Making a worthy burger depends on architecture as much as it does on great ingredients.
You can throw all the Prime short rib and Epoisses you want over feathery brioche buns made in a local oven. If it all falls apart in a basin of grease and bread by the second bite, your esteem for the consistent engineering at In-N-Out is sure to double-double.
Burger structure is a subject that Maria and Armen Khoudoian, owners of The Mouth in Burbank, have spent months studying.
Open for four months on a corner of Riverside Drive, the couple’s sparkling clean, eye-popping burger spot has a simple roster of smashburgers, croissant burgers, spicy chicken sandwiches, and smack dab in the center of the menu, an attention-grabbing “pocket burger.”
Emerging from the liminal shadowlands between a savory meat pie and the Hot Pocket, the burger patty in this creation comes encrusted by its own buns. The meat is grilled on a flat top before it’s built between two halves of a Dutch crunch bread bun, and topped with chopped raw onions, American cheese, pickles, and a Thousand Island-style “secret” sauce.
The entire burger is then placed between the hot irons of a sandwich press that resembles a convex pancake griddle. That gets flipped vertically, on its side, for about 35 seconds, liquid burger fat and cheese escaping from its seams.