The Underrated Tool Ina Garten Swears By When Mixing Burger Meat

From how to store your good knives to the best mess-free method to cut corn off the cob, cookbook author and celebrity chef Ina Garten has countless tips to make you a better home cook. In every recipe, video, blog post, or TikTok she shares, Garten offers up another intuitive yet unexpected approach. Her recipe for Niman Ranch burgers, shared on Food Network's YouTube channel, is no different, revealing a helpful tip for preparing burger patties.

When making hamburgers at home, you might be tempted to mix up your beef, egg, bread crumbs, milk, and seasoning with your hands or perhaps with a spatula (or even a potato masher). According to Garten, this is a classic hamburger mixing mistake as you'll compress your meat too much. Instead, the Barefoot Contessa swears by an underrated kitchen tool we all have at home: the fork.

"The key to this is using a fork," says Garten when mixing up her meat. "You don't want to compact it at all, you want it to be light." In the same way you don't want to overmix your cake or cookie batter, you don't want to make your hamburger patties too dense and chewy. That extends to when you shape them, too. "Roll it around carefully but don't compact it," Garten adds.

Just as Ina Garten will never ask you to purchase an unnecessary kitchen tool for an easy task, she doesn't overcomplicate her recipes by including everything but the kitchen sink. And that applies to her hamburgers. "I'm talking about the classics, but with great ingredients so the volume is turned up," she says in the video on her Niman Ranch burger recipe. Speaking of quality ingredients, Garten uses premium grass-fed beef in her burgers. "I ask for 80% lean, 20% fat so they're really delicious and moist," she specifies.

When mixing up her meat, Garten relies on just a few household ingredients. "To make them really moist, and nobody wants a dry hamburger, I put in 3 tablespoons of olive oil," she says. "You won't believe what a difference this makes." She then keeps it simple with basic ingredients that won't overpower the flavor of the beef, like salt, pepper, and mustard. 

When it comes time to cook her patties, she dabs a little olive oil on the grill to prevent sticking, and to create photo-worthy grill marks. As a final tip, she advises her audience against ever pressing down on burgers on the grill as it releases too much of their juices, drying them out. Garten serves her simple but delicious burgers with caramelized onions on top and, as an added twist, between two toasted pieces of English muffin. Try her methods yourself to see if you'll swear by them too.