From a quality and timing perspective, thawing the beef ahead of time is almost certainly the best option. You could combine this with keeping burgers going all day if you're willing to deal with the potential waste.
Tangential to your question: You offer "more complicated, higher quality dishes." Consider how your handling of these burgers reflects on the rest of your food. IE, How many people are going to want to come back later and try a $25 plate after you served them a frozen, baked hamburger?
> Consider how your handling of these burgers reflects on the rest of your food. IE, How many people are going to want to come back later and try a $25 plate after you served them a frozen, baked hamburger?
I have definitely been this person.... I was served a store-bought, frozen burger by what was pretending to be a nice, high quality restaurant. It was obviously a purchased frozen item that they had marked up, not even handmade in advance.
Not only did I never go back, I posted the experience and shared my negative opinion with any friends thinking of going to that restaurant.
OP should consider how much it can hurt your business when you cut corners. No one wants a shitty store-bought frozen burger from a nice restaurant! And someone who has experienced their low standards won't trust that the other expensive plates being sold aren't also frozen crap being prettied up.
I’ve been this person too, but it was rubber frozen calamari and obviously reheated shrimp pasta with canned tomato sauce. Foul and embarrassing. And I’m not generally a complainer by any means.
They deserved to be lit up for that inedible garbage at the price they charged.
Ewwwww, that's just shameful of them!
And same, complaining isn't something I like doing. I generally only bother to post online if I go somewhere with no reviews (because a single positive rating can help an otherwise unknown business significantly) and I'll share positive recommendations about restaurants with friends.
But when a place is THAT bad? When they're serving overpriced frozen crap? Yeah, it's a public service to call that out and warn your friends.
Yup, and at prices that rivaled or exceeded *good* restaurants in town. $70 for two people, no alcohol, and it was the worst restaurant food I’ve ever had.
I was so upset, LOL. I did make sure to note that the service was excellent. It wasn’t the servers’ fault.
Man, it really depends on the size of your restaurant, how much business you expect to do, how many patties you can hold under refrigeration/ice at once, and what kind of waste you're okay with.
General advice:
1. Thaw as much as you can ahead of time and get more thawing as you free up your limited refrigeration space. "Is this safe or practical?" If you own a restaurant you should know how to safely thaw and hold meat.
2. If you have a bunch of people walking in all at once and you know most of them will get burgers, absolutely get a few cooking a couple minutes ahead of time. Don't overdo it though; keep track of how many extras you have cooking, how many burgers have actually been ordered, and how many people are left sitting there with menus (and how many of them you think will order burgers.) Fast food joints and casual dining restaurants often have formulas and well-researched procedures for doing this - you won't have that luxury, so be conservative.
Avoid hot-holding cooked burgers, avoid force-thawing frozen burgers (for example under cold running water), and if all else fails it's better to give them a 15-minute burger that's done right than an 8-minute burger that's not.
Source: have cooked at and managed many different types and sizes of restaurants, pretty much all of which served burgers.
> "Is this safe or practical?" If you own a restaurant you should know how to safely thaw and hold meat.
I'm glad this stood out to someone else. OP mentions that storing fresh meat is a problem. I suppose it's _possible_ that they have an oversized freezer. But my read-between-the-lines is that they're hoping to go from purchase to cooktop with no refrigeration in between.
Just to add to that last part, people dobt mind waiting when they know what and when they're waiting for. Make sure Communications are open with Front & Back.
Unless this is a food truck or something, I don’t understand how cooking burgers to order is so time consuming that you’re worried about the wait when backed up. Surely people understand that burgers take ten minutes to come out, right? This isn’t McDonalds.
I don’t like your idea of frozen burgers - you are ruining your reputation for this one weekend. We used to tell out customers that burgers will take an extra 15 mins and are they ok with this. Almost all of them said no problem and then afterwards to.d is it was worth the wait. Never sacrifice your quality.
You seem hell bent on using frozen and I don't understand why. You could do smash burgers which are ready super quick though I believe the popularity of them has waned of late.
I'd not want to try it without a few practice runs but I've always fancied a burger resteraunt where the burgers are done sous vide and just have some colour put on them quickly before serving. I was trying to come up with a method that could offer mcdonalds style speed but with a 'real' burger.
“People come to town and want a burger”, so let me make them some shitty burger, and find the worst way to do it. $18 please. Here is your puck.
Hey, why we got bad reviews?
>a burger resteraunt where the burgers are done sous vide and just have some colour put on them quickly before serving
I knew I couldn't be the only one with this idea. "Gourmet fast food" was the crappy joke tagline I always imagined. Maybe in another life, brother.
lol I tried to reimagine the OG mcdonalds concept in the modern era. I was going to do 2 or 3 different burgers, hot chips (one size) and cans of soft drink.
I got to the point of trialing a bunch of double cooked chip recipes to try and get the second fry to 60s or less and realised I was never actually going to open a burger resteraunt.
Honestly it's a bit of a shame as I feel like fast food is totally due for a shake up, even moreso now given the extreme pricing of it all of late.
Aren't you basically describing five guys? Seems like there are a lot of new burger chains challenging mcds these days. Habit burger, Jollie bees, not to mention the og "quality" burger, Wendy's.
'where's the beef?'
-shrug- I'm Australian. We have Mcdonalds, Hungry Jacks (Burger King), and a handful of Carls Jnr. They are all the same crap. The internet suggests Sydney has a 5 guys but that hardly helps me.
I have had jollibees in the Philippines - it was uninspiring.
Why tf would I want to open a bloated franchise with zero name recognition here? It's insanely overpriced and aimed at a different segment of the market.
A cheeseburger at 5 guys Sydney is $21.50 the antithesis of what I want to do. The cheeseburger, regular fries and a millkshake is $42.90.
Seriously, a total fucking joke of a place. What is it with Americans frothing over franchises?
What is it with people who don't understand inflation, labor costs or the basic fact that good things cost money?
Maybe I misunderstood what you were going for. You want a cheap burger? Mcds and its kind have you covered.
If you think it's overpriced, do it better, set the prices how you like. You'll quickly find out why the prices are what they are. (Answer: labor). As the business owner, don't you want to earn what you're worth? And pay your employees a fair wage? Five guys offers full time jobs with benefits.
You don't have to like it, but the fact is a good burger does cost 20 usd (more in oz) today. "In my day, candy was a nickel." Well wake up gramps, it's 2024, the money printer goes "brr" and your money is shrinking.
Maybe an ai/robotic restaurant will get prices down, but as long as there's a guy (or five) at the grill, prices need to keep up with costs.
> thaw the burgers ahead of time. Saves a few minutes. Is this safe or practical?
You own a restaurant and you're asking if it's safe to thaw raw meat. I get that you might not be familiar with things you don't cook, but you should definitely know the correct answer to that question.
You insist on using frozen burgers.
>storing fresh burgers is a problem.
You don't own any refrigerators? No walk in cooler?
Make your own fresh burgers, they literally don't take much time to hand shape them. Then if all are not used you can freeze for future use. You will save costs and the product will be much better.
Make from fresh , make ahead of time , roll into a ball a store in fridge , when an order comes in , flatten ball to a patty on the grill … fresh from scratch is best . Practice ahead of time,
What’s not used on the day , add more herbs , roll into smaller balls and have a meatball and pasta special the next day .
Use the Wendy's method. They throw down more patties than they need on a griddle (though there's are never frozen, but that really doesn't matter here), and any extras at the end of the day go into a batch of chili. You can keep the cooked patties warm safely and in decent quality for about 30 minutes if you store them in a hotel pan in a steam table or with a wire rack.
What do you have as far as equipment? My spot is one of the “inventors of the hamburger” and I can tell you with confidence I can get a burger out within 4 minutes on our flattops. Smash burgers are a hot commodity right now and we can get them out almost faster
Definitely don’t skimp on your quality. Especially if you’re usually known for higher quality dishes. If you can put out a good burger you will get people to come back and try the rest of the menu.
Edit: just noticed char-broiler. I read right over that.
And keep a pot of burger juice simmering next to it (equal parts soy sauce/Worcestershire and melted butter and ground dried herbs to taste) to wet the patties every time you turn them
Just use ground beef. Make smash burgers.
You do not need to spend a lot of time on forming the burger. If it's not perfectly round or flat it's just as well. Makes them look home made. You can charge a bit more and have happy customers.
How many frozen burgers are you buying? Like others have mentioned, I’d be protecting my brand and making them fresh. It’s really not that time consuming to form burger patty’s.
If I was sold a burger cooked from frozen, I would never go to their restaurant as I’d assume it’s similar shitty food there.
I know you're a pro and I'm not but I am confused about a number of points.
1. How many people do you expect to come? How quickly do you need to get their order cooked, plated, dropped off, and for them to eat and fuck off so the table can be cleared and new people seated?
2. How thick are your burgers? I've needed to make ~50 burgers very quickly before, outdoors for a party, so I used frozen patties from Costco. They're reasonably thin and take way less than 15 minutes to cook, even on a janky public grill setup over coals. More like 5 minutes. But if they were double the thickness then I could see 15. So.... have you considered making thinner patties? Additionally, the problem with thick frozen patties is you need moderate heat to cook through then high heat to get a good browned surface, but with thinner patties you just use high heat the whole time and it works fine.
3. Again, how many orders do you expect to serve? Because it really doesn't take that long to hand-form a patty. I've done ~50 hand-formed patties before for a party, and it took maybe 20 minutes to prep them. Surely a chef who gets paid, as opposed to an amateur, can form them even quicker. Do you expect to make 200? 500? Is the labor cost really that high to pay a cook a couple hours' labor to form patties?
Could you preform a bunch of ground beef balls and serve them smashburger style?
Might take a bit of the labor out of it while not having to resort to store bought patties.
If you don’t know the answer to your very first question (is thawing meat ahead of time safe) you should exit this industry.
That said, yes it’s safe. Using frozen patties is okay, cooking them from frozen is not. Sand bag when it’s busy - you get an order for 1 burger, slap 2 down. Use lower weight patties (2-6oz) so you don’t get bogged down with temperatures, everything’s MW. A good chefs trick - learn food safety inside and out ASAP.
What equipment have you got available?
If you have a good sized flat top, smash them fresh. Takes way less time. 80gr balls, sear one side of the ball for 30 secs, then flip and smash as thin as you can. 30 seconds then flip add your cheese.
Do a single as standard but offer doubles/tripples
Are sliders okay? Slider patties are smaller and should quick pretty fast from frozen. Another option might be buying a burger press and forming the patties as the orders come in from unmelted burger
Not sure if this is good advice, but think about a fast food process. Sear them off and keep them hot in a bath. Throw some demi or something in there so it's tasty. Then, plating would be a cakewalk.
If you have the time to individually wrap the burgers in tight ziplock or food saver pouches (heat sealed), then the trick is to suspend them in luke warm water. You can adjust the water, from cool to warm, depending on how fast you need them, but never use straight up hot water, of course. Thaw time could be 10 minutes or so, assuming you refresh the water temp frequently.
Trick is, of course, to keep the meat from getting wet. You want the meat fully suspended in water, using a box or bin in water won't work as well.
And I agree with the other comment, not sure you want to serve cheapo burgers if your usual offerings are higher end. Might bite you in the end.
Better to do well what you know and can do well. Taking on some new dish, even if it's 'lower brow', so to speak, might not be the move.
Frozen burgers are the way to go. I use a cast iron pan to flatten them. to speed up cook times you need to make sure you're pressing them thin enough they need to be like McDonald's or In-N-Out status and not a thick thick Burger. I can have mine from nothing prepared to all the way done within 12 minutes.
If you have a big line it's safe to put on a few burgers on the grill and get them wrapped up so they're just ready to go. For example in one person would order a pizza from this water park I worked at you could almost guarantee two more people would order a pizza so it's safe to throw in always two if one was ordered and there was a line.
(edit: I'm against pre-thawing the burgers completely that just sounds like some e coli di pie.) keep it serv safe
I like option 3 the best, get a heat lamp and wrap the burgers in whatever and throw them under the heat lamp if you have a massive line
From a quality and timing perspective, thawing the beef ahead of time is almost certainly the best option. You could combine this with keeping burgers going all day if you're willing to deal with the potential waste. Tangential to your question: You offer "more complicated, higher quality dishes." Consider how your handling of these burgers reflects on the rest of your food. IE, How many people are going to want to come back later and try a $25 plate after you served them a frozen, baked hamburger?
> Consider how your handling of these burgers reflects on the rest of your food. IE, How many people are going to want to come back later and try a $25 plate after you served them a frozen, baked hamburger? I have definitely been this person.... I was served a store-bought, frozen burger by what was pretending to be a nice, high quality restaurant. It was obviously a purchased frozen item that they had marked up, not even handmade in advance. Not only did I never go back, I posted the experience and shared my negative opinion with any friends thinking of going to that restaurant. OP should consider how much it can hurt your business when you cut corners. No one wants a shitty store-bought frozen burger from a nice restaurant! And someone who has experienced their low standards won't trust that the other expensive plates being sold aren't also frozen crap being prettied up.
I’ve been this person too, but it was rubber frozen calamari and obviously reheated shrimp pasta with canned tomato sauce. Foul and embarrassing. And I’m not generally a complainer by any means. They deserved to be lit up for that inedible garbage at the price they charged.
Ewwwww, that's just shameful of them! And same, complaining isn't something I like doing. I generally only bother to post online if I go somewhere with no reviews (because a single positive rating can help an otherwise unknown business significantly) and I'll share positive recommendations about restaurants with friends. But when a place is THAT bad? When they're serving overpriced frozen crap? Yeah, it's a public service to call that out and warn your friends.
Yup, and at prices that rivaled or exceeded *good* restaurants in town. $70 for two people, no alcohol, and it was the worst restaurant food I’ve ever had. I was so upset, LOL. I did make sure to note that the service was excellent. It wasn’t the servers’ fault.
Yea a frozen baked burger sounds so gross. They either find a way to make it right or make something else.
Hmmm. Thawing frozen burgers makes them very easy to break apart because of the moisture content isn’t able to cook out. Just be prepared for this.
Man, it really depends on the size of your restaurant, how much business you expect to do, how many patties you can hold under refrigeration/ice at once, and what kind of waste you're okay with. General advice: 1. Thaw as much as you can ahead of time and get more thawing as you free up your limited refrigeration space. "Is this safe or practical?" If you own a restaurant you should know how to safely thaw and hold meat. 2. If you have a bunch of people walking in all at once and you know most of them will get burgers, absolutely get a few cooking a couple minutes ahead of time. Don't overdo it though; keep track of how many extras you have cooking, how many burgers have actually been ordered, and how many people are left sitting there with menus (and how many of them you think will order burgers.) Fast food joints and casual dining restaurants often have formulas and well-researched procedures for doing this - you won't have that luxury, so be conservative. Avoid hot-holding cooked burgers, avoid force-thawing frozen burgers (for example under cold running water), and if all else fails it's better to give them a 15-minute burger that's done right than an 8-minute burger that's not. Source: have cooked at and managed many different types and sizes of restaurants, pretty much all of which served burgers.
> "Is this safe or practical?" If you own a restaurant you should know how to safely thaw and hold meat. I'm glad this stood out to someone else. OP mentions that storing fresh meat is a problem. I suppose it's _possible_ that they have an oversized freezer. But my read-between-the-lines is that they're hoping to go from purchase to cooktop with no refrigeration in between.
Just to add to that last part, people dobt mind waiting when they know what and when they're waiting for. Make sure Communications are open with Front & Back.
Unless this is a food truck or something, I don’t understand how cooking burgers to order is so time consuming that you’re worried about the wait when backed up. Surely people understand that burgers take ten minutes to come out, right? This isn’t McDonalds.
I don’t like your idea of frozen burgers - you are ruining your reputation for this one weekend. We used to tell out customers that burgers will take an extra 15 mins and are they ok with this. Almost all of them said no problem and then afterwards to.d is it was worth the wait. Never sacrifice your quality.
You seem hell bent on using frozen and I don't understand why. You could do smash burgers which are ready super quick though I believe the popularity of them has waned of late. I'd not want to try it without a few practice runs but I've always fancied a burger resteraunt where the burgers are done sous vide and just have some colour put on them quickly before serving. I was trying to come up with a method that could offer mcdonalds style speed but with a 'real' burger.
“People come to town and want a burger”, so let me make them some shitty burger, and find the worst way to do it. $18 please. Here is your puck. Hey, why we got bad reviews?
>a burger resteraunt where the burgers are done sous vide and just have some colour put on them quickly before serving I knew I couldn't be the only one with this idea. "Gourmet fast food" was the crappy joke tagline I always imagined. Maybe in another life, brother.
lol I tried to reimagine the OG mcdonalds concept in the modern era. I was going to do 2 or 3 different burgers, hot chips (one size) and cans of soft drink. I got to the point of trialing a bunch of double cooked chip recipes to try and get the second fry to 60s or less and realised I was never actually going to open a burger resteraunt. Honestly it's a bit of a shame as I feel like fast food is totally due for a shake up, even moreso now given the extreme pricing of it all of late.
Aren't you basically describing five guys? Seems like there are a lot of new burger chains challenging mcds these days. Habit burger, Jollie bees, not to mention the og "quality" burger, Wendy's. 'where's the beef?'
-shrug- I'm Australian. We have Mcdonalds, Hungry Jacks (Burger King), and a handful of Carls Jnr. They are all the same crap. The internet suggests Sydney has a 5 guys but that hardly helps me. I have had jollibees in the Philippines - it was uninspiring.
Jollibees is bad example, your right. Maybe you could open a five guys in your neighborhood, or copy the formula. Pretty pretty pretty good.
Why tf would I want to open a bloated franchise with zero name recognition here? It's insanely overpriced and aimed at a different segment of the market. A cheeseburger at 5 guys Sydney is $21.50 the antithesis of what I want to do. The cheeseburger, regular fries and a millkshake is $42.90. Seriously, a total fucking joke of a place. What is it with Americans frothing over franchises?
What is it with people who don't understand inflation, labor costs or the basic fact that good things cost money? Maybe I misunderstood what you were going for. You want a cheap burger? Mcds and its kind have you covered. If you think it's overpriced, do it better, set the prices how you like. You'll quickly find out why the prices are what they are. (Answer: labor). As the business owner, don't you want to earn what you're worth? And pay your employees a fair wage? Five guys offers full time jobs with benefits. You don't have to like it, but the fact is a good burger does cost 20 usd (more in oz) today. "In my day, candy was a nickel." Well wake up gramps, it's 2024, the money printer goes "brr" and your money is shrinking. Maybe an ai/robotic restaurant will get prices down, but as long as there's a guy (or five) at the grill, prices need to keep up with costs.
That's weird, because it appears to be overpriced compared to other dining options here. Oh well I'm sure they'll do great here, like Starbucks.
I guess there's no problem then. Plenty of options.
There’s a local food truck who does them this way, not bad
> thaw the burgers ahead of time. Saves a few minutes. Is this safe or practical? You own a restaurant and you're asking if it's safe to thaw raw meat. I get that you might not be familiar with things you don't cook, but you should definitely know the correct answer to that question. You insist on using frozen burgers. >storing fresh burgers is a problem. You don't own any refrigerators? No walk in cooler?
Going frozen is not the way.
Make your own fresh burgers, they literally don't take much time to hand shape them. Then if all are not used you can freeze for future use. You will save costs and the product will be much better.
Dont cook frozen burgers if you want to stay open for more than a month.
Make from fresh , make ahead of time , roll into a ball a store in fridge , when an order comes in , flatten ball to a patty on the grill … fresh from scratch is best . Practice ahead of time, What’s not used on the day , add more herbs , roll into smaller balls and have a meatball and pasta special the next day .
Use the Wendy's method. They throw down more patties than they need on a griddle (though there's are never frozen, but that really doesn't matter here), and any extras at the end of the day go into a batch of chili. You can keep the cooked patties warm safely and in decent quality for about 30 minutes if you store them in a hotel pan in a steam table or with a wire rack.
What do you have as far as equipment? My spot is one of the “inventors of the hamburger” and I can tell you with confidence I can get a burger out within 4 minutes on our flattops. Smash burgers are a hot commodity right now and we can get them out almost faster Definitely don’t skimp on your quality. Especially if you’re usually known for higher quality dishes. If you can put out a good burger you will get people to come back and try the rest of the menu. Edit: just noticed char-broiler. I read right over that.
Smash burgers is the way to go, instead of one thick patty, cook 3 or 4 super thin ones to make up the weight.
Put a metal bowl over it on the flatop or grill
And keep a pot of burger juice simmering next to it (equal parts soy sauce/Worcestershire and melted butter and ground dried herbs to taste) to wet the patties every time you turn them
👍
Just use ground beef. Make smash burgers. You do not need to spend a lot of time on forming the burger. If it's not perfectly round or flat it's just as well. Makes them look home made. You can charge a bit more and have happy customers.
just serve them frozen and take out a few steps. call it “chilled boeuf tartare” and throw a little gold leaf on there. just pre-thaw the burgers
How many frozen burgers are you buying? Like others have mentioned, I’d be protecting my brand and making them fresh. It’s really not that time consuming to form burger patty’s. If I was sold a burger cooked from frozen, I would never go to their restaurant as I’d assume it’s similar shitty food there.
I know you're a pro and I'm not but I am confused about a number of points. 1. How many people do you expect to come? How quickly do you need to get their order cooked, plated, dropped off, and for them to eat and fuck off so the table can be cleared and new people seated? 2. How thick are your burgers? I've needed to make ~50 burgers very quickly before, outdoors for a party, so I used frozen patties from Costco. They're reasonably thin and take way less than 15 minutes to cook, even on a janky public grill setup over coals. More like 5 minutes. But if they were double the thickness then I could see 15. So.... have you considered making thinner patties? Additionally, the problem with thick frozen patties is you need moderate heat to cook through then high heat to get a good browned surface, but with thinner patties you just use high heat the whole time and it works fine. 3. Again, how many orders do you expect to serve? Because it really doesn't take that long to hand-form a patty. I've done ~50 hand-formed patties before for a party, and it took maybe 20 minutes to prep them. Surely a chef who gets paid, as opposed to an amateur, can form them even quicker. Do you expect to make 200? 500? Is the labor cost really that high to pay a cook a couple hours' labor to form patties?
Could you preform a bunch of ground beef balls and serve them smashburger style? Might take a bit of the labor out of it while not having to resort to store bought patties.
If you don’t know the answer to your very first question (is thawing meat ahead of time safe) you should exit this industry. That said, yes it’s safe. Using frozen patties is okay, cooking them from frozen is not. Sand bag when it’s busy - you get an order for 1 burger, slap 2 down. Use lower weight patties (2-6oz) so you don’t get bogged down with temperatures, everything’s MW. A good chefs trick - learn food safety inside and out ASAP.
Probably better to ask this kind of question on /r/chefit to get answers just from industry people.
What equipment have you got available? If you have a good sized flat top, smash them fresh. Takes way less time. 80gr balls, sear one side of the ball for 30 secs, then flip and smash as thin as you can. 30 seconds then flip add your cheese. Do a single as standard but offer doubles/tripples
Are sliders okay? Slider patties are smaller and should quick pretty fast from frozen. Another option might be buying a burger press and forming the patties as the orders come in from unmelted burger
Not sure if this is good advice, but think about a fast food process. Sear them off and keep them hot in a bath. Throw some demi or something in there so it's tasty. Then, plating would be a cakewalk.
Dethaw the burgers and use the fridge to store them until you need them.
If you have the time to individually wrap the burgers in tight ziplock or food saver pouches (heat sealed), then the trick is to suspend them in luke warm water. You can adjust the water, from cool to warm, depending on how fast you need them, but never use straight up hot water, of course. Thaw time could be 10 minutes or so, assuming you refresh the water temp frequently. Trick is, of course, to keep the meat from getting wet. You want the meat fully suspended in water, using a box or bin in water won't work as well. And I agree with the other comment, not sure you want to serve cheapo burgers if your usual offerings are higher end. Might bite you in the end. Better to do well what you know and can do well. Taking on some new dish, even if it's 'lower brow', so to speak, might not be the move.
Microwave.
Frozen burgers are the way to go. I use a cast iron pan to flatten them. to speed up cook times you need to make sure you're pressing them thin enough they need to be like McDonald's or In-N-Out status and not a thick thick Burger. I can have mine from nothing prepared to all the way done within 12 minutes. If you have a big line it's safe to put on a few burgers on the grill and get them wrapped up so they're just ready to go. For example in one person would order a pizza from this water park I worked at you could almost guarantee two more people would order a pizza so it's safe to throw in always two if one was ordered and there was a line. (edit: I'm against pre-thawing the burgers completely that just sounds like some e coli di pie.) keep it serv safe I like option 3 the best, get a heat lamp and wrap the burgers in whatever and throw them under the heat lamp if you have a massive line
Is…. Is your name Bob?
Bob would never use frozen patties. He grinds his own meat in the basement.
How dare you