[00:00] McDonald's Burger King, Wendy's in and out every fast food restaurant that you know and love owes its success to this little burger. And unfortunately, it's not good, but stick with me.
[00:12] Formed in Wichita, Kansas in 1921, White Castle was America's first fast food restaurant. Pioneering the process of standardization across all locations and speed of service.
[00:25] This is arguably the most important burger that's ever existed. And while commendable, my problem is it's engineered for speed, not flavor. We're going to take what White Castle has done well and blend it with some of what this burger's predecessors have come to adopt that kind of
[00:42] made this thing irrelevant. This is the White Castle burger. Now before I nerd out on a little bit more history, we've got to make these iconic patties. Now I've done these a few ways. I've sandwiched
[00:56] in between two sheet trays. I actually just kind of came up with a potentially smarter way to do it with a big ziplock bag. Now I've got just some 80-20 ground chuck here, freshly ground from my supermarket,
[01:08] not some pre-packaged junk. Now we need to form this meat into square and we sort of have to make some decisions. Now upon further inspection, I mean this is what I'm talking about. That's the problem right there. But when it comes to the meat patty, you can't even pull this thing off. Do we want this
[01:24] patty so thin? It's practically indesernable, disappears between the buns, or do we want to add a little bit of heath into it? The amount you put in here will kind of dictate how big each patty is. So with two pounds here, I'm going to put about a pound in and see where we're at. To me, you can make
[01:40] them as thin or as thick as you want. My method involves steaming, but just not quite the way White Castle does. So now I'm going to start pressing it out. Sort of push it out to the sides as far as you can and then we can get a little rolling pin and we can use that to sort of even it all out. We're
[01:57] just going to go working around to the corners, trying to get it as even as possible. Now basically what I'm going to be looking for is cutting them into two and a half inch by two and a half inch squares. So we should get three going up, maybe about four going down. Another way you could do it,
[02:13] take some sheet trays, put some parchment in there, think maybe we'll make some thicker ones in here. Place parchment on top and then we can compress it. You can knock it out, remove the parchment
[02:29] and we can just roll it out a little further, get it to the thickness that we want. So then we're going to take our ruler and we're just going to measure two and a half inches and then we're just going to cut. Take the trim from that other side and just kind of work it in to get four rows.
[02:49] So now we still have that parchment, going to transfer it over here, then we're going to take the zip lock and open it up, rip the corners. We're just going to do the same thing with this two and a half inches. You can just take the scraps and form a new patty. Got 25 patties formed. Now we've got to
[03:09] make the little holes, one in the center and then four around. Now why would you do such a thing? As frozen as these are going to be, those holes allow steam to pass through, cooking the patty evenly.
[03:21] Now back in 1921, ground beef had a bad wrap. Thanks to the 1906 publication of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, the American public generally believed hamburgers were made from scraps from diseased animals.
[03:34] And to me, in an ironic twist of fate, the product we have here today looks like what Sinclair wrote about. I also like these holes for one other reason is when the cheese melts. It kind of goes through those holes, fills the burger up with cheese, which I like. These now are going to go in the
[03:49] freezer. We're going to let them chill in there for at least 30 minutes or so and then break them apart. Now despite that negative PR around ground beef at the time, white castles single-handedly put ground beef back on the mat. But the process in which they got there is a little weird and wacky. These
[04:04] square frozen pucks of ground beef with those five slotted holes and it placed over a bed, not of fresh onions, rehydrated dried onion flakes, which while weird is smart, a pantry item doesn't have
[04:18] to be stored, doesn't need refrigeration, and could be standard across locations. Those onions are rehydrated in water. The onions and that water are then placed on the grill to cook and to create
[04:30] steam. And then those pucks of meat are then tightly packed next to each other on top of that bed of onions. The holes in the patties allow steam to pass through, cooking the burgers evenly and through. And it might make some people uncomfortable they placed the buns on top of the raw beef.
[04:46] The buns act as a shield to keep the steam in and help cook that burger patty all the way through. And what you get is just a wet bottom bun. The patties never touch the grill. The burgers are then scooped up, placed in their buns and packed off to the customer. Steamed burgers which in my experience
[05:02] most people have no appetite for. But these steamed onions do add a flavor component and so we're going to be blending them with fresh onions. The combination of the fresh and the dehydrated should give us a combination of classic onion flavor with that unique white castle onion flavor.
[05:19] So we've got our fresh onions and we've got our dehydrated onions that are now starting to rehydrate. It's like how some garlic breads have both fresh garlic in there and some garlic powder as they have complimentary and distinct flavors and we're trying to achieve the same thing here. So it's not
[05:36] redundant. Now for this we can use a combination of whatever cheese you want. You can use American which is classic. You can use cheddar. All we have to do though really is to portion the cheeses because these slices they're too big for the patties that we made. So we're just going to cut
[05:52] slices of cheese the same size as our patties. I can of course recycle that cheese through a combination of both great stuff for a little small mac and cheese. You got to keep that.
[06:07] Now before they actually freeze up we can just sort of detach the squares and these are still sort of fresh. By now you can just cook these from fresh but I actually want to store these in my freezer and I want to have access to them often. So you can make a few now pack a few up later.
[06:25] Now you can either cook them or continue to freeze them solid. Now while we let those freeze like any good fast food restaurant we're cooking these burgers on one of my best friends in the kitchen the carbon steel griddle from our sponsor today made it. Something that sips on my stove. I
[06:41] flaut it. It's a core tool in my kitchen. Now made in griddle is going to give you that restaurant quality cooking style right in your home. Heat safe up to 1200 degrees so it can be used outdoors
[06:53] on a grill over an open flame or indoors on a gas electric or induction cooktop. And for a recipe like this the carbon steel griddle is essential to truly transform your kitchen or even your grill
[07:05] into a true fast food restaurant in your home. The griddle is pre-seasoned and naturally non-stick ready to start using right out of the box without any chemicals or coatings. And to go along with the griddle today we're going to be using maidens press to allow our burgers to make great contact and get a nice
[07:22] sear on the first side part of our reinvention of these burgers. So if you want to get yourself one of my favorite cooking tools and save on all of maidens amazing kitchen gear head on down in the link in my description and all we got to do now is get this preheated to our burgers are ready to cook.
[07:38] Now this thin right so after a few hours it should be more or less hardened and so we can take our burgers then you got a bag of burgers sits in your freezer because of those holes anytime you throw it on the
[07:52] griddle it should cook well and fast and now you can feel good about frozen burgers rather than buying whatever it is that they sell in the freezer at the grocery store. Now we got our onions as you can see they've taken up all that liquid very distinct smell from the fresh onions and those two things are
[08:09] going to make a nice powerful onion flavor in these burgers which is iconic in white castle and then we've got far buns what I found the best shape the best size the best texture for this even though it's
[08:21] not going to be the same as white castle are these buns these are sweet dinner potato rolls there's just like mini potato roll sliders now as is often the case while this was the first and maybe
[08:33] most important burger to exist the first is not always the best this is technically an onion burger that predates the Oklahoma smashed onion burger by about a decade similar concepts vastly different
[08:46] results and while the smashed onion burger solved a lot of white castles shortcomings the holes the dehydrated onion water for that unique flavor stealing from a bit of white castles predecessors
[08:58] tricks implementing it while maintaining the soul of this historic burger so first I'm going to go down and hit that hot griddle with a little bit of oil and use a spatula to sort of spread it out across the surface of the grill and pour my raw onions straight onto it season with a little bit
[09:17] of salt now we're just going to sort of work these onions on the grill I sort of cradle them towards the center build a little long mound allow them to kind of get going and steaming then to sort of
[09:29] shift them around to flip them I'm going to pull the onion that are at the far end of the pack towards me and then use my scraper to flip the onions closest to me kind of over the mound of onions
[09:42] to rotate the position to brown them evenly and we're just going to repeat this process until we start to see those onions getting translucent and beginning to sort of change colors and brown
[09:55] right now I have the front and the back burner on so the entire surface of the griddle is hot now I can see those onions starting to become a little caramel so now I'm going to use a slotted spoon to
[10:07] pull out the rehydrated onions and I'm going to add that to the mix and start incorporating them into the raw onions once everything starts getting even more brown I'm going to begin to push the onions
[10:22] towards the back burner and lower the heat down in the back to just allow those onions to sort of slowly caramelize in the back while we start working on our patties we're going to pull some of the frozen patties out and unlike white castle which would just throw these on top of the onions
[10:38] we're going to develop a crust on the first side we're going to season that first side we're going to place that season side down on the grill in a pattern of about six patties at a time season that
[10:50] other side and we're going to place a press down on them so we get nice contact and try and get a really good sear on this beat allow that first side to develop color and we're almost ready to flip and now is when I'm going to add some of that onion water that's going to act as the steam
[11:09] see the burgers browning around the edges so now I'm going to pick them up and then flip them onto the onions this is where the white castle part comes in we're going to finish steaming that other side on that bed of onions and in that onion water as soon as they're on the onions we're going to
[11:25] place a piece of cheese on each one we're going to do cheddar on a few and then some American cheese on a couple others then we put the bottom bun on top and the top bun on top of the bottom bun which is going to trap the steam melt the cheese and warm the buns up with this method we get
[11:40] the best of both worlds we get a little bit of that caramelization on the meat that transformation of flavor rather than just steamed meat but then we also get that onion steam the onion flavor the steamed bun now once that cheese is melted and that burger has cooked through we're going to pick up
[11:55] the patty take that top bun off and close up the sandwich and use our thumbs to sort of pinch that burger out flip it right side up and we're just going to place it on some wire rack and go ahead and cook up another batch of burgers six burgers cooked in a few minutes
[12:23] after you want you're going to have a pickle to some that's your thing some people don't like a pick hit him with some ketchup pack some up now let's compare which one you want to eat
[12:42] me what do we do you can see it's cooked all the way through which obviously you're looking for but it's moist and that's that onion steam I mean what's the real fun about sliders and the
[12:54] a lore of a white castle is walking out of there with 30 burgers in a bag 12 is going to be plenty for me whether you find white castle gross or not respecting the past honoring what came before you know like sort of what this channel is all about and now I can eat these and you know I have to
[13:09] add a benefit of not having my stomach want to kill me very good for a crowd with your grittle on a grill outside in the summer you can be a shorter cook just banging out sliders all day you just can't stop recipes going to be down in the description give this sucker a try that's
[13:25] all that I have today I'll see you next time until then take care of yourself and go feed yourself