Drenched in butter and melted cheese, Wisconsin butter burgers are a state icon combining some of the Midwest’s most beloved foods: dairy products and ground beef. They’re jam packed with flavor and are usually dressed up with simple toppings like pickles, lettuce, tomato, and cooked diced onions. Butter burgers take an already hearty meal and dial the fat up a notch, frying the burger patty in its own grease but adding a heaping spoonful of butter to the pan, too. They’re rich, almost too buttery, with chunks of butter worked into the patty before it even cooks. Wisconsin chefs don’t make small hamburgers, so butter burgers aren’t only saturated in butter, they’re big.
If you want to cut through a little bit of the richness, add a bright pop of flavor to a Wisconsin butter burgers with lemon juice. The acid will balance out the butter in the burger and tie in well with pickles and other condiments you use. But, you don’t add lemon juice to the burger itself, instead, you add it with the sautéed onions.
Lemon juice brightens up a fat-heavy butter burger
The main thing that sets Wisconsin butter burgers apart from a standard hamburger is the butter burger patty and diced, sautéed yellow onion. A heavy dose of those diced onions are layered on top of the burger patty when you build the burger. When the onions are cooked in lemon juice, you’ll get a burst of zesty lemon in every bite, balancing out the richness of the rest of the burger.
Butter-fried burgers aren’t exclusive to Wisconsin. Butter is Gordon Ramsay’s burger secret, but he grates frozen butter over the top of a cooking ground beef patty. He doesn’t cut it into cubes and work it straight into the meat like you would with the Wisconsin butter burger. These burgers get even more luxurious when you add other upgrades like fried pickles or if you turn it into a Juicy Lucy stuffed with cheese curds. If you’re using a traditional potato roll, as is common for Wisconsin butter burgers, the lemon juice will help pull the flavors into the bread as well, helping keep the dryness of the bread from taking over the burger.
