Sliders have moved far past that, though, and onto the menu at classic diners and fine restaurants like American Social in Brickell Miami.
They also tend to fit well with the current small, shared plate trend, with a plate of sliders being fun to share with a group at the table. Some restaurants take the concept of the slider beyond burgers. You can also get sliders with bacon and beef blended patties, because everything is better with bacon! Or get black truffle short rib or BBQ pork belly sliders, the latter on a brioche bun.
What order should the burger be stacked in? How does the meat get cooked? Is it even possible to dissect and reassemble the slider in standard Burger Lab style and come out the other end with a recipe that doesn't in some way dishonor a nearly year-old institution?
My goal this week: develop the ultimate slider recipe. I know, ouch. Sorry about the terrible pun. Living a stone's throw from North Jersey, I fortunately have some good stomping grounds to research sliders that are still cooked via the method pioneered by White Castle.
Almost all of the slider joints in Jersey have the word "white" in their name; an epithet originally intended to evoke a sense of purity and cleanliness to calm a beef-wary s public, who were still reeling at the horror stories of the Chicago stockyards chronicled in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. So how do they cook their burgers?
To quote slider expert Nick Solares , this is how it's done I'll refer to this method as the "traditional" method from here on out :. After steaming through, the sandwiches are closed, and pickles and condiments are added. Simple, right? White Castle on the other hand, has made a few innovations in the process over the years that bear some investigation.
Rather than starting with the beef, they first cover the griddle with a layer of reconstituted dehydrated onions apparently they made the switch from fresh onions during World War II food shortages and have never looked back. The onions and their liquid are allowed to slowly warm and soften, before frozen patties of beef with the distinct five-hole pattern intended to hasten cooking time are added, and topped immediately with both bottom and top bun.
So what does this mean? Well, the key difference is that at White Castle, the beef never touches the griddle. It's unclear exactly why White Castle made this change which according to my research, happened very early on, well before the 's. It could be for efficiency and uniformity reasons, or it may be that the method simply delivers better flavor. Clearly, the independent stores in Jersey trump White Castle in terms of quality and freshness of ingredients—but has their cooking method been left wallowing in a less-than-ideally-flavored past?
Armed with beef, onions, and a boatload of questions, I hit the kitchen to find out. First things first. Finding a slider-sized bun is not easy. While most old fashioned slider joints use white, Wonder Bread-esque squishy buns according to burger expert Josh Ozersky, these are the only buns a slider should be made on , these buns are not readily available to the general public. Martin's Potato Rolls , on the other hand, are available, do have some precedence in real-world sliders White Manna of Hackensack uses them , and come in two potentially slider-friendly sizes, shown above.
While the tiny, 2-inch Party Rolls may be good for passed hors d'oeuvres at a fancy dinner party, I decided to go with the slightly larger Sliced Rolls, which are still small enough to be considered a snack, but large enough that you can make a meal our of three or four of 'em. Another easy decision. Since their thinness prohibits cooking these burgers to anything less than well done to very well done, I knew I'd have to use a very fatty cut. Either fresh ground chuck or fresh ground second-cut brisket would do me just fine.
After some brief experimenting with beef-to-bun ratios, I settled on 1. Here's where we get to the really tough part. In my estimation, the onions are in fact a more important element to the slider than the beef itself. They add moisture, they add flavor, they provide that all-important aromatic steam. Without onions, there can simply be no slider. My first test was to cook four patties side by side, using cooking method 1, with the onions smashed into the uncooked side of the patty before being flipped.
I tried onions cut four different ways: small dice, really small dice, finely sliced parallel to the equator, and finely sliced pole-to-pole. Straight away, the onion cut parallel to the equator was out for its unappealingly stringy texture. Of the remaining options, the teeny tiny diced onion and the onion sliced very finely pole-to-pole were in a dead heat.
They both seemed to have much more distinct onion flavor than either of the other two batches. What was going on? To get at the answer, we've got to take a quick look at an onion under a microscope:.
Onions, like all vegetables, are composed of a series of liquid-filled cells. Within this liquid floats a number of large compounds armed with sulfurous molecules that are designed specifically to irritate our eyes and noses. Now normally, these molecules are inert. Like a bomb without a trigger, they are perfectly harmless. Sliders refer to miniature hamburgers. The name originated in the s, when sailors in the U. Navy would refer to mini-burgers as "sliders" because of their extreme greasiness.
In just one or two bites, the burger would just slide right down! The slider was first created at White Castle, a popular American fast food chain restaurant. White Castle became famous for their cheap and greasy mini-burgers and the tradition continues to this day.
As the oldest hamburger fast food chain in America, the centerpiece of the menu was none other than a five-cent burger. To promote their famed burger, White Castle would run periodic promotional advertisements in local newspapers with coupons for five burgers for ten cents.
As time passed, the burger kept getting smaller and the price kept getting higher, but popularity never waned. In fact, White Castle was the first hamburger chain to sell a billion hamburgers. While White Castle is an American icon, franchises have been sold all over the world including Japan, Malaysia, and Mexico. As interesting as it is to reminisce about these historical mini-burgers, we are now in the era of the gourmet slider.
Around is when the image of a slider began to evolve into a much different culinary experience. Now sliders are featured at some of the most modern and upscale restaurants with expert chefs constantly inventing new combinations. So long traditional beef patty, and hello chicken, pork, and veal! The slider did wonders for the restaurant industry. For diet-conscious foodies, the idea of a small gourmet burger is appealing because it's less food, for more enjoyment.
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