A Burger Press Turned My Messy Cookouts into the Neighborhood Favorite

I have been grilling burgers in my backyard for going on twenty-three years, so I should have had this figured out a long time ago. I did not. Every Saturday in the summer, I would tear off a chunk of ground beef, ball it up in my palms, squish it flat on the counter, and convince myself it looked fine. By the time it hit the grill it was already uneven, thicker in the middle and thin around the edges. Half the crowd ended up with a pink center while the other half got something closer to a hockey puck. I called it "character." My neighbor Earl called it "Sue's gray burgers." He was not wrong.

This past Memorial Day I picked up a Meykers burger press, mostly because it was cheap and I was tired of Earl's commentary. The Meykers press comes with 150 wax patty papers and has a non-stick surface, so you just drop a ball of beef in, press down, and out comes a perfectly round, evenly thick patty every single time. I pressed twelve of them in about four minutes before I even fired up the grill. That was a first.

By the time it hit the grill it was already uneven, thicker in the middle and thin around the edges. I called it character. My neighbor Earl called it Sue's gray burgers. He was not wrong.

Here is the thing about hand-formed patties that nobody really talks about: it is not just a cosmetic problem. When a patty is thicker in the center, that thick part needs more heat to cook through while the thin edges are already overdone. So you end up either undercooking the center or turning the outer ring into shoe leather. You can try to smash it down with a spatula mid-cook, which just presses out all the juices and makes the situation worse. I spent years doing exactly that and wondering why my burgers were never quite right.

Back to Memorial Day. I fired up the charcoal around four in the afternoon. My daughter Jessie brought her family over, my husband Ray handled the drinks, and I had twelve uniform patties waiting in a stack, each one separated by a wax paper from the Meykers kit. No patty was sticking to the one above it. No patty was falling apart. I set them on the grate and for the first time in my grilling life, every single one of them looked the same.

They cooked the same too. I did four minutes a side over medium-high heat and pulled them all at once. Cut a couple open for the skeptics in the group. Even pink throughout, then nicely browned at the edges. Ray ate three of them, which is not a record but it is close. Jessie's husband, who is the kind of person who brings his own seasoning to other people's cookouts, said they were "actually really good." Coming from him, that is a standing ovation.

Earl ate two and did not say a single word about gray burgers. That alone was worth every penny.

What I Would Have Saved Myself If I Had Done This Sooner

Honestly, I spent years thinking the problem was my ground beef, my grill temperature, or my timing. I tried 80/20 vs 85/15. I tried colder meat, room-temperature meat. I tried grill-pan pressing techniques I saw online. None of it fixed the core issue, which was that my patties simply were not the same shape going into the cook. If the patty is not uniform, nothing downstream saves you. You cannot grill your way out of an uneven patty.

The press also helped with speed. When you have eight adults and four kids at a cookout, forming patties by hand while people are standing around hungry is genuinely stressful. With the Meykers press I can prep all my patties before anyone arrives. Stack them in the fridge with the wax papers between them and they hold their shape. No scrambling. No pinching and re-patting while Ray is asking me if the grill is ready yet.

One honest note: the press makes one size of patty. It is a good size, right around a quarter-pound when you use the right amount of beef, but if you want a thick steakhouse burger or a thin smash burger you need to adjust the amount of meat you start with and experiment a bit. That is not a complaint, just something to know going in. For a longer look at how it holds up over time, check out the full Meykers burger press review I did after a whole summer of using it every weekend.

What I Would Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you have been grilling burgers for years and they keep coming out uneven, the answer is almost certainly your patty formation, not your grill or your beef. I know that is not the exciting answer. We all want it to be about technique or wood chips or some special marinade. But consistent patties cook consistently, and there is no grilling skill that replaces that. A good burger press is a three-minute investment before the grill even gets lit.

The Meykers press is the one I reach for now. It is not fancy. It takes up about as much drawer space as a large spatula. It costs less than a bottle of good BBQ sauce. And it is the single reason my cookouts went from "Sue's gray burgers" to the one everyone on the street looks forward to. If you want to see what else it does well, and where it has some limits, I covered all of that in my post on the 10 reasons a burger press makes backyard burgers better. But if you are already convinced, just go check the current price and give it one cookout. I think you will be surprised.