For Rachael Ray-Style Burgers, Ditch The Grill Grates For This Versatile Kitchen Tool

Whether you know Rachael Ray from her wildly successful Food Network series like "30-Minute Meals," her eponymous talk show, or her lifestyle magazine Every Day with Rachael Ray, you know she has firecracker girl-next-door energy and is focused on making daily life for her audience easier and, hopefully, more tasty. Everything Ray does is no-muss, no-fuss and focused on practical advice largely aimed at home cooks. While her content often skews toward American classics, one of her most frequent subjects is humble meal staple: the hamburger.

Ray took to her latest show, "Meals In Minutes," to share some incredibly useful tips for burger success, leading with her cooking method of choice. In a montage of clips from the show posted on Instagram, Ray waxes poetic about the fact that she always makes burgers using a flat plane, such as a cast iron pan, of putting the patties directly on a grill. She elaborates that even if she is cooking outside, she still puts a cast iron surface on top of the grill grates. Her thought process behind this approach is that you get more even browning of the meat by cooking it on a completely flat heated surface.

In the same Instagram post, Rachael Ray advises viewers to make burgers thinner in the center and thicker at the edges so they cook through properly, and reminds us to let the chill come off the burger meat before cooking. To make sure your meat mixture is seasoned properly, another Ray pro move is to cook a mini test burger before you proceed with your full batch. She also emphasizes the importance of eyeballing your meat mixture to equally portion burgers so they cook through at the same time, and making the patties 20% bigger than the bun to accommodate the contraction that occurs when they hit the heat.

To work cleanly and efficiently as you make your burgers, who can forget Ray's universally helpful advice that has kept many a household counter top tidier with the implementation of the garbage bowl? As if Ray's burger advice isn't convincing enough on its own, Bobby Flay is yet another Food Network superstar who prefers a flat cooking surface for winning burgers. Just make sure to avoid common burger pitfalls like using lean meat, overcooking the patties, or not letting them rest before serving.