Give Burger Patties A Flavor-Packed Boost With This Breakfast Staple

Forget what the purists say — burgers are a flavor playground, and you should feel free to customize them however you want. You can mix and match different breads and toppings, get ridiculously flavorful burgers with compound butters, and baste the patties with this one-ingredient burger glaze to make some pretty amazing sandwiches. You can also take things a step further and fiddle around with the meat itself, transforming regular ground beef into a patty packed with surprises. Bacon, for instance, can seriously level up your burger patties.

Mixing a few tablespoons of bacon fat into your ground beef makes the patties richer and juicier, while also adding several layers of flavor via the spices, salt, and smokiness of the bacon itself. If you want to play around with texture, try chopping up cooked bacon and mixing it straight into your burger meat. The contrast between the moist, juicy burgers and the crisp bites of bacon inside makes for a fun meal.

You could also try grinding raw bacon into your beef to get even more of the bacon's flavor into your patties. It's a technique that's been around for quite some time; Slater's 50/50, for instance, has been making burgers with a 50/50 beef and bacon blend since their restaurant first opened in 2009. If you're making everything at home, however, you might want to try an even better ratio: one that gives you optimal flavor without compromising texture.

It's often said that the ideal lean-to-fat ratio of a burger is 80% lean meat and 20% fat; this gives you a good, beefy burger that stays juicy after cooking. Ground chuck is one of the most recommended cuts of beef for a burger because it has a similar ratio. Adding in bacon, however, throws that balance off. 

Bacon is roughly 45% to 50% fat, so adding too much of it to your chuck will give you a greasy, overly rich burger. To maximize the bacon-y goodness of your patties, switch to using ground sirloin, which, on average, has a 90:10 lean-to-fat ratio. This will allow you to amp up the bacon in your mix without compromising the texture.

Based on the math, you'll want to add around 1.4 ounces of raw bacon for every 4 ounces of sirloin. These proportions should get you very close to an 80:20 lean-to-fat ratio, give or take a few decimal points. This makes the patty a little over ⅓ bacon, which should be enough to make its flavors really shine through without overpowering the beefiness of your sirloin, and — more importantly — without turning your burger into a greasy mess. If you get your bacon from a trusted butcher or one of the best-ranked store-bought bacon brands, you'll end up with some remarkably flavorful burger patties.