Jake Dickert reveals bizarre secret to cooking perfect hamburger

Jake Dickert talked more than just football at ACC Media Days Wednesday when the Wake Forest head coach revealed a bizarre secret to cooking hamburgers. You’ll want to hear this one.

Basically, Dickert doesn’t want to eat a dry hamburger, nor does he want his players doing that either. Taking from the Wisconsin method, where you put the meat in beer for cooking.

But, without alcohol, there’s another method. And this is one Dickert has been doing for quite awhile.

“The process when you’re cooking for 100 football players, you’re talking about, you know, 300 burgers,” Dickert said on ACC Network. “The last thing you can serve as a dry burger. When you’re from Wisconsin, you know, to be honest, we put the burgers and the brats and in the beer, right? So, you know, I learned a Dickert family tradition. You know, you got the kids around, you can’t use the beer? You put a little Sprite in there. Gives it a nice, little sweet taste, you let it stay warm, hydrated, being there for about 30 minutes, you eat them perfectly.”

Former coach Mark Richt followed up and asked if he did additional marinades or anything else. Dickert simply said he puts them in the cooker.

If the burger method works well for Dickert, Wake Forest is hoping his coaching chops work out on the field. The Demon Deacons went 4-8 last season.

Wake Forest hasn’t won the ACC since 2006. Still, under previous head coach Dave Clawson, the program found some consistent success. He’d lead them to a 67-69 record from 2014 through 2024. That was when he made the decision to step down as the head coach at Wake Forest.

Dickert now finds himself in a part of the country where he hasn’t coached before. A Wisconsin native, he’s never coached further East than the state of Missouri. The majority of his time as a coach has come in North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, and Washington.

In 2020, Dickert first joined Washington State as the team’s defensive coordinator. After previous head coach Nick Rolovich was fired due to not following the state’s vaccine mandates, Dickert was promoted to head coach in 2021, first as the interim coach and later as the full-time head coach.

At Washington State, Dickert put together a 23-20 record over about three and a half seasons, which included the difficult circumstances in which he took the program over. He’d lead the program to three different bowls but didn’t coach the bowl in 2024 after taking the Wake Forest job.