The great fast food burger experiment

I don’t know how many of you may have seen the article about the McDonald’s burger not decomposing after being left out for six months. Well, I had some issues with her “experiment”, namely she had no control subject, ie other brands and some homemade burgers. So today I started a similar experiment using a burger from McD, BK and Wendys. For control subjects, I also have two frozen patties of 85/15 beef and two fresh patties, also 85/15. The two frozen/fresh patties, I fried one and grilled one each per the cooking instructions on the packages. I also purchased some off the shelf package of white hamburger rolls.

I’m working on the road this week, so I won’t be able to update each day, so my next update won’t be till this next weekend. Right now, I’d say it’s going to be interesting since following the cooking instructions made the control subjects appear to be well done. Pictures below areĀ  my “Day O” layouts.

These are a few of my samples, the plastic containers are new, nothing has ever been in them to prevent contamination.

The fresh sample control, on the left is fried, on the right is grilled. These were done per the package directions for time and temp cooking. Seeing how they came out, I have doubts they will get moldy any faster than the fast food burgers.

My complete testing setup.