Learn How to Make In-And-Out Burgers at Home (It's Easy!) 🍔

Summer 2019 is coming to a close and we wanted to celebrate the end of a dreary, rainy, miserable summer here in Edmonton by dreaming of someplace sunny like Las Vegas, Los Angeles, or San Francisco. And do you know what all those places have in common? In-N-Out.

In-N-Out hasn’t graciously blessed Canada with its presence, so to satisfy our cravings for animal style sliders we had to make our own. We figured that this would be an excellent opportunity to do a recipe review (we haven’t done one of those in a while — our last one was in April) as well as try our hand at making hamburger patties from scratch. For this post we followed Serious Eats’ In-N-Out's Double-Double, Animal Style Recipe.

Burger Sauce

In-N-Out sauce is delicious. Recreating it is easy, although the topic is a bit contentious. Serious Eats’ recipes uses mayonnaise, ketchup, sweet pickle relish, sugar, and white vinegar. It’s 1000x better than that bottle of thousand island dressing in your fridge. We know because we made it.

Not the most flattering picture, but trust us, it’s good!

However, according to Food Hacker we were wrong to follow J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s recipe blindly. Their recipe includes the addition of finely diced onion, mustard, and paprika, and they swap sweet pickle relish for dill pickle relish. We actually used finely diced dill pickles in our sauce because we forgot to buy sweet relish and it’s the best substitute we had. Next time we make In-N-Out burgers (because there likely will be a next time unless we decide to shell out $$$ to fly to California to go to In-N-Out), we’ll try this variation of the sauce and report back!

The Toppings

The toppings are relatively straightforward, with only one topping requiring a lot of prep — the onions. To make the grilled onions found on an animal style burger, you have to fry diced onions in oil (with a bit of salt) until they are well browned. Once they sizzle and start looking dry, add 1 tablespoon of water, stir, and let evaporate. The recipe recommends repeating this process a few times until the onions are nice and soft and dark brown. Mmmm.

In addition to the onions you’ll need iceberg lettuce, sliced tomato, sliced dill pickle, and sliced American cheese. If you’re Canadian, you won’t find American cheese. The closest thing are Kraft singles and those are kind of gross, eh? We went with some real cheddar slices instead (not pictured).

Burger Patty

If you’ve never made your own ground beef before, this is the perfect opportunity to try it for yourself. If you don’t have a meat grinder, that’s okay, a food processor will do the trick.

To start, throw the blade of the food processor into the freezer to get cold — a cold blade is easier to cut meat with. Next take 1 pound of chuck roast and cut it into small, one inch chunks. Place the chunks on a sheet tray so that they aren’t touching, and place in the freezer as well. The trick here is that you want to cool the meat so it’s firm, but not frozen — firm meat is easier to cut.

🥩 Mediocre Tip: If you can’t find chuck roast, or chuck steak in your grocery store, and you don’t feel like going to a butcher, try looking for blade steak. We’ve been trying for a long time to find chuck roast in our grocery stores here, and it turns out that we just call it something different in Canada.

When the meat has firmed up, remove it from the freezer and divide the meat into 3 batches. Place one batch in the food processor and start pulsing it. (You may have to let the processor run on high for a few seconds to get everything going.)

The recipe says to process until you’ve achieved a medium grind. We have absolutely no idea what that means as we’ve never ground meat before, nor are we butchers. So we just went until it looked like the ground beef that you would buy in the store.

Serious Eat’s recipe is for a double, which obviously means that there’s two patties. An In-N-Out double is a ¼ pound burger, which means that each patty is ⅛ of a pound. There are 16 ounces in a pound, so one-eighth of that is 2 ounces. The whole point is that each patty is going to be 2 ounces (57g) of beef. So divide your fresh ground beef into 2oz portions and flatten them to your desired thinness. (The recipe calls for 3/16 inch thick, but just sort of eyeball it). Make sure to season one side generously with salt and pepper before cooking.

To actually cook the burgers, add vegetable or canola oil to a hot frying pan (cast iron or stainless steel as they hold heat the best) and then place the burgers in. While they’re getting all crispy spread a bunch of yellow mustard on the top of the patty — when you flip it you’ll get the delicious fried mustard crust.

How do you know when to flip it? Initially the burger is going to stick to the pan and won’t be easy to flip, but at some point the burger will release itself from the pan and be ready to flip. Why does this happen? Science. These patties are super thin and take no time at all to cook, so keep an eye on them!

Once the mustard side is crispy and fried, the burger is good to go.

Assembly

The best part — assembly. Well, eating is the best part but assembly is fun because it means you’re very close to stuffing a delicious burger in your face.

Starting with the bottom bun, you’ll want to first put down a healthy layer of sauce followed by pickle slices, tomato, and lettuce. Put your burger patty with melted cheese on top followed by the grilled onions. If you’re making a double (we didn’t because we have tiny stomachs), add another patty on top before sandwiching it with the top bun.

🧀 Mediocre Tip: American cheese is so processed that it’s going to melt super easy from the heat of the patty. Since we used real cheddar cheese, we put the cheddar on the patties while they were in the pan and placed a lid on top for a few seconds to get it nice and melty.

Our Mediocre Thoughts

👨‍🍳 Trevor: I love In-N-Out burger. I had heard about it from Brittany as well as a couple of other friends and family who had visited the states. When I got the opportunity to try it when I went to Vegas in 2018, I fell in love. And this is coming from a guy who is not a big fan of burgers, like at all. It’s been a while since I’ve eaten a proper In-N-Out burger (and like we mentioned above, we have to travel quite far to get to one — 1932km/1200mi to Grants Pass, Oregon) but our version was pretty close from what I can remember — and it satisfied a weird craving I had been having.

👩‍🍳 Brittany: In-N-Out has a special place in my heart. I was first introduced to In-N-Out in 2016 when I attended my first BlizzCon. Sadly I’m not going this year, so when Trevor suggested that we recreate In-N-Out burgers I was excited! (And also surprised, because Trevor isn’t a burger fan.) It has been almost a year since I last had In-N-Out, but our recreation hit the spot and killed my craving (for a while, anyway). Next time I make this I’m not going to make the same mistake though — I’ll definitely be putting on more sauce! Yum.

Our Final Review

Taste: 5 cravings satisfied out of 5 🍔🍔🍔🍔🍔

This recipe did a very good job of copying that In-N-Out flavour that we had been missing. The burger spread was so much better than any bottled thousand island dressing, and homemade patties created from fresh ground beef were absolutely delicious.

Presentation: 4 beautiful burgers out of 5 🍔🍔🍔🍔

We missed the branded red and white paper burger holder that makes the burger look iconic. We’re also missing a basket of piping hot side of fries and a nice cold Coca-Cola on the side. But as far as burgers go, it’s a pretty good looking burger. (Brittany failed food photography school didn’t make sure the sauce was showing in the final photo. Oh well.)

Affordability: 5 full stomachs out of 5 🍔🍔🍔🍔🍔

For people that live in the USA, ordering at In-N-Out is probably cheaper than making it at home because of economies of scale. But it’s cheaper for us to make at home than to fly to the States to eat it, so it gets a 5/5 for affordability.

What American burger should we recreate next? The east coast competition — Shake Shack? Or a regional burger like the Juicy Lucy? Let us know in the comments below!

We Made In-N-Out Burgers at Home. They Were 👌