The Best Five Guys Copycat Burger Only Takes One Cook, Not A Handful

Five Guys most likely has an entire team in the kitchen putting the food together assembly-line style: One person fries potatoes, another flips burgers, while yet another attends to assembly and packaging. As a home cook, you may not have trained sous chefs on hand, much less the space to accommodate them, but Mashed developer Jake Vigliotti's recipe will still allow you to make a decent copycat Five Guys burger as long as you have more than one grill pan and the manual dexterity to cook two items simultaneously. The reason for this is that the bun must be toasted at the exact same time the burger is frying. While the bread cooks more quickly than the meat does, you won't get to relax once the buns are done. At this point, you'll need to dress the buns with the necessary condiments so they'll be ready to slide the burgers in the second they come off the grill.

If you're not great at multitasking, it may take some practice, but as Vigliotti tells us, "If you use the correct stuff, and follow the formula, you'll be making burgers just like they do at Five Guys." Even if you don't manage to pull the operation off with split-second precision, you'll still have a tasty cheeseburger for a lower price than Five Guys charges (the chain is known for being expensive) and can avoid the temptation of asking for fries with it, then going home with five pounds of unwanted extras.

If you're determined to make a burger that duplicates the ones sold at Five Guys as closely as possible, then you'll need to do some meat math. "Five Guys," as Vigliotti tells us, "uses very specific products to get that taste exactly right" and he recreates its meat blend by using a 50/50 mixture of 80% lean chuck and 90% lean sirloin. He points out, as well, that "None of [Five Guys'] restaurants have freezers on-site" and advises "To get the perfect Five Guys burger, buy your meat fresh and only refrigerate it."

The other ingredients required for a Five Guys copycat burger seem simple enough: sesame seed buns, American cheese, hot sauce, ketchup, mayonnaise, and mustard. Vigliotti notes that, when it comes to the cheese, Five Guys uses Kraft singles, but goes on to say "The one you give to 5-year-olds isn't the one Five Guys uses. Kraft makes a deli slice that's a little thicker and a little more real than the other stuff." He also notes that "The Heinz [ketchup] that Five Guys uses is a little different from the one you pull off the shelf at the grocery store" and, in his opinion, Hunt's ketchup is closer to the mark. Vigliotti does say the mustard is standard yellow Heinz, while the hot sauce is Frank's, but the mayonnaise is private label. To duplicate it, he advises adding an egg yolk to a jar of the store-bought stuff.