Oklahoma Fried Onion Burger Recipe | Sid's vs Robert's | Ballistic Burgers

thank you for stopping by ballistic burgers on today's video i'm going to be recreating the oklahoma fried onion burger straight out of el reno oklahoma let's get going so the oklahoma fried onion burger in my opinion is probably one of the most iconic hamburgers in america born out of the depression a little town called el reno oklahoma about 30 minutes outside of oklahoma city the hamburger inn birthed the oklahoma fried onion burger basically again depression era no one had money the owner was trying to feed his customers a good meal and save himself a little money serve it at a good value was five cents for one burger and an order of fries and basically what he did was paper thin sliced onions smashed into the hamburger meaty what you didn't have to use as much hamburger meat became a nice filling meal currently there are three they call them the big three oklahoma onion burgers in el reno there's roberts roberts came around in 1929 there's sids diner probably the most famous place now but they came around in 1989 and then there's johnny's they're still there i want to say it was 1943 so really roberts was there serving these people that were you know leaving oklahoma because of the dust bowl the second whammy that hit oklahoma during the depression era a few years ago i was in oklahoma and i hooked up with my good friend cosmo from cosmos q a great guy and i proudly call him friend anyway we went to el reno where he grew up and he worked at roberts when he was a juvenile delinquent making hamburgers so um he and i have had a lot of conversations about you know his pa his passion for the oklahoma onion burger and his thoughts of the videos that were out there and i had done an old you know a video a long time ago on the onion burger my video was based solely on um just soaking up videos of the owners of both these restaurants making burgers i think i did a pretty good job sitting at the counter we he and i went to roberts and then sids sitting at the counter watching them make the burgers kind of let me know there's a few other things that i needed to do anyway let's get going uh first thing some equipment you're going to need to do a legit smashed onion burger get in the style we're going to do it they fashion a brick layers trowel into a spatula and if you want to do this really all you need to do is buy a bricklayer's trail and those are those you know kind of pointed trowels they call them throws at home depot your local hardware store and you cut that point off and then just you know bevel the edge this is actually a little longer than the trowels they use at the restaurants like sids and roberts and johnny's theirs are actually cut about right here but i don't honestly see the purpose of it i'm thinking it's just to eliminate weight because they're cooking so many hamburgers just again it just helps with the fatigue at the very least get a nice firm sturdy spatula like this this will do the trick i've actually found a link of a business that's selling these bricklayer kind of trowel spatulas i'll put it down below now the other piece of equipment you'll need is a mandolin so here's a mandolin i have again it's not a lot of money to buy one of these things and we're using yellow spanish onions to give you a visual see you can actually see through this piece of onion now i know i'm going to be asked i'm leaving the glove on this hand we went to a friend's house the other night to celebrate his son's birthday they had one of those oculus headset things and in the virtual world i was throwing a punch at a bad guy but in the real world i punched a cat punched a cabinet and laid my knuckle over so i have a band-aid on here and it always kind of grosses me out when you see someone cooking with a band-aid so keeping the glove on now the other piece of equipment you'll need to really get this thing right is at the very least like a stovetop griddle you know stovetop flat top um i'm using a blackstone griddle any any of these large griddles like this whatever you know camp chef whatever brand are perfect you can cook one of these on a cast-iron skillet but really it would to do it right to you know get everything right it would need to be a really big skillet so again a stove top cast iron griddle they're not expensive anymore so i'm going to take my spatula just kind of preheat it a little bit i just like to get a little bit of heat i don't want it searing hot these three burners here i'm running those at medium high which is about 400 degrees this very last burner i have off but there's plenty of residual heat so here's the meat it's 80 20 ground chuck now sids they form theirs into kind of a like a puck you know a thick puck roberts a meatball i'm gonna lay those down no they're not seasoning meat again i've seen these recent videos popping up they're not seizing them right now with a kind of a light hand i mean a medium touch i guess we're going to smash these you don't want to fully smash them just yet we're going to take a lot of onions throw these on here's where the fun comes in now again here's sids we're going to season the onion basically the onions with some salt and some pepper now roberts they don't season their meat at all so i'm guessing it's decades of cooking on a flat top the spirits of all those cooks season it for them now sids toast their buns the buns down here to toast all right we're going to go ahead and give these a flip now both of these restaurants after the flip they give it a press and i'm guessing that's just to get you know that onion more cooked cheese is an option american cheese and i'm not sure if they were adding cheese in the early 30s but they definitely do now now roberts they steam their buns so i'm going to put the heel on top of that cheese and what they do is they put it off to the side the second button kind of off to the side and they're allowing that steam to come through right you can see the cheese is definitely melted so sids roberts i can already feel the sponge nice and steamed and this is how both restaurants serve their burgers to the customer but they're going to be accompanied by a side of dill pickle chips that you can add and there's mustard and ketchup on the table so i'm going to serve mine up how i like it some mustard some dill pickles here we go all right let's try these out i'm going to go with robert's first so this is robert's right off the bat i can feel that the bun is softer on the robert's bun here yeah i mean the bun feels very very soft this burger works i mean it's so good let me try sids so i am actually getting the salt and pepper and i like that better i'm guessing again roberts they were doing it this roberts is the most traditional way of doing this i'm guessing that's how the hamburger inn was doing it but sids i like that salt and pepper on the onions i'm guessing roberts didn't you know it was probably again saving money and they had just hoards of people leaving you know oklahoma because of the dust bowl and they were just cranking these things out um i'm not totally missing the salt and pepper i mean the the roberts style is a great burger but i think that the salt and pepper added just pushes sids a little over the edge again in my opinion no offense to anyone in el reno but wow great burger anyway guys thanks for stopping by ballistic burgers if you're not sub please do ring the notification bell give it a thumbs up if you like it i'll see you in the next video cheers

Channel: Ballistic Burgers

Views: 80,499

Rating: 4.9277029 out of 5

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Id: N55MKbbJMVQ

Length: 10min 16sec (616 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 25 2020