Attention, Disclaimer: This text is only to be enjoyed for vegetarians with caution. In contrast, all lovers of a perfectly fried, juicy burger could collect the water in the mouth when reading.
Jean-Luc Thiffeault of the University of Wisconsin-Madison has developed a mathematical model that can be used to determine when and how often a burger needs to be turned on the grill to cook it as quickly as possible. Although his calculations are perhaps more interesting for academics than for professional chefs, the mathematician admits in the »Physics Magazine«, since he treats the burger as a simple, uniform slice. On the other hand, the simplification has the advantage that you do not need a supercomputer for modeling.
In his calculations, which he has published in the specialist journal "Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena" and previously on the Preprint server "Arxiv", assumes that the model burger has a homogeneous, solid structure and symmetrical thermal properties: Independent From which side lies on the grill, the heat moves upwards at a constant speed through all layers of the meatball one centimeter thick. At room temperature (25 ° C) it places it on a flat surface that has an even temperature of 200 ° C. With the help of heat transfer equations, he then calculates the combination of turning and frying the equations reach their optimum. For the mathematician, perfectly cooked means that each point inside the burger has reached a temperature of 70 ° C.
In contrast to classic temperature-dependent optimization problems, which deal with the temperature of an object at a certain point in time, his burger frying problem takes into account the temperature curve of each point in the slice. The requirement that each point has reached a certain temperature at a defined time is very different from the requirement that each point must be above this threshold at the same time, says Thiffeault. "If you asked for that, it would be impossible to make a burger on a grill."
In its model, it takes an infinitely long time to cook the burger if you don't turn it. If it is turned against it, the top and the overall guarantee is brought to a finite value. This results in a cooking time of 80.5 seconds when the burger meatball is turned exactly once. With four flips, the time drops rapidly to 65 seconds. If the number of swivel is increased to 20, the cooking time only decreases by another one or two seconds and finally approaches 63 seconds. The model shows that it is pretty pointless to turn the meatball again after three or four times, "says the researcher.
However, if you really want to spend as little time as possible on the grill and turn the burger meatball at most once, you should not wait until it is exactly half fried. "Turn around when the lower third is cooked," advises Jean-Luc Thiffeault. This means a longer cooking time for the second side, but a shorter overall time. This leaves more time to take care of the guests you may have invited. And you save yourself sweating on the grill. However, Thiffeault points out in the conclusion of his paper that his results are "mainly qualitative in nature and about a factor of two too short compared to the typical cooking times". Ideally, one must also take into account that during the frying process, the moisture content of the burger meatball changes and fat melts. Whether Thiffeault has also made a taste test following his calculations remains open.
