Is Wendy's Chili always made with pre-cooked burgers? Do they ever make it from fresh ground meat?

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I used to manage a Wendy’s. I can explain the various ways it’s done.

They have little timers on their grills and flat top. All of their burgers are made from raw ground beef on a grill and then transferred to the flat top, which keeps them warm but doesn’t continue to cook them. Cheese is placed on half of them to melt properly.

*** Bonus hint #1 - If you regularly get unmelted cheese on your burger (there are always exceptions where the burgers are taken straight off the grill and the cheese doesn’t have time to melt) they aren’t following procedure.

I believe the timer was about 5 minutes. A little longer than it takes to cook a burger. I can’t guarantee that the grill person always stuck exactly to the timer… they certainly wouldn’t ‘waste’ the burgers until fresh ones are available… but the general idea is that a cooked burger shouldn’t sit out longer than 5 minutes before being used. At the busy stores (mine was the high end of mid-range volume stores, so we were fairly busy) it generally wasn’t an issue, as we sold burgers as fast as we could make them during lunch and dinner hours. We binned maybe 1 to 2 burgers in 10 for chili. Often zero. All the rest that went out were 5 minutes or less on the flat top portion of the stove.

Wendy’s sells an awful lot of chili, particularly in the winter months. 1 or 2 burgers isn’t going to cut it. That’s when the off hours come in. The burgers will (possibly) sit longer on the flat top if you show up at 11pm… we would be throwing out whole cows each night otherwise and we can’t make all the burgers to order, as most drive through customers get pissy if they have to wait. It takes 4 minutes (if memory serves me) to cook a burger and our corporate set goal for speed of service was 3min 20sec.

*Bonus hint #2 - If you want to guarantee a fresh burger, state that you have high blood pressure and need one without salt. The burgers are salted while still raw and the grill attendant will have to put down a fresh one. Same goes for fresh fries.

I seem to have gotten off subject. The rejected burgers (cheese scraped off) are kept in a warming bin for a couple of hours. This is a process used mainly to keep them at a safe temperature.

Now, let me tell you… making chili meat is a pain. You have to re-hydrate the beef, mash it up manually and store and date it properly. It was generally refrigerated for use the next day, as chili takes 2 hours to cook and you can’t just make it on demand. But my point is that it won’t sit in the warmer all day. The evening crew would throw a fit if they had to make chili meat left over because the day crew didn’t do their part.

It’s really no different than cooking a batch of ground beef today and saving some in the fridge for tomorrow. My mum does that all the time.

However… there are two instances I can think of in which we made fresh ground beef for the chili.

A) We had a crappy night shift who didn’t make enough chili meat to start the day. I’ve had the grill person start up the grill early simply to cook beef for a batch of chili. As I mentioned earlier, Wendy’s sells a bumload of chili and it takes 2 hours to cook. You can’t just wait until it’s time to take burgers off the flattop.

B) The beef is going to expire. I’m sure you’ve heard the slogan… always fresh, never frozen. Even the poorly run stores adhere to that. There are situations where I’ve ordered too much meat. I might sit there and say “We’re never going to go through that much before it’s use by date… make X bags of chili meat.”

Now, that is not the optimal way to make chili at Wendy’s. I don’t know how home cooks do it (I haven’t personally eaten meat in over 25 years) but there is no real process to properly drain all the grease out of the hamburger at Wendy’s, if it’s cooked fresh. That’s part of the re-hydrating process. If you use ground beef fresh off the grill, a layer of icky grease will develop at the top of the chili while it sits. All you can really do is stir it into the mix.

Gross.

So, to properly answer your question… yes, they sometimes make it from fresh ground beef. However, the taste people know and love in Wendy’s chili is best made with the unused burgers. The chili is less greasy.