I’ve made burgers using 4 different appliances and my grill master husband preferred the air fryer.

We really love burgers in my house – and by we, I especially mean my teenage son, who would order a plain cheeseburger at a fancy steakhouse.

We host a weekly burger night as faithfully as we honor Taco Tuesday, but we like to switch things up when it comes to recipes and cooking methods.

I recently tested my air fryer, stove, oven, and grill to see which one makes the best burger.

I started by gathering a few basic ingredients and making burger patties by hand.

At the grocery store, I bought ground beef, hamburger buns, and American cheese – my son’s favorite hamburger topping.

I prefer handmade patties over frozen options, so I set to work making a patty for each member of my family. Our preference is to use an 80 to 20 ground beef blend to retain some fat in the meat.

I really like a steakhouse-burger recipe I found that uses a panade – a mixture of bread and milk – with ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, minced garlic, salt and pepper.

The oven was the messiest way to cook a hamburger.

After scouring internet search results for the best way to cook a hamburger in the oven, I settled on 425 degrees Fahrenheit for 15 minutes.

I placed a baking rack on a cookie sheet and placed the burger patty on the rack.

My cooking time was perfect, but the juices from the burger were difficult to clean off the cookie sheet and rack afterwards.

The baked burger was my daughter’s favorite.

I found the texture of the baked patty to be more like meatloaf than normal burgers, but it was my daughter’s favorite.

This was the first time anyone in my family had a hamburger prepared this way, and the meat was definitely tender. It seemed to melt in your mouth without the crispy exterior texture that a grill or stovetop sometimes provides.

Cooking a burger on the stove was also complicated, but worth it.

Frying anything in a pan comes with bursting grease and a bit of a mess, and cooking a burger on the stovetop is no exception.

Following a few recipes online, I added a little oil to the pan and cooked the burger for about four minutes on each side, for eight minutes total. My goal was to achieve medium doneness.

This was probably the second messiest cooking method, as it required both washing the pan and then wiping down the stovetop surface.

The stovetop method was my favorite way to cook a burger.

The pan provided the perfect amount of caramelization to the outside of the patty. The crispy exterior was flavorful and delicious, and I found myself coming back for more bites of this burger than any other.

We like to sprinkle steakhouse seasoning on the outside of our burgers, and the salt and spiciness of the seasoning really stood out after crisping up in the frying oil.

Using the grill kept my kitchen clutter free.

I’m a big fan of grilling, especially in the summer when we’re trying to keep our house cool.

My husband fired up a charcoal grill for our little burger experiment and, unsurprisingly, it was the least messy method. Any drips or excess grease melted when they hit the hot coal, leaving very little cleanup.

As with the stovetop method, my husband spent about eight minutes grilling the burger, flipping it halfway.

My son, a real burger lover, preferred the grill.

As a true burger fan, my son preferred the grilled patty. He enjoyed the smoky, grilled flavors and said he could still taste the flames over which it was cooked.

I agree that the grilled burger was very good, especially when topped with creamy American cheese. It didn’t have the caramelization of the oven burger, but it definitely had flavorful grill marks.

I must say; the air fryer made a damn good burger.

I don’t know if there’s anything an air fryer can’t do. I preheated it to 375 degrees Fahrenheit and cooked the patty for six minutes before flipping it and letting it cook for another two minutes.

Cleanup was minimal since our air fryer baskets are dishwasher safe. All we had to do was drain the drippings and load the basket with our dinner dishes.

The downside of using the air fryer was that we served our burgers with fries, which we normally use our air fryer to cook. Instead, we put the frozen fries in the oven while the burgers cooked and finished them in the air fryer while the burgers rested for a few minutes.

My grill master husband is now on Team Air Fryer.

My husband loves grilling, but he has found the air fryer method to produce the tastiest burger. He compared it to a well-seasoned meatball.

I totally understand his point: the burger didn’t have any char marks or caramelization, so it was easy to just focus on the flavors of the meat.

On a weeknight I would absolutely make burgers in my air fryer again to minimize effort and cleanup. Another benefit is that it doesn’t heat our home like an oven does – something we appreciate in the height of summer in Florida.

Each method resulted in a different tasting burger.

Cooking a burger in the oven produced a tender, broken-down texture and gave the patty a distinctly meatloaf-like vibe. But I probably wouldn’t cook burgers using this method again because the cleanup was very involved.

The baked burger gave us a diner vibe, producing a caramelized patty that was slightly fatty and very flavorful. And the grill produced a wonderfully charred burger that would be perfect for summer meals.

But the air fryer might just become my new way to cook burgers. We all loved how it preserved so much flavor and cleanup was incredibly simple.

This story was originally published in July 2023 and last updated on March 8, 2024.

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