J. Kenji López-Alt

J. Kenji López-Alt is the author of The Food Lab and The Wok, a long-time voice of Serious Eats and a New York Times food columnist, and his YouTube channel is the least produced of the big cooking channels: mostly a head-mounted camera, his own kitchen and a running explanation of why each step works.

Burgers are one of his great subjects. He popularised the ultra-smashed burger, two small patties pressed paper-thin onto a ripping-hot griddle and scraped up with the crust intact, and he walks through the exact smash burger process from Wursthall, the restaurant he was involved with, in real time. He cooks Oklahoma fried onion burgers indoors and on the grill, green chile cheeseburgers in the style of New Mexico’s Bobcat Bite, a cheeseburger fatty melt, his own extra-crusty all-time favourite, and a better Big Mac.

The vegetarian side gets equal care, with black bean burgers built on beans dried in the oven first and a chickpea patty written for young cooks. His twelve rules for better burgers condense much of this into a single video.