Where’s the beef ? Fast-food burgers share the same flaw
Consumers love the Big Mac, Whopper and Dave’s Single, but why?
North Americans hate fastfood hamburgers. We mock their ingredients, stare slackjawed at their high sodium counts and blame them for our expanding waistlines.
We consistently rank the Big Three burger chains — McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s — near the bottom of America’s most satisfying fastfood options.
Americans love fast-food hamburgers. Every year, they pound down millions of Big Macs, Whoppers and Dave’s Singles, as if trying to confirm the outside world’s opinion that many Americans have ground beef running through their veins. Despite their apparent distaste for Wendy’s, Burger King and McDonald’s when a pollster calls, they have consistently made these companies among the highest grossing fast-food chains in America.
What gives? Are they hypocrites? Addicted to cheap food? Or maybe they’re just too weak to avoid one of the thousands of locations of McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s that dot the landscape?
I have an alternative theory: Intellectually, we may embrace the local, praise the seasonal and hail the chef. But our cravings call us on our self-deceptions. Some part of us — the part that covertly eats Mickey D’s in the car — still longs for the fastfood burger. We can’t help it. We’re hard-wired to desire the salt, sugar and fat tucked into every one of these gift-wrapped bundles. It should be okay to admit it, even if it’s not okay to live off them.
I’ve eaten a lot of Whoppers, Big Macs and Dave’s Singles lately, and I’ve been reminded of two things: They’re often seductive sandwiches, and they’re not hamburgers. Not really. Yes, technically, they feature a ground beef patty tucked into a bun. But the meat is not the star, as you’ll see when you read the results of my taste tests.
The largest patty, by weight, is the one buried in the Whopper: At best, it tipped the scales (yes, I lugged a digital scale with me) at about three ounces, but the beef still represented only about 30 per cent of the overall weight of the hamburger. None of the patties among the Big Three ever assumed more than 35 per cent of the burger’s total weight, and some recorded percentages in the mid-20s.
Let’s put this into context: Experts in hamburger engineering, such as chef Alex McCoy of Lucky Buns in Washington, say a burger should be 50-per-cent meat and 50-per-cent bun and condiments. The Big Mac, Whopper and Dave’s Single, by contrast, are between 65 and 76 per-cent bun and condiments, which may explain why they all still cost under $5 each in the Washington market. It’s easy for a patty to get lost among those competing flavors — unless, of course, the patty comes with a controversial flavour.
The Whopper offered a quarter-pound of beef long before McDonald’s rolled out its Quarter Pounder nationally in 1972.
The Whopper is also the only hamburger among the Big Three to be cooked over a flame.
Frozen patties come out of the broiler with grill marks and a distinct smokiness. Internet conspiracists have long suggested the chain adds Liquid Smoke or some other agent to give the burger its “flame grilled” flavour.
Burger King had a one-word email response when I asked whether the company uses anything to pump up the smokiness of its burgers: No.
But the question is important. That very smokiness is what makes the Whopper instantly recognizable as a hamburger. The Whopper recalls backyard barbecues, with burgers dripping grease onto blisteringly hot coals.
McDonald’s created the Big Mac because it feared the Whopper, wrote Ray Kroc, the guiding light behind the burger behemoth, in his1977 autobiography Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald’s.
The Big Mac was introduced nationwide in 1968, a year after it was developed by Jim Delligatti, a franchisee in western Pennsylvania. When the 1960s came to an end, Esquire magazine hosted a huge party and invited McDonald’s to cater it because, as Kroc wrote, the hamburger chain had “the biggest impact on the eating habits of Americans in the decade.” A couple generations later, millennials don’t understand what the fuss is all about. A Wall Street Journal article in 2016 went viral after quoting from an internal McDonald’s memo, which claimed that only one in five millennials had ever tried a Big Mac. One theory is that younger diners, who witnessed the horrors of Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me documentary and heard the endless stories about childhood obesity, have shunned McDonald’s in favour of seemingly more healthful alternatives, like Chipotle. But millennials may also just want a burger that actually, you know, tastes like a burger:
As a competitor famously asked in a 1984 commercial: Where’s the beef? Some 34 years later, it’s still a relevant question for McDonald’s Big Mac.
Dave Thomas, the avuncular founder of Wendy’s, made his first million as a KFC franchisee. But his true love was always the hamburger, which is why he never liked the Golden Arches. “It takes a certain percentage of meat to make a good [burger],” Thomas wrote in Dave’s Way, his 1991 memoir.
The Single — now the Dave’s Single — debuted in 1969 at the first Wendy’s in Columbus, Ohio. Unlike McDonald’s or Burger King, Wendy’s relied on fresh, never frozen, beef.
The Single is also unique in that it features a square patty. It allows diners to see exactly how large the Wendy’s patty is and symbolizes a lesson that Thomas learned from his “Grandma Minnie”: You never cut corners.
It’s hard to know what Thomas, who died in 2002 at age 69, would think of the modern Dave’s Single. The quarterpound patty, after cooking, makes up only 35 per cent of the overall sandwich. At best. Sometimes, the meat was as little as 32 per cent of the burger. Dave’s Single, in short, has become the kind of burger that its founder once despised.
What do these burgers taste like, then? Mostly condiments and bun.
The Big Mac smacked of onions, pickles, bun and special sauce, which still manages to trip all the receptors on my palate, no matter what’s mixed into it these days. The Whopper(I added cheese to it, and to the Dave’s Single, to make easier comparisons, since the Big Mac automatically gets a slice of American) had the freshest toppings, including ripe, surprisingly flavorful spring tomatoes. It also has that flame-grilled thing, which only plays to my love for smoky meats.
Dave’s Single proved the wild card: One time, the burger featured the closest thing to a juicy patty. Three other times, it tasted like something pulled from the Potomac River.
Not surprisingly, Dave’s Fishburger finished at the bottom of my rankings, scoring six out of a possible 15 points. (Each burger was awarded between one and five points in three categories: bun/toppings, quality of beef, and overall impression.) The Big Mac took second with eight points, and the Whopper was declared the victor with 10 points.
Even if I subtract the point I awarded the Whopper for its smoky flavor, it still would have won owing to its superior condiments. Because — all together now — the nation’s best fastfood burger is not about the beef.