Tinfoil Chef

For me, living in a rural area, “Sliders” is a flashback to something I haven’t seen in quite a while. No, I’m not talking about the TV series by that name. “Sliders” is a slang term for the singularly unique hamburgers I discovered at a White Castle restaurant back around 1979.

Exactly where the term originated I never did know, perhaps sometime I’ll see if I can find it just for curiosity’s sake.

These burgers were unlike any that I’ve seen before or since, although I’ve been told that another restaurant… “Krystals” is known for a burger that’s similar to the White Castle Slider.

They’re approximately two inches square, a shade less than a quarter inch thick and have a cluster of five holes in the meat. They’re cooked on a hot grill that’s been covered with a mixture of one part dried minced onions in two parts water.

The meat is laid down on the onions, then the bottom part of the bun is put on top of the meat and the top of the bun sits on top of that.

If you’re thinking that this makes turning them difficult, that’s the reason for the holes, they allow steam from the onion and water mixture to pass through and cook both sides at once. It also means that a White Castle burger never has a dried out bun.

They cook like that for just two or three minutes and they’re ready to go. The cook then picks up the top bun, flips the burger and bottom bun over, drops on a slice of cheese (this part is optional depending on whether you’re ordering White Castles with cheese or not), Add a dill pickle chip, put the top half of the bun on and it’s popped into a pasteboard box.

They were bagged up, the boxes made it easy to pack ten of them in a single bag, by facing the open side of the boxes together.

There was a time when I’d pick up a sack of sliders (or two…sometimes three.. what can I say? I love those things), a two liter bottle of Coke and spend the night watching Tv while munching sliders.

Unfortunately those days are gone for the foreseeable future because actual White Castle restaurants can only be found in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky and Tennessee. It’s true that frozen White Castles can be found in supermarkets in most major cities, but frankly I’ve tried them on a number of occasions and really, they’re just not the same.

Somehow I don’t expect they’re going to build a restaurant somewhere in northeast Arkansas any time in the next hundred years,

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