A person who prefers the single cheeseburger over a big juicy double is sort of like a person who likes hamburgers over cheeseburgers — f*cking weird. I’m sorry if that’s mean but I have a hard time understanding why the single fast food cheeseburger is even a thing. If you’re making a burger at home, or hitting up a restaurant I get it, there is no need for a double when you’re dealing with some thick and meaty patties, but the typical fast food cheeseburger is paper thin, throwing off the meat–cheese-bun ratio. They’re almost always too bready and certainly not cheesy enough.
Some fast food restaurants, particularly the local chain variety (Jims, Douglas, Louis, Tams — whatever your city’s equivalent is) have gargantuan cheeseburgers that most people can’t take down in a single sitting. But even at those establishments, I’d rather order a double and split it in half with a friend than grab a single. The single cheeseburger, as far as I’m concerned, is a joke. Which of course got me wondering:
Could any fast food chain prove me wrong? Who actually makes the greatest single cheeseburger in all of fast food?
To get to the bottom of this, I put five single cheeseburgers from my five favorite fast food burger spots to the blind taste test to see if any of them could blow me away.
Methodology:
For this burger experiment, I zeroed in on five different stock cheeseburgers from a mix of fast casual and fast food restaurants. These five burger brands represent, in our opinion, the best of the best in the fast food landscape. The five brands we picked have routinely ranked in the top tier of our various double cheeseburger rankings, so presumably, the single cheeseburgers should also be delicious.
Because I wanted fair parameters, I opted against obscure burger builds and secret menu items with one exception. Here are the burgers we’re working with:
McDonald’s — Quarter Pounder
Five Guys — Patty Melt
In-N-Out — Single Cheeseburger
Shake Shack — Shack Burger
Wendy’s — Dave’s Single
So why Five Guys’ Patty melt over a regular Five Guys single cheeseburger? Because the patty melt uses the exact same bun, but flips it inwards, and the result is a significantly better burger (see our single review here). It won’t cost you more, it’s essentially the same burger, but better — so who is getting hurt here?
Because most of these burger restaurants aren’t right next to each other like the other restaurants in our fast food blind taste tests, it would’ve been impossible to make it home in time without the burgers getting soggy and cold, so I ate them at a local park. As an additional measure, I ordered each burger without sauce so they wouldn’t get too soggy in transit. That’s going to make each burger drier, but it’ll give the other ingredients an opportunity to really shine.
Once the five burgers were rounded up, I wore a blindfold and had my girlfriend cut each burger in half, and pass me each at random (I photographed the remaining half after the fact). I recorded some voice notes of my initial impressions, and once I had tasted all of them, ranked ’em from worst tasting to best. Here are the results.
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Part 1: The Burger Tasting
Meaty and salty, I’m getting a pronounced American cheese flavor here that pairs nicely with the beefy flavor, which is very present despite this being a single cheeseburger. The tomato adds a blast of freshness, but this lettuce is terrible, it waters the burger down and drowns out some of the flavor.
I’m getting a small hint of onion in this one, not really enough to be prominent in each bite but enough to give a subtle spicy kick on the aftertaste.
Taste 2:
The beef here is overcooked, it’s dry and mealy. This is the sort of burger that obviously uses sauce to hide that. It’s cheesy and beefy with brine-y pickle notes and a very sharp onion finish. I don’t love this one, but I think it works as a single, it packs a lot of flavor.
Wonderfully savory, the last two burgers gave me a sense that I was wrong to think single cheeseburgers were a waste of time but this one really seals the deal. The beef is juicy and bursting with flavor with each bite. The cheese has more complexity than Taste 1 and Taste 2, aside from being salty it has a sweet-almost-buttery vibe.
The lettuce and tomato combination are salad fresh, the tomato imparts a nice sumptuous umami flavor that pairs well with some caramelized notes on the beef. The real star though is that bun, it’s soft, sweet, and a bit gummy, it’s not dry at all, almost like a Hawaiian sweet roll. I think we might have a winner on our hands here.
