When times are tough, ingenuity often breeds a regional delicacy. Such is the case for the humble dough burger.
On Feb. 1, northern Mississippi resident Julie Jackson confounded TikTok when she posed a simple question while making dinner for her family.
“Hey, TikTok. Settle a debate in our house tonight. What do you eat on your dough burger?” she asks in the video, garnering over 5 million views in the process. “I say mustard, pickle and sweet onion.”
Her husband, Michael S. Jackson, who is helping her prepare dinner, chimes in with “mustard and ketchup,” with which Jackson disagrees.
“All right, America, tell us what y’all eat on your dough burgers,” she says.
Instead of answering her question, most commenters expressed confusion about what, pray tell, a “dough burger” is.
“I regret looking up dough burger,” wrote one. “How about nothing!”
“I don’t know what the heck a dough burger is, and by looking at these comments I feel safer that way,” wrote another.
“I was blown away,” a TikToker said in a reaction video. “They did it to ration out meat portions in the Great Depression. Reckless, reckless, reckless.”
What Is a Dough Burger?
Despite the reaction on TikTok, the dough burger is nothing to be feared. It’s a regional delight beloved by a small section of the South, namely northern Mississippi and the surrounding area. It’s a hamburger whose patty has a dough-related extender, like stale bread, breadcrumbs, or, in Jackson’s case, a sprinkling of flour.
“As far as I can remember, my grandmother would make dough burgers,” Jackson tells TODAY.com. Her grandmother’s recipe included flour, water, milk and pepper. “Now, at the time, she did not call it a dough burger. She just would say, ‘I’m having a hamburger.’”
Jackson’s memory fits with the sly history of the dough burger, which was also called a “slugburger” because it cost a nickel (or a “slug,” as people used to call it).
“Most of the restaurants that I know of would never reveal they’re putting anything in their burger at all,” George Motz, widely renowned burger scholar and author of “Hamburger America,” tells TODAY.com. “No one actually revealed they actually put any kind of breading or breadcrumbs in their burger.”
Motz says, during the Great Depression, restaurants that wanted to extend their ground beef would use stuff that would otherwise be tossed in the trash.
“The idea for the dough burger was to take your beef for today, and you take yesterday’s stale buns that went bad because they’re from yesterday,” Motz says. “Crush them up, mix that into the beef in some sort of ratio, a lot of times it’s one to one. The more bread you have in there, of course, the more bready it gets.”
Other than the fact that this would save restaurants money, it would also make for “very crispy burgers,” says Motz.
“Whenever you have rendered beef fat on a flat top and a griddle, it is now out of the burger, and it gets soaked up back into the breading, and starts to crisp up,” he says. “That’s why they’re so good.”
Slugburgers, or Dough Burgers, Today
Once a year, you can visit Corinth, Mississippi for its annual Slugburger Festival. The celebration happens every July, and folks can sample a variety of dough burgers — which include anything from flour to soy grits.
“People talking about dough burgers today are not talking about beef burgers, believe it or not,” Motz says, adding that in the early days, beef was what they were trying to extend, but “sometime in the middle of the last century, it shifted” to pork.
Shops that serve slugburgers like this include Borroums Drug Store in Corinth, Mississippi.
Traditionally, it’s topped with mustard, pickles and onions (like Jackson prefers) on a hamburger bun.
What Does a Dough Burger Taste Like?
Other people have made dough burgers on social media, and those videos have been met with a similar amount of confusion from commenters. I had to try them for myself.
I prepared beef patties, two ways: one with flour, milk and a little water and one with crushed, stale breadcrumbs. These puppies cook very quickly, so if you’re trying this at home, I would suggest keeping a close eye on them.
I dressed them the traditional way — mustard, pickle and onion — and was surprised to find I preferred the flour-and-milk patties to the breadcrumb patties, which I found grainy. Maybe I was using the wrong crumbs.
The texture, while unusual, was very appealing to me. They are nothing like hamburgers, because you’re looking for juiciness in those, but for these, it’s all about the crispness. They have more bite, contrasting nicely with the soft hamburger bun, and feel more like a deli sandwich than a hamburger.
I’m glad I kept an open mind — more so than the very Yankee comments section of Jackson’s video, at least.
“People come in to visit, and we say, ‘OK, we need to go get a dough burger,’ and they look at us like we’ve lost our minds,” Jackson says with a laugh. “But it’s a Southern staple.”
