Can technology build a better burger?

Ten years ago, Daniel Boulud, the famed French chef, introduced the hamburger that food experts credit for the beginning of an international burger renaissance.

Boulud’s delicacy, oddly enough, was the indirect result of the antiburger movement in France, where protesters became national heroes by ransacking a McDonald’s. At the time, Mr. Boulud said the French were just jealous.

“The French wish they could have invented McDonald’s,” he said, and added, as an afterthought, that he’d always wanted to invent an “adult burger” himself. Then he invited me to his kitchen to watch him create one combining Wyoming beef, black truffles and Colorado short ribs braised in red wine.

“I’ll call it the DB Burger,” Mr. Boulud told me.

That burger has since become the $32 signature dish of his DB bistros and inspired haute-priced rivals around the world.

After that haute cuisine treatment comes Nathan Myhrvold’s attempt to introduce the burger to high-tech. The former chief technology officer for Microsoft has proposed this innovation: the use of liquid nitrogen to prepare the patty.

So far, though, restaurant chefs haven’t embraced the scientific techniques set out by Dr. Myhrvold in “Modernist Cuisine,” the new sixvolume tome on technologically enhanced cooking.

A burger patty, Dr. Myhrvold explained, succulently exploits the Maillard reaction, named after a 20th-century Frenchman who explained the chemistry of browning meat . When the beef patty hits the hot grill, the water at the lower surface quickly boils away, producing a very thin, dry crust, actually a transparent gel, called the desiccation zone. Immediately above is the Maillard zone, where heat causes reactions among sugars and proteins that turn the meat brown, yielding molecules with an intrinsically appealing flavor.

The burger’s immediate evolutionary antecedents were the 18thcentury “Hamburg steaks” of the German port city whose name was applied to various ground-beef sandwiches sold in the United States at restaurants and fairs in the 19th century. Although these sandwiches were called hamburgers, they didn’t have all the quintessential elements, according to Josh Ozersky, the author of “The Hamburger: A History.”

He credits Walter Anderson with creating the hamburger at a restaurant in Wichita, Kansas, in 1916, which turned into the first White Castle eatery . Mr. Anderson’s crucial innovations were to use a specialized bun (instead of bread slices), to cook the meat on a very hot grill (260 degrees Celsius), and to press down on the patty with a customized spatula made of highstrength steel.

Those breakthroughs assured global domination, in Mr. Ozersky’s view. “There is an inevitability to the hamburger,” he said. “It is the most concentrated and convenient way a person can cheaply eat everything that people like about beef.”

Dr. Myhrvold agrees that the technological breakthroughs at White Castle were crucial.

“Pressing down with the spatula counteracts the tendency of the burger to lift off the grill due to the steam escaping from the bottom,” Dr. Myhrvold said. “When you press it against a very hot surface, you maximize the Maillard reaction. The great challenge in a burger is to create the Maillard flavors on the outside while keeping the inside fairly pink. Gray meat is tasteless and tough because you’ve broken down the proteins without breaking down the collagen.”

Dr. Myhrvold’s solution to this challenge is a twofold process developed by the “Modernist Cuisine” laboratory team. First, put the beef patty in a plastic bag and cook it sous vide - immersed in warm water for about half an hour until the core temperature reaches about 55 degrees Celsius. Next, dip the patty in liquid nitrogen for 30 seconds to freeze the outer millimeter of the meat, and then deep-fry in 230-degree Celsius oil for one minute.

“The freezing followed by the burst of high heat lets you brown the outside without overcooking the inside,” Dr. Myhrvold said. And the deep-frying is supposed to be a technological improvement over the classic White Castle spatula-on-agriddle technique.

This laboratory innovation elicited a tactfully noncommittal response from Mr. Boulud. “It’s very interesting, the nitrogen freezing,” the chef said, but he wondered if it would be either practical or tasty.


By JOHN TIERNEY