Grilling the perfect burger this summer starts with good ingredients and can be a great end to every day! Whether you’re cooking for friends in the backyard or just fixing yourself something, a good burger can be achieved with very few actual rules.

1 – The Beef

Fresh ground beef is obviously the best choice for a burger, but knowing the fat content of your beef is also essential.

Like most good meat, burger should have a fat content of about 20% to keep it flavorful and juicy. If you don’t know the actual fat content of the ground beef you’re buying, you can always grind your own beef, but it’s not necessary.

2 – The Technique

Your burger patty can quickly turn into meatloaf if you overwork it before you apply heat. Ground beef should be kept cold up until the point you are ready to shape it and grill it.

Letting the fat in ground beef begin to warm means it will become stickier to work with, and leave less in the meat for cooking. Shape your burger patty quickly and without a lot of fussing. Too much and the patty will be too dense.

3 – The Seasoning

Another way to avoid dense, dry burgers is to avoid salting or seasoning the raw meat before you shape it into a patty. Salt can dissolve muscle proteins, creating a sausage-like burger that is springy.

The best time to season your burgers is right before you add them to the heat. But feel free to extensively season your burger patties however you’d like… just don’t season and shape them too far ahead of grill time!

4 – The Shape

If you’re cooking up burgers for a small army, making sure the patties end up uniform in size is a matter of using a kitchen scale to divide up the ground beef equally.

The average burger patty is about 4 ounces, which is a quarter pounder. If you’re making burgers any bigger than that, you may run into “meatballing” once the burger cooks up: a beef lump instead of a burger.

If that’s your style, that’s fine, but if you’d like to make sure a larger burger heats evenly, form your patty with a dimple in the center, and it will cook up more like a disc than a football.

5 – The Show

Once you’re ready to grill, how hot you set the grill or how often you flip the burgers is not as important as having a meat thermometer to know when to serve it. Flipping a burger regularly or letting it grill for a specific amount of time on each side will end up producing the same results.

Burgers need to cook to an internal temperature of at least 120°F (49°C) for a very rare burger, up to 150°F (66°C) for medium well. The USDA recommends that a burger have an internal temperature of 160°F (71°C), but that is a very “well-done” temperature, designed to kill any bacteria within a shadow of a doubt.

If you know a good butcher and trust your beef, a patty cooked to 135°F (57°C) will be pink at the center and the perfect temperature throughout for a great burger. As far as toppings go, whatever you decide to put on your patty – even if you go “no bun” – is up to you.

Don’t forget to enter the #WhatsGrillin contest!

This year there’s no photo needed, no purchase required—just some good old-fashioned summer fun! All it takes is a quick entry with a few fun questions and you’re in the running to win big from Porter’s and Weber Grills. Winners will be drawn on Saturday, July 14 during Porter’s GRILLED Event in Riverton (but don’t worry, you don’t have to be there to win!).