White Castle Burgers - Clone Copycat Recipe

Earlier this year I blogged about White Castle® cheeseburgers affectionately known as Slyders™.  Searching through online sources I found a lot of clone recipes that actually came nowhere close to Slyders™.  Some even have the audacity to bake the burger to form patties!  Obviously they missed one of the fundamental rules of cloning a recipe and that it to clone the method as well.

White Castle® burgers start out with thin frozen burger patties with a characteristic 5 hole pattern to help them cook quickly without flipping.  I started with lean ground beef (1) then rolled it with a rolling pin (2) between two pieces of wax paper.  I kept rolling until the ground beef was thin and squishing out the sides of the wax paper sheets.  The next step was trimming the ground beef into a rectangle (3) which actually sounds a lot easier than it is because raw ground beef simply does not cut easily.  I used a combination of a chef's knife and pizza cutter.  After the the rectangle was formed I used the pizza cutter to score the actual patties and a clean marker top to mark where the holes would go (4).

One of the characteristics of White Castle® burgers is each frozen patty has 5 holes.  The holes serve the specific function of ensuring the patty cooks all the way through without flipping.  At the same time they let the steam from the onions waft through the cooking burger to permeate the bun.

Pictured are the burger patties after I removed the holes.  Each patty was about 4 - inch square.  Removing the holes involved a toothpick and a slight swirly motion that wasn't quite as bad as it sounds.  It was a bit tedious though.  The finished patties were then covered with wax paper and placed in the freeze to freeze solid before cooking. 

I used the griddle similar to the cooking surface used at White Castle®.  The frozen patties are  placed on a bed of onion (traditionally reconstituted dehydrated onions) then topped with the bottom of the bun.  When the burger is cooked it is removed, a slice of American cheese is added with optional but traditional pickle slice and the top bun is added at White Castle® so that's what we aimed to duplicate.

The patties look huge compared to the bottom of the buns but as you can seen with the middle burger at the top the patty shrinks considerably.   I made a fundamental error during the cooking process by using the onion flakes as is rather than reconstituting so that will be something to consider for the next attempt.  The result was still good just not exactly right so a bit of tweaking there and they will be about as close to the perfect clone for White Castle® burgers as you can get.

I used store purchased dinner rolls for this clone recipe.  Each mini burger was topped with a half slice of American processed cheese. I omitted the traditional pickle slice because my husband does not like dill pickles so we never get them even when getting Slyders™ at White Castle®.

Overall I am extremely pleased with this first attempt at cloning Slyders™.  The only real tweaking that needs to be done is the onions and I already figured out what I did wrong.  Watch for the second attempt later this year with the onion problem corrected.