Posted on 07/28/2022 1:04:02 PM PDT by Red Badger
If you have a hankering for a hamburger, math may have some timesaving cooking tips for you.
Increasing the number of times a burger is flipped from one side to the other reduces its cook time by up to nearly a third, theoretical calculations suggest. But cooks at home probably won’t see much benefit out of more than three to four flips, mathematician Jean-Luc Thiffeault reports June 17 in Physica D.
Thiffeault used math to model how heat moves through an “infinite” slab of meat, which cooks continuously on only the bottom side and cools on the top until the meat is flipped. Flipping heated the meat evenly, speeding up cooking, the analysis showed. And more flips led to a faster cook. For example, flipping this theoretical 1-centimeter-thick patty just once gave it a cook time of 80 seconds, while flipping it 10 times at intervals ranging from six to 11 seconds resulted in a cook time of 69 seconds. Continuing to flip the burger led to a maximum decrease of 29 percent in cooking time.
But the timesaving benefit seemed to diminish as the number of flips increased beyond a certain threshold, says Thiffeault, of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “After three or four flips, the gain in time is negligible.”
Thiffeault’s findings align with what chef and food writer J. Kenji López-Alt has observed in the kitchen. In a 2019 article for the food and drink website Serious Eats, Kenji López-Alt compared how long it took for a burger’s internal temperature to reach about 52° Celsius, or 125° Fahrenheit, based on cooking method. Flipping a burger every 15 seconds — as opposed to flipping the patty just once — shortened cooking time by nearly a third.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenews.org ...
Unlike Joe Biden. We know what kind he is. Has he flipped his lid yet today?
Well there can be a problem of losing meat if you flip it and it hasn’t released from the grill yet.
Thanks for the tip.
I use a gas grill some but I have a cast iron gridle on top of the grate. Unfortunately that severely limits the cooking area.
Selling the idea of another grill to my wife will be the biggest hurdle however. Lol
The multiple flip theory is a myth. Crank up the flame, soak em in beer and flip away. Awesome burger.
Cooking 30 burgers at a time, flipping once makes total sense from a practical point of view!
Interesting thread.
In the last 25 years, I’ve cooked thousands of cow and venison burgers on my George Forman grills. It cooks them perfectly. 5 minutes and 30 seconds cooks them just right for us, no need to flip, and I get grill marks. I measure my burgers in inches.
Did our money fund this waste of time? This is not how science is done. You flip, measure and gather information.
Or just ask someone who flips a lot of burgers.
I just wonder how big the Grant was to figure this out. We should all get big Grants so we could afford some hamburger to try this out.
How do you melt the cheese?
Ahh! You blinded me!
flip it before then to keep the juices inside
You put the cheese on after to remove the burgers from the grill. I put them in a glass (pyrex) 11x8 pan, put a slice of cheese on the burgers, then cover the whole thing with foil. Wait 5-10 minutes, and you have a perfect burger, with melted cheese.
“after to remove” == “after you remove”
Put the Cheese on for the last couple minutes while the buns are browning. Perfect.
One day when you are staring at the ceiling in the nursing home, you will not be saying to yourself “I wish I had never bought that gas griddle”.
A nuclear blast will always be the fastest method . . . and I am unanimous in this!
Yes, I was a short order cook back in the 1970s and always put the cheese on the burger after it was placed on the bun, nothing worse than melted cheese running down the sides of your patty. I used to flip the patties twice per side when cooking too, while the other cooks just did one flip. Repeat customers always asked the waitress for me to cook their burger because mine were so juicy and cooked evenly.
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