At our house, we like to keep the flavorings pretty simple: minced onion, barbecue sauce and worcestershire sauce. But burgers are pretty receptive to just about any flavor concoction you could possible imagine. For 1½ lbs. of ground beef (about four patties), you might experiment by adding:

... or whatever else your little heart desires. As with just about all cooking, adjust quantities to suit your individual tastes. Since you can’t (or rather, really shouldn’t) actually taste the raw beef mixture, you can always test the seasonings by cooking up a little bit of the meat mixture in a skillet. On the other hand, if you’re feeling lazy, just use my mom’s method: add seasonings until the meat smells good. Actually, my normally cooking-phobic sweetie swears by this technique as well … basically once the meat no longer smells quite so bloody-beefy, it’s probably good.

A brief word of warning: You might think it’d be a dandy idea to add salt when you’re seasoning the beef. Unfortunately, you’d be wrong. Adding salt to the mixture will only suck all the good juices out of the meat, leaving you with oh-so-tasty, bone-dry burgers in the end. It’s a much better idea to sprinkle salt on the patties just before slapping them on the grill – though if you’ve used other seasonings, like soy sauce, worcestershire or other sauces, salt may not even be necessary.