Restaurant flips for UW students’ burger

UW-Madison students Cherry Lam
(from left), Abbey Thiel and Seth Schulz
grind hamburger meat in a lab.
Their hamburger recipe was selected for
Gilly's Frozen Custard restaurants
in Sheboygan and Green Bay

classes at the University of Wisconsin-Madison can be rigorous with long hours of study, a group of UW students spent much of this semester eating hamburgers.

And they weren't just staving off hunger pangs during all-nighters. These hamburger patties were eaten in the name of science.

Because, really, if American scientists can send a man to the moon, surely they can come up with the perfect hamburger.

A group of 17 UW-Madison undergraduate and graduate students in food science and meat science participated in a project this semester to develop a great-tasting hamburger for Gilly's Frozen Custard restaurants in Green Bay and Sheboygan. They quickly learned there's more to a good burger than grinding up beef, forming a patty and slapping it on a grill.

Split into five teams, the students sampled 11 types of beef, including flank, shoulder, brisket, sirloin ball tips and chuck rolls. They were free to use whatever raw materials they wished in various combinations.

"Their only objective was to develop the tastiest, best hamburger they could," said their instructor, Jeff Sindelar, a UW-Madison associate professor and extension meat specialist.

"Although it appears a hamburger is a hamburger - that isn't the case. There's a lot of things that impact the flavor, tastiness and juiciness of a hamburger and some of those are the location of the raw materials from the animal," Sindelar said.

The students also were mentored by UW-Madison executive chef Jeff Orr and Monica Theis from the UW Food Science Department. The students went through many pounds of beef, carefully adjusting their mixtures, grilling and tasting them. In the final tasting, the students evaluated themselves and chose the best burger from each team. Then Gilly's executives were invited for a dinner and tasted each of the five best burgers, with the team that dubbed itself Between the Buns chosen as the hamburger victors.

Just what makes the burger created by Cherry Lam, Abbey Thiel and Seth Schulz so great? That's top secret. But it's fair to say it includes ground beef and seasonings.

"One of the biggest factors in making a burger is the texture and flavor - you attribute that to the cut of the meat, the fat content and how you grind it," said Lam, 23, a graduate student in food science from the Twin Cities. "Some of the recipes were disappointing. We thought the formulas would work, but they didn't, so we moved on."

Lam, Thiel and Schulz started with three basic hamburger recipes, which they changed many times, playing with the fat content, seasonings and type of meat cut. Between the Buns learned their burger was the winner via email after the meal with the Gilly's management. They were invited to Green Bay this month for the unveiling of their creation.

"That's the first time we got to try our burger with their own spices and on a bun," said Thiel, 21, a junior majoring in food science from Howards Grove. "It was amazing to know this was something we came up with and formulated, and everyone is now buying it."

Both Lam and Thiel hope to some day work as product developers in the food industry. Schulz is an associate outreach specialist in the UW Meat and Muscle Biology Department.

Looking to make its hamburgers as good as its frozen custard, Gilly's contacted Sindelar last fall to see if he was interested in being a consultant. Recognizing a rare teaching opportunity, Sindelar suggested UW food and meat science students take on the project. In January he emailed UW meat science students and contacted a colleague in the food science department.

Gilly's has drive-in restaurants in Fond du Lac and Sheboygan, which close in the winter, and an indoor restaurant in Green Bay. The first drive-in was opened in 1949 in Fond du Lac by Tom Gilles, whose family at the time owned Gilles Frozen Custard in Milwaukee.

The UW hamburger recipe recently began sizzling on grills at the Sheboygan and Green Bay Gilly's restaurants, where some customers are now asking for the "science burger" and the "geek burger," said Amy Deering, Gilly's vice president of marketing. Gilly's tweaked the recipe by using a finer grind of meat and different seasonings, but otherwise it's the same burger from the Between the Buns team.

"The UW students were fabulous. We are so pleased with what they did and the amount of research that was gathered," Deering said. "It just shows you how talented our young people are."