More Oklahoma Onion Burgers | Kenji's Cooking Show

hey everyone it's kenji we're gonna make some onion burgers so these are oklahoma-style onion burgers um i'm not gonna go too much in the history of them because um you know i'm more of the cooking guy and not the history guy but um if you're interested in the history of these things you should definitely check out uh my buddy george moats uh he does a he does the burger scholars over on first week feast he also wrote an excellent book called hamburger america sorry about that my battery just died um all right so yeah i was saying you should check out my buddy george moats over on first we feast um he's uh we've we've both worked on burgers for years um i've known him since my time at sirius eats um when he came out with his book hamburger america and his documentary hamburger america anyhow oklahoma onion burgers uh beef lots of onion cheese and that's about it um the technique is really where it's all what it's all about all right so i'm gonna get this cast iron pan going you don't have to use cast iron but you want something heavy that's going to retain heat and something that you don't mind scratching a little bit so cast iron is kind of perfect for this carbon steel also works so we want to preheat this we're gonna get it really really nice and piping hot okay meanwhile i'm gonna take these onions um one of the essential tools for this is a mandolin mandolin like this a slicer this one's about the been runner it's um i don't know 30 bucks or so maybe you can use this or you can use a you know if you happen to have like a meat slicer like a deli slice that works too but you want to get this basically as thin as it'll possibly go you want your onion slices to be really really paper thin and really even and so for about that's about four ounces of beef maybe actually a little bit less small burgers um we're gonna use about you know two and a half ounces of onion or so so that's maybe like a quarter to a third of a large onion that's a good amount all right so set the rest of this aside meanwhile i'm gonna season my beef okay so salt and pepper normally i would use pickle chips by the way but i didn't have them i just had these pickle spears that i made with my daughter last year so i just chopped one of those up and i'm going to use those season the beef one side first like that okay then i'm going to lightly flatten this out a little bit like that okay and then flip it over and then don't season that second side yet but pile on the onions let's see you want to you want to have like a big haystack of them like this okay and then the other tools you're going to need are the only other tool you're going to need actually is a really stiff spatula so like this this one's from oxo but you know any any nice thick stiff spatula will work so this is you know a it's done slider style so you see we're going to kind of steam everything sort of in the style of you know white castle but but better um white castle actually the i would argue is the inventor of the hamburger because prior to white castle and somebody else you know who maybe knows a little more about this can correct me if i'm wrong but i'm pretty sure about this um white castle was the first company to make to serve their hamburgers on soft round burger buns that were specially baked for the burgers before that burgers came on either hard rolls or on uh toast um so 1927 i believe it was something in the 1920s white castle invented the burger bun which i think thereby makes them the creator of the modern hamburger all right and they still cook their burgers the same way and they they steam them over a bed of onions all right so the way we're going to do this now we're going to start by smashing this okay so this is really nice and piping hot you saw i was moving it around a little bit because i wanted to make sure that um you know so like a western style gas ring it spreads the flame out so if you just have your pan like this what ends up happening is it gets really hot on the outside but not too hot in the center so you get this weird heat pattern um so what i'm trying to do by moving this around is make sure that it's heat evenly heated all over so i get a nice sear all over this patty all right so no oil in the pan it is a well seasoned pan but there's no oil in it and the idea is that i want this meat to stick you do this whenever you're making a smash burger whether whether it has onions on it or not okay get the patty on there and then i'm gonna smash and you can see what i'm kind of doing trying to do is go from the center and smash towards the edges so that it gets thinner towards the edges and a little bit thicker in the center that way you get this nice uh these nice crusty lacy edges while still maintaining a little bit of juiciness in the center of the patty when it's done once it's smashed out like that you don't want to fuss with it too much um so that's about it i'm not going to touch it anymore because i don't want too many juices to squeeze out um i'm gonna let this sit here so it's gonna cook on this one side for quite a while most of the way through and meanwhile i'm gonna season those onions up then i'm going to get my onion towel ready everyone has an onion towel at home right this is this is the towel that you don't mind not that one my wife would kill me if i use that uh this one i'll use this so you want a nice clean dish towel um what we're gonna do is we're gonna trap steam using this towel um so uh once you do this this towel is never gonna not smell like onions again no matter how many times you wash it so make sure you do it with a towel that you don't mind having a bit of an onion aroma down the line okay other things to get ready american cheese always american cheese on this burger you want it to really melt nicely and nothing melts as well as american and then a hamburger bun that is not just like one of the super cheap uh store-bought store-bought store-brand buns because those with a juicy burger like this they tend to kind of disintegrate so you want something with a little bit more harden so brioche works okay but this is a king's hawaiian roll which i think is great for this because it's got a little bit of sweetness you can also absorb plenty of uh hamburger drippings without dissolving all right so once we see that nice browning around the edges now we're going to start scraping so you see i have my stiff spatula turning it over so i get a little more leverage and i'm trying to get under every little edge here with the idea that we're trying to make sure that we don't leave any browned bits behind so once you've loosened up all the edges and get under there give it a flip so you see how nice and browned and crispy those edges are [Music] actually even with that preheating the center of the pan you can see was actually still a little bit a little bit paler than the rest but that's all right it's still going to taste fine get our cheese on there now our buns so top bun first okay and our bottom bun on top of that and then we're gonna take our onion towel and cover it i saw them do this i can't remember where it was it was at a slider joint in detroit i saw them doing this where they would fill the entire griddle so they filled the whole griddle up with onions they put the burgers on top uh the raw patties on top they would put the um the buns stacked like this so you had this whole row of buns and then they covered the whole thing with a towel and everything kind of steamed all through together and you know so when you do that everything steams in the onion vapor the buns absorb this onion vapor the burger gets really nice and unique and you get this really nice cosmic oneness to the uh the slider that you don't get if you don't if you leave it uncovered um if you've ever been to white mana in i think it's in hackensack in new jersey right across the river from where i grew up um if you've ever been to white man or one of the really old school uh slider joints also they do it the same way as they do at that place in mission in uh detroit in michigan but without the towel on top a white mana also makes an excellent uh old-fashioned slider and so what's happening here now is those onions you saw they were kind of thicker in the middle and they spread out towards the edges so what's going to happen is that the onions right around the very edges are going to get really nice and dark and almost burnt then you're going to get a sort of layer of caramelized onions then in the middle you get this kind of steamed softened onions that are dripping with burger juices so you get this these multiple textures and flavors of onions which is one of the things that makes uh this particular sandwich so good all right ready to go i'm gonna take my bottom one nice and soft and oniony i'm going to put my pickles on it if you want to do topping you know if you want like condiments at this point ketchup mustard whatever you want to put you can put it here but i think this burger doesn't need it okay so i got my lower bun i'm going to again make sure i get all that crusty goodness and now here we do the uh the squeeze and pull so everything's on the top bun put the lower bun under the spatula squeeze and pull and there is look at those onions our oklahoma onion burger ready to eat hmm beef and onions um you can see how nice that cheese melted everything's nice and steamy i'm a little bit pink and juicy in the middle still that is a tasty burger all right i'm gonna enjoy this guys gals non-binary pals i will see you next time bye [Music] you

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 748,951

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Id: vZ76sZR5U-A

Length: 10min 57sec (657 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 24 2022