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Comment by MichaelCollins | Hacker News Reader

I've never seen anything wrong with grocery store patties. I think the problem with fast food burgers is the bad bread, weird sauces, missing/sparse toppings, and most of all the sloppy half-assed construction. If you make the burger at home with the same patty, it will almost certainly come out much better.

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There's nothing wrong with the meat quality per se, but if you're cooking a frozen premade patty you're not properly seasoning it and it's not going to have a good taste.

You could thaw it out, break it down, season it and re-form it. But who does that?

Ngl I don't even know what seasoning I would put on a burger patty. A burger patty to me is just a disc of ground beef, I don't expect anything else from it.

In my experience, if the beef is fresh, high quality, and the right cut, grind and fat content, all it needs is salt on the surface at the time of cooking.

The salt mixed into many pre-made patties makes them increasingly rubbery the longer they sit in the supermarket. The seasonings are usually a crapshoot.

Toppings are a separate matter. Go to town.

I suspected as much, but I didn't want to be rude. A lot of people are unaware of seasoning and don't really think about why food from one place taste so much better than food from another.

There's a whole lot of seasoning going on with well cooked ground beef. When you go to a restaurant and the burgers pop -- this is why.

The most basic seasoning is salt. Unseasoned beef doesn't taste great and when it's cooked less than ideally often excess condiments are used to make up for the lack of seasoning.

When I cook burgers at home I often mix in diced garlic, a tiny bit of soy sauce, cayenne, msg, and rosemary.

Nothing rude about it, it's the way I prefer burgers. I've never considered restaurant burger special or 'pop'ish, mostly just convenient. I do put lots of raw onions on the burger though, the refreshing crunch of freshly sliced onion goes well with the greasy meat. Restaurant burgers rarely have much onion, and when they do it's usually cooked or limp and sad. A lot of restaurant burgers go heavy on lettuce instead, but lettuce is bland compared to onions.

I know some people prefer unseasoned food, but I think you probably shouldn't be surprised when people complain about lack of seasoning.

One of my kids went through a phase of eating burgers with no toppings at all. Another, noodles with no sauce. It's a preference, but - if the topic is quality of cuisine it shouldn't be surprising that people have higher expectations.

Also decent restaurants get their patties pre-made..

The only decent restaurant burger I had was in an American restaurant that grinds their own meat.

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