Give Burgers A Mess-Free Bite By Stacking Toppings This Way

Burgers are a simple and effective sub-genre of food, but for as easy as they are to get right, they can also go awry as a result of a few small mistakes. Drying out your burger patty by pressing it down and squeezing out its flavor is one of the most common blunders burger fans are prone to making, but the construction of the burger itself is similarly consequential and is a process that many have been getting wrong for years. 

Michael Hawk is the executive chef at Fontainebleau Miami Beach, and he explained to us that there is a very specific order in which you should be putting toppings on burgers. The right order can make the difference between a well-constructed, clean burger and a sloppy mess that falls apart in your hands.

"I like to put sauce on both sides of the bun and leaf lettuce on the bottom bun," Hawk said. "The lettuce acts as a barrier to help prevent the burger juices from soaking into the bottom bun." From there, how you add each of the ingredients depends on size rather more so than its role on the sandwich itself. "The burger goes on top of the lettuce, followed by the remaining ingredients, arranged from the largest circumference to the smallest," Hawk explained.

When it comes to the toppings you use, Hawk recommends keeping balance in mind when adding anything beyond lettuce to your burger. "Try to distribute the toppings as evenly as possible so the burger stays balanced when you take that first bite instead of everything sliding out the other side," he advised. This comes into play whether you're adding classic ingredients like tomatoes and bacon or one of the more abstract toppings you could add to a burger. Keep the ingredients as flat as possible, or (at the very least) maintain each layer so that it's easy to contain while eating. If you find it to be necessary, you can put melty cheese on top of certain ingredients (most notably, bacon) to keep them from falling off.

Alternatively, the best bet for keeping your burger neat and easy to manage is to avoid adding unnecessary toppings to it in the first place. Anthony Bourdain famously believed the perfect burger was one you could easily hold in one hand without making a mess, and that getting too creative and adding toppings beyond what's standard is actively detrimental to the dish's structure.