I couldn’t remember the last time I ate, let alone cooked, a turkey burger. I vaguely recall my mother making them once during my childhood, probably drawn to the ground poultry for its purported nutritional benefits compared with beef. (However, “when the lean meat-to-fat ratio of ground beef and ground turkey is the same, their nutrition profiles are very similar,” dietitian Carolyn Hodges wrote for EatingWell. More on fat content later.)

Regardless of when it happened, I know for sure that the experience stuck with me, and ever since, I’d been convinced that turkey burgers weren’t something I enjoyed eating. They were dry and bland, and that was all I needed to know.

As much as I knew I disliked turkey burgers, I know how much I enjoy a challenge. So, armed with more than a decade of culinary know-how, I decided to see whether I could create a turkey burger that didn’t make me long for beef. Lucky for you, dearest reader, I did.

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Get the recipe: Turkey Smash Burgers

The key that came through as I tested these Turkey Smash Burgers was that although you’re substituting one for the other, you can’t just directly swap turkey for beef without making other alterations in the quest for burger excellence.

For a standard beef hamburger, you can achieve greatness by forming the ground meat into a thick patty, making an indentation in the middle, sprinkling it with salt and pepper, and cooking it in a hot skillet or on a grill until the burger reaches your desired doneness. Try the same with turkey and you’ll see why I stayed away from it for so many years. The two primary issues are flavor and dryness.

On the flavor front, I find that beef simply has much more of it. To compensate when using turkey, I mix soy sauce and garlic powder into the ground poultry for a boost of umami. In addition, I suggest grabbing the fattiest ground turkey you can find to help keep the patties moist and to enhance flavor. “Fat coats the tongue, allowing various aromatic compounds to stay in contact with our taste buds for longer periods of time, intensifying and prolonging our experience of various flavors,” Samin Nosrat wrote in “Salt Fat Acid Heat.”

Perhaps those bland turkey burgers of my youth were made from 99 percent lean ground meat. But in developing this recipe, I was able to find 85 percent lean ground turkey at my local grocery store, resulting in turkey burgers that not only were good, but that I also craved. (I also tested with 93 percent lean ground turkey, and the burgers still turned out great.)

In addition to fat content, another contributing factor to the dryness of turkey burgers is fully cooking them to the appropriate temperature for safe eating. While the Agriculture Department recommends that ground beef be cooked to a minimum internal temperature of 160 degrees for safe consumption, in practice, many people are fine eating hamburgers that are less than well-done. But when it comes to ground turkey and poultry in general, you risk salmonella poisoning, which can cause serious illness, if it doesn’t reach an internal temperature of at least 165 degrees.

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With turkey burgers of a standard thickness, it’s easy to see how you can dry them out when they’re cooked until they reach the proper temperature throughout.

The fix? Smash them. As is the case with just about any meat or seafood, it’s easier to evenly cook a thinner piece vs. a thicker one.

However, you don’t want to smash them in the pan — as you might with their beef brethren — because ground poultry is rather sticky and prone to clinging to a spatula. Instead, I suggest using wet or oiled hands to form the patties. (Alternatively, you can press them between two squares of parchment or wax paper. This makes it easy for you to transfer them to the skillet, but the paper is extra waste.) Once smashed, the turkey burgers are ready to be cooked in your kitchen — or outside on a grill — and dressed however you like.

I was formerly a turkey burger hater, and I’m ready to eat my words. Moist and full of flavor, these are hands down the best turkey burgers I’ve ever had.

Get the recipe: Turkey Smash Burgers

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