The “Krystal White Castle” Sliders

For those that aren’t onion fans – this isn’t the post for you. I’ve been in your shoes.. in like middle school – but then I made up for lost time. This post is the perfect example of that. I was jonesin’ for some “White Castle” or “Krystal” style sliders – but we don’t have those in my area. I was reading the history of these joints, and I figured it’s time to try to recreate it.

It wasn’t a true re-creation, but it was a damn good result. Onion fans, brace yourselves – we’re going crazy.

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Recipe

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The Prep Table

I made this blend years ago and baked them in the oven, and it was a great result. But that was before the Blackstone, before ForensicBBQ, and before I really had a knack for venturing outside the comfort zone. Point proven, check out the prep picture:

Why in the hell do you need 4 onions for a pound of beef? You don’t, but I do. And hopefully after reading this, you will as well. My thought was to make a bed of onions on the Blackstone and steam the meat until it’s cooked. In theory, I’d have a beautiful range of cooked onions to really make the slider a slider. In more ways than one.

I calmed it down a little bit – I only used three onions. I diced these pretty fine, but nothing crazy. These slider/smash burgers are a favorite of mine, and I think I mentioned in the Oklahoma Onion Burger post – the varied cook of the onion makes for a delicious result. What we did here was mix that pound-ish ground meat with some onion soup mix, an egg, and some bread crumbs. As if the 3 onions weren’t enough, we added the onion soup mix.

Get this all mixed up in a bowl and get it laid out. I don some food prep gloves and get dirty with it. I’m sure you’d be just fine with a KitchenAid – it was actually MrsForensicBBQ’s first gift to each other – but both of us end up just mixing shit by hand. This was no different. Mix it up and get it prepped.

Was going to make this the next day, so after it was spread out on a piece of parchment paper, put it in the fridge until we were ready to go for tomorrow. The prep is done, let’s get to the process.

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The Process

My thought it was going to be easy to slice from the loaf pan and burger this up. For reasons I can’t quite recall, but I’ll attribute to authenticity, I just ended up ripping a piece off, balling up, and smashing it. I was going to make a lot of little burgers from this, so grabbed a pile of wax paper squares and cut them accordingly.

I took a chop stick and poked the traditional 5 holes in the patty. There’s actually a pretty solid write up done as to the “White Castle” method of this, so I’d actually suggest you seek it out. This prep was pretty easy: Rip a bit, ball it up, flatten, five-hole it, and repeat. I did this many times. Ended up freezing a lot of it (until the freezer died) – but let’s get to cooking.

This was the picture I was hoping for. All those chopped onions laid out on the Blackstone. We were low heat for it, going to cook up the onions and steam the burgers/buns. If you’ve ever had the fast food sliders – you know it’s not a pretty result. The buns are soft, the burgers are thin, the onions are prevalent. But it works. So let’s see if this works.

Just dropped some patties and buns on the onions and let it go. Never actually cooked this way before, so I was curious to see how it was going to turn out. We weren’t going to be short on onion flavor, that’s for sure. If not for the bed of onions, we had the onion soup mix in the patties, and now the buns were going to be onion steamed.

The flip kind of ruined our method. After one flip, we lost the ideology. The meat was now on the griddle, but we still had the bed of onions working. I added the bottom of the buns to the burger – Oklahoma Onion Burger style – and everything got soft and sloppy like I wanted. Once these burgers got cooked, we assembled with some cheap ass pickles like I do.

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The Result

The only thing these burgers were missing was the box. The buns were so soft and airy and were there just to grab onto. Once you bit into it, it melted in your mouth and left only the burger/onion/pickle left to satisfy the pallet – what you want.

So while that was the presented picture, let’s look at what’s under the hood:

I don’t know what you were expecting, but that’s what I was going for. How dirty is that burger. Just enough beef to call it a burger, a splatter of onion – it’s so satisfying.

That’s your steamed “Krystal Castle” burger in all it’s glory. These things were an onion-bomb – even more so than the Oklahoma Onion Burger. The added soup mix was fantastic, and I’ll probably add this to future “regular” burgers. I had so much saved sautéed onion, that it made for delicious leftovers. These might not be for everyone, but it was for me – and I hope for you!

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The Recipe