For one of the most democratic foods this country has ever produced, the hamburger is the source of more infighting, misinformation, and virulent name-calling than any other. Paradoxically, it’s the burger's near-total cultural ubiquity that has created this vicious partisanship. Because everyone has access to a burger, everyone has an opinion about what’s best. And as with most democratic institutions in this country, having an opinion means believing that everyone who doesn’t share your opinion is godless trash.

Meat blends, patty size, toppings, bun: Whether you’re grinding your own short rib blend for an eight-ounce behemoth, or stanning for your hometown chain’s smashburger, we have love for all of the thousands of burger variations that people get passionate about. “One of my mottos is there are no rules in the kitchen or the bedroom,” says grilling iconoclast Meathead Goldwyn, founder of AmazingRibs.com and author of Meathead: The Science of Great Barbecuing and Grilling. In other words, your own personal burger preferences are sacred, and nobody should try to take them away from you.

That said, there’s a lot of bad information out there. “I don’t normally get angry, but I get angry when people think they know what they’re talking about,” says George Motz, author of The Great American Burger Book. Motz has devoted years to studying the burger in all its many forms, and spends much of his time setting the record straight on American burger history and lore.

Why is there so much burger misinformation out there? There’s the fact that, when you get right down to it, it’s pretty easy to make an acceptable hamburger, and if you’ve never had a truly great burger, it’s easy to believe that’s as good as it gets. Sure, there are some truly awful ones (though even the 7-11 microwaved version has its fans), and some undeniably amazing ones, too. But that vast middle ground is still pretty damn serviceable, which leads competitive types to act like they deserve a Beard award just by putting two kinds of cheese on their overcooked, grey patty.

Secondly, most people fall in love with a specific burger as a child (a minor variation on Sam Sifton’s groundbreaking Pizza Cognition Theory). They’re as vehemently opposed to ideas that challenge their burger beliefs as the male babies who boycotted the all-female Ghostbusters because it ruined their childhood. Suggest to one of these burger bros that Whataburger is mediocre at best and they’ll run you off the internet.

Well, facts are facts, and our two experts aren’t afraid of a little fight. Here are the top seven burger myths that need to be toppled ASAP.

Motz says: "The definition of a slider is not based on the size of the burger, it’s based on how it is made. It can only be one thing: a small ball of meat that’s been smashed flat on a flattop, pressed once, cooked for 30 seconds, flipped, cooked for another 30 seconds if that, maybe you add some onions, and then you throw it on a small bun. A mini-burger is anything goes; it’s literally just a scaled-down version of a full-size hamburger. Chefs hate mini-burgers. They’re impossible to get right.

There are two stories about the history of the word “slider,” both from White Castle. One is that they’re so small they slide down your throat—that’s the obvious choice. The other choice, which I like better, is that in the old days, White Castle was sort of like a show. You’d walk in and there would be two or three men behind the counter in white paper caps and clean white aprons on. They’d greet you when you came in, it was sort of a fun, happy environment. And if you were sitting at the counter, they would make your burger—everything was served on porcelain—and they would slide the burger down the counter to you. That’s how they became known as sliders. White Castle likes both stories; they haven’t picked a favorite.” 

Motz says: "In the 1940s and 50s, all the big chains—Bob’s Big Boy, McDonald’s, Carl’s Jr.—were putting ketchup on their burgers. The idea on the corporate level was to attract the next generation of burger lovers. That original 1920s American hamburger didn’t have ketchup on it. There were only four ingredients: the hamburger patty itself, pickle, onion, and mustard. Most people would get a combination of all three of those, or one or two of those toppings. By the time the next generation came around, the big companies were thinking, ‘How do we get parents to bring in their kids who don’t necessarily want to eat a burger?’ Their solution was to put sweet ketchup on it."

Motz says: "The original American hamburger was actually a slider. It was tiny, somewhere around an ounce and a half, served on small bakery dinner rolls, the size of little golf balls. The first big wave of hamburger popularity was the generation that was post-WWI, in the ’20s-30s—they were huge during the Depression. Hamburger restaurants realized that the only way they could standardize production was to buy these little dinner rolls from local bakers. They also realized that by making small patties, they could cook them faster and sell more. A big patty took 10 minutes to cook. A thin patty took 35 seconds; they saw the value in that right away."

Goldwyn says: "At the grocery store, never buy anything labeled ‘ground meat’ or ‘hamburger.’ ‘Ground meat’ is lips and sphincters and more. It’s scrap, sometimes treated with ammonia. But I often hear people say ‘Oh, I know my butcher, so my meat is safe.’ The butcher doesn’t clean the grinding machine. Some kid cleans the grinding machine, and if the kid doesn’t clean it properly, it’s not safe. The butcher doesn’t slaughter the cattle, break it down, box it, and ship it to the store. If it’s been sitting on the loading dock for an hour in the summer, bacteria will grow. The butcher does not control safety."

Motz says: "People say, 'It’s a Cali burger, let’s put some guacamole on there!' Or, my favorite, some guy in the ’60s making pizza in Ontario decided that he would put pineapple and ham on a pizza, and it became known as the Hawaiian pizza. Then somebody asked him to make a burger, so he put the ‘Hawaiian’ touch on a burger, and the Hawaiian burger was invented. It somehow made its way back to Hawaii, and now if you walk into any of the big hotels you can get a Hawaiian burger. But if you ask anybody in Hawaii, they’ll tell you it’s bullshit. True regional American foodways are almost always about method. The original Hawaiian burger is something called a loco moco: a bed of rice, a burger patty, gravy, and a fried egg. That’s a real regional Hawaiian burger, invented in the ’50s by a high school football team on one of the islands.

Goldwyn says: "Meat is 70% water, so you have moisture in a burger that comes from water, but a lot of it also comes from the fat. You want your burger to have what a good steak has, which is marbling, or a mixture of fat to muscle. The sweet spot is in the 20-30% fat range. The fat is the flavor. If you want, you can cook a burger to safe temperature, 160-165 degrees, and still have extraordinary moisture and flavor by getting a fatty burger. You eat 80,000 meals in your life if you live to 80 or beyond—you can eat a fatty hamburger every now and then."

Goldwyn says: "Kenji López-Alt over at Serious Eats, [food science writer] Harold McGee, and I have done this test, and the old rule of 'put the burger down and don’t flip it' is wrong. If you put a piece of meat like a burger or a steak down on a hot fire, the heat hits the meat and  travels very slowly through it. So if you lay it there, you’re building up energy in the surface of the meat, and as it starts working its way to the center, it’ll overcook the outside of the meat. You’ll have a dark brown crust, a tan inner layer, then a layer of pink, and finally a medium rare center. But if you lay it down for just 30 seconds or a minute, darken the surface, and then flip it, that heat that’s built up on the surface will come off into the atmosphere so it doesn’t push the heat down into the meat and overcook it. You’re putting all of the energy into getting that dark crust and it doesn’t have a chance to move to the center."