Home Cook Finds An Easy Way To Keep Burger Patties Perfectly Round

What's not to love about burgers? They're quick to cook, relatively budget-friendly, and the patties are endlessly customizable. But beyond taste, another factor that can quickly separate a homemade burger from one that came out of a gourmet kitchen is appearance. Alongside beautifully arranged toppings, the shape of the patty can be the difference between a $5 burger and a $777 one (yep, this is the price of a real burger). If you want your patties to look like they came straight from Godron Ramsay's kitchen, an egg mold is the secret to picture-perfect burgers.

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Round, juicy, and perfectly cooked, thank you silicion egg ring! #burger #cooking #food

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There's a little piece of food lore behind the humble circular egg mold, too. In 1971, McDonald's franchise operator Herb Peterson invented a Teflon-coated ring to give the eggs in his soon-to-be-famous Egg McMuffin a perfectly round shape that would fit neatly inside an English muffin. While the original purpose was eggs, home cooks have found plenty of other uses for the tool, including shaping burger patties. Aside from keeping the burger's shape consistent – which is particularly useful if you're cooking many for a crowd — a circular mold enables more control over making your patties an even thickness; this encourages more uniform cooking, making this hack particularly well-suited to burger-making novices. 

To try the hack out yourself, place the egg ring in a lightly oiled pan and gently press your ground beef into it using the base of a spoon or a flat jar lid, making sure not to compact the meat too tightly. Once the patty has cooked long enough to hold its shape and develop a beautiful golden-brown crust, carefully lift the ring away. From there, the shape should hold, and you can flip the burger with a spatula, finishing cooking it as usual.

An egg mold might be able to keep your burger patties perfectly round, but it can't stop them from puffing up in the center. It's a common frustration for home cooks, and the reason comes down to what happens to the meat when it hits heat. As the proteins tighten, the muscle fibers contract and pull inward. If that happens evenly across the patty, the effect is minimal. When the edges cook faster than the center, however, the outer meat contracts first and pushes the softer middle upward.

This is particularly noticeable when grilling or broiling, where the edges can be exposed to more intense heat than the center. The result is a burger with a rounded, almost dome-like surface rather than the flat patty you started with. Fortunately, there's a simple tip to prevent it. Using your fingers, just press a small dimple into the center of the raw patty before cooking. In tandem with this hack, we also recommend chilling your burger patties before cooking, as this solidifies the fat, helping the burger hold its shape as it cooks. Here, a moderate lean-to-fat ratio is important; too little fat can cause the patty to dry out, whereas too much renders out quickly, causing the burger to shrink.  

This trick is easy as it is effective. Starting with a raw, indented burger patty may feel illogical, yet as the burger cooks and shrinks, the center fills back out to replace the lost space, rather than overspilling. This is especially useful if you want the burger to act as a solid base for your toppings, whereas an uneven base can cause them to slide out onto your plate before you've even had the chance to take a bite.