The Juiciest Juicy Lucy

Turn a cheeseburger inside out and you get Minnesota’s Juicy Lucy, a beef patty with an ooey-gooey cheese center, usually nestled on a bun with pickles and griddled onions. For many visitors to the Twin Cities, it’s a curiosity—worth a pilgrimage to Matt’s Bar, the iconic Minneapolis dive that likely invented it in the 1950s. For many locals, it’s lunch. 

“It’s a cheeseburger with a little flair,” says Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl, a Twin Cities food writer who has been covering the burger for nearly thirty years. “Everybody likes a cheeseburger.”

To hear Grumdahl tell it, national food writers overthink it. For one thing, they make too much of the supposed rivalry between Matt’s and The 5-8 Club, another Minneapolis bar and restaurant that claims the burger. “Matt’s is the one, and everything else comes from that one,” she says. “The 5-8 tries to own it, and Matt’s is like, ‘I don’t know her.’” Outsiders also spend too much time dwelling on the spelling—without an “i” at Matt’s, which has famously preserved a midcentury typo (“Jucy”) on the menu, and with one pretty much everywhere else.

The Truth About the Juicy Lucy

Minnesotans are far less fussy about the Juicy Lucy than some stories would have you believe. For one thing, they’ll accept just about any filling, as long as there’s cheese. 

The version served at Matt’s calls for beef, American cheese, salt, and pepper (plus onions, pickles, and a standard-issue burger bun). That’s the baseline.

The 5-8 serves a traditional Juicy Lucy and a burger filled with a melted mixture of American cheese and creamy peanut butter, then topped with strawberry jam—a tallow-soaked take on the PB&J. Are you into blue cheese-stuffed olives? How about a blue cheese-stuffed burger? That’s the flagship Blucy at the Blue Door Pub, a Twin Cities favorite with four locations, which pairs the pungent cheese with a smattering of minced garlic. Not even the all-beef patty is a requirement. The Nook, a popular spot in St. Paul, serves a burger made from a 50-50 blend of beef and chorizo that oozes queso blanco, called the Spanish Fly.

There is no Juicy Lucy gatekeeping in the Twin Cities, Grumdahl explains. “There’s no limit to your creativity. I can absolutely see, if someone said, ‘I’m putting mango pickle in the middle!’, people would respond, ‘Oh, I’ll try it.’” In the Upper Midwest, long, cold winters inspire a lot of indoor experimentation, in the kitchen and beyond. “This is the land of the indoor enthusiast. It’s a land of knitting, and a land of model trains… you name a hobby that people do for indoor time. I think food falls in that category.”

What actually matters is that the burger lives up to its name. When you take your first bite, melted cheese and beef juices should come rushing out in a mouth-coating moment of burger bliss. “The best ones have a liquid, molten core that requires you to wait a beat, lest you scorch your mouth with scalding cheese,” wrote Natalia Mendez, a writer and another one of my go-to Twin Cities food experts, when I reached out asking for guidance. “However you make your cheese, you’ll probably need something to make sure that once it’s hot, it liquifies, instead of turning into a stretchy curd.”

How to Build a Better Juicy Lucy at Home

After eating Juicy Lucys around the Twin Cities and consulting a couple of Minnesotan experts, I was ready to start building my version of the burger. I wanted to keep it simple—beef, American cheese, salt, and pepper, the way it’s served at Matt’s—but as I worked my way through a couple dozen test batches, I noticed a consistent issue with that formula.

Turning a cheeseburger inside-out has advantages and drawbacks. Cook the burger to a juicy medium, and the cheese inside may not even be fully melted, much less molten. Overcook the burger, and you get oozy cheese and, of course, dry, crumbly beef. There may be a point of perfect equilibrium, at which both the beef and the cheese are optimally cooked, but good luck dialing that in and repeating it when you can’t even stick a thermometer into the burger, because it would create a flow channel for the cheese inside. I’ve come up with two ways to make sure your home-cooked version of the cheese-stuffed burger has the ideal gooey cheese center encased in a rich beef patty. Here’s how. 

First, add a teaspoon of powdered gelatin to your beef. Since I first made Kenji’s recipe for pan-roasted chicken breasts, I have often added gelatin to my chicken stock before making a pan sauce, for a rich, mouth-coating result. In a burger, gelatin functions similarly, aiding moisture retention and creating a richer texture. Because you can’t temp these burgers, you might overcook them a little bit—and you might want to, anyway, to ensure the meltiest cheese core possible. If you overcook your patties a bit, the gelatin in the mix will ensure that the meat stays juicy.

Second, make your own “American” cheese using sodium citrate. I know—it’s more work, and you wouldn’t see homemade cheese on the menu at Matt’s. When I started developing this recipe, I told myself I wouldn’t do it. It’s too fussy for such a simple recipe. Over time, though, as I progressed from shredded cheddar to standard American to Kraft Singles, I recognized that for the best Juicy Lucy, I needed the meltiest cheese in existence, and a 15-minute investment in shredding, whisking, and chilling the DIY beer cheese got me there. As explained in our nacho cheese sauce recipe, the sodium citrate prevents the cheese from breaking into an oily mess when it’s initially heated with the beer, and it guarantees a smooth, creamy texture as the cheese melts inside the patty when cooked. 

In my tests, deli-counter American cheese melted well, Kraft was gooier, and my homemade American made a filling that was coherent but almost dangerously juicy, like a beefy beer cheese soup. That’s what I wanted. Plus, using extra-sharp cheddar and beer—a tribute to the burger’s dive-bar origins—in the homemade cheese mixture adds tang and complexity to each hefty bite. If making American cheese at home is too much of a science project for your taste, store-bought American will work. It just won’t be quite as melty or flavorful.

Whether you take the time to make and mold your own cheese or you start with store-bought, there are still two rules to getting the patties right: Seal the two patties tightly, so your cheese doesn’t leak out into the skillet, and after cooking rest the burgers at least five minutes before eating, so your taste buds can survive the onslaught of melted cheese and you can safely appreciate the drippy joys of the juiciest burger on earth.