re supposed to put the puck of ground beef into a cast-iron pan or onto a hot griddle, and press down on it with a firm spatula so that the meat thins out and develops a crackly-edged crust.
I failed at that. First I used a rubber spatula, which boinged back pathetically like a prop in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, and then, hunting for something more solid, I tried to use the bottom of a beer mug. Too late. I could already sense that my burgers were going to look more like deflated basketballs than skinny frisbees.
I also didn’t season the patties with enough salt, and I should’ve known better, since for a decade or so I’ve had countless conversations with chefs about the magical role that salt plays in burger artistry. (I will always remember standing next to gifted chef Ned Baldwin in the kitchen of his Manhattan restaurant, Houseman, while he placed some burger patties in a row, lifted his hand, and then proceeded to release a whirling white tornado upon them.)
Mark Rosati, Shake Shake’s culinary director and a man who has spent actual years of his existence obsessing over every iota of cheeseburger infrastructure, later got on the phone with me and compared salt to electricity. “It brings everything to life,” he said. At Shake Shack, he went on, the patties are “pretty liberally salted. That’s how you get that flavor.” Scrimp on the sodium chloride and you’ve got a dance party where the cheese and the sauce linger glumly on the margins because the music’s not loud enough.
I probably shouldn’t belabor this, because it’s embarrassing, but I also realized too late that we didn’t have lettuce and tomato in the house. Whatever, I figured. People just want the meat and cheese anyway. In thinking that way, I was guilty of ignoring the scientific evidence, by which I mean Rosati’s hours and hours of research. “We need that tomato for the sweetness,” he later explained. Okay, but how essential can a leaf of lettuce be? “Its one job, besides looking pretty, is being a refreshing note,” Rosati said. “A little bit of relief. Certain flavors are going to become accentuated when all those ingredients come together. We think so much about all that nuance.”
Maybe nuance is not my specialty. On my own burger, in place of the lettuce and tomato, I impulsively jammed in some pickles and crispy fried onions. I couldn’t imagine how that would be a bad decision. I was wrong. Juxtaposed with the calculated mildness of the cheese and the bun, these last-minute party crashers were too boisterous. All I could taste was pickle brine. The dominant texture was crunch, from the onions, instead of the smooth, unified bite you’d normally get. I was stuck at home in quarantine and I had ruined my ShackBurger. Insert sad emoji here. As Rosati would later put it, “It’s hard to edit oneself.”
People of America, you’re going to be cooking some burgers this weekend. It’s what we do. Whether you’re testing out a Shake Shack kit, or attempting to replicate the juicy pub burger they’ve got at Red Hook Tavern in Brooklyn, or grilling veggie burgers out in the backyard, you don’t want to look up and see the same disappointed grimaces that I saw on the faces of my children when I shattered their Shake Shack daydreams. Even René Redzepi at Noma in Copenhagen eventually saw the light when he and his team turned their famed, envelope-pushing restaurant into a burger joint in May. As Jeni Porter reported for Esquire a few weeks ago, “being Noma, they spent the next five weeks tinkering and testing all sorts of concoctions—such as mixing wild foraged blossoms and buds into the sauces—only to circle right back to where they started. Their best burger was their simplest.”
Remember that this Fourth of July. Remember it for your family. I know what my own mantra will be: Simplicity. Balance. Harmony. And plenty of salt.
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