A thin patty does not a smashburger make

Published 5:30 am Thursday, November 13, 2025

I was at a grocery store last week, looking for ground beef because the fam wanted hamburgers.

As I have now been doing for far longer than I want to remember, I searched in every possible section of the store for the best deal.

I used to love grocery shopping, but now, it’s just so depressing and even angering sometimes because everything is so ludicrously expensive. And there is really no good explanation for it except greed.

Normally, the best deal is usually plain old ground beef in the packaged meat section. However, on that particular day, the best deal I could find was a box of frozen “smashburgers” that were on sale.

I quickly did the math, and, gram for gram, with the markdown, it was the cheapest burger meat in the store.

So, I bought them.

This is not a product I would normally buy because calling these things “smashburgers” is flat-out marketing nonsense.

The smashburger was ostensibly invented in Ashland, Kentucky, in the 1950s or 1960s, when a fry cook at a restaurant called Dairy Cheer smashed a ball of beef onto a very hot griddle with a bean can. Of course, there are plenty of dissenters to this origin story.

In any event, the result was a very thin patty with flavourful crispy edges. Some “burger historians” credit something called a Maillard reaction for the appeal of making burgers this way.

A Maillard reaction occurs when reducing sugars interact with amino acids to create melanoids – compounds that give browned foods their unique, rich flavour. Using the aforementioned technique creates more surface area for browning.

Anyway, smashburgers became much more trendy when the Denver, Colorado-based, Smashburger restaurant chain was founded in 2007. In more recent years, they became ultra-chic when they started appearing in upscale gastropubs everywhere.

The thing is, whether you are a fan of them or not, simply making a very thin raw burger patty with jagged edges and freezing it does not a smashburger make.

A burger is a smashburger because of the griddling technique. Of course, you no longer have to use a can of beans to smash them. Pretty much every kitchenware company makes griddle presses, which are often marketed as smashburger presses.

So, to make these things that I bought into smashburgers, I would have had to thaw them, roll them back into balls, put them on a very hot griddle (or cast iron pan), and smash them with a griddle press.

I didn’t, I threw them on the barbecue.

They were OK, but not smashburgers, and, despite the relative price, still depressingly expensive.