Improving Flavor of Gas Burgers?

[tallbm]

What's a good way to get more flavor into gas-grilled burgers? I've been using my Napoleon grill's infrared burner, and while it's basically fine, the flavor could be better. Today I basted a burger with butter containing garlic, thyme, and tarragon, and it seemed like an improvement.

Should I consider using a smoker box and giving burgers a couple of minutes of smoke?

Flavor in general?
Immediately mix your spices into the meat, form patties, at the grill, and grill them.

Try SPOG (Salt, Pepper, Onion, Garlic).

How much seasoning?
Form your ground meat into a big ball in a bowl or if its a small enough amount (1 pound block) season both sides of the block of meat with what looks like what will stick to it but is coated well, then mix.
Repeat again, and that is about as much seasoning as you need.

Why grill immediately after mixing?
Salt will cause the meat proteins to want to bind together and get dense the longer a "worked/mixed" meat sits.
This results in hockey puck, thick, dense texture burgers which is not great.
So, to avoid that you mix, form your patties and toss on the grill 1 at time.
Or mix, quickly make patties (be done in like 5-8 min) and throw the patties on the hot grill.

This will give you max flavor without getting dense patties. No patties are more flavorful than when seasoning is mixed in.

Alternatively, you can mix all the seasonings EXCEPT the salt and form the patties. Then later when you are ready to grill, you can salt the patties on both sides pretty well and then grill.
No salt with the "worked" meat seems to not cause the dense issues.

If you want smoke, I would use a smoke tube with your gas grill but burgers cook so quick that unless you were cooking over mesquite wood coals I don't know how much smoke flavor you get from a smoke tube in your grill.

I hope this info helps :D

 

[Suds15]

Lot of great replies here.

I have a smoker box in my Amazon cart.

I don't put too much stuff inside a burger. I have done the onion soup mix thing sometimes, but generally, I mix salt and pressed garlic into the meat and leave it at that. I am no Emeril fan, but I picked it up from him, and it worked.

I wonder if anyone here remembers Ollie Burgers. The spice mix is still available online.

Ballistic Barbecue on utube does a replica recipe for Ollie Burgers. Check it out.

 

[onlypurch]

I'm surprised by all of the suggestions here. I've always kept it simple... 3 parts salt, 1 part pepper. I don't mash the burgers too much before the grill. I do smash them on first flip. Come out great every time.