I'm a White Castle fan - but there's a secret about the onions used for burgers and it's not just how they're cooked
A WHITE Castle fan has revealed a secret about the onions used in their burgers – and it’s not just to do with how they’re cooked.
Jason Notte, writing on the Cheapism blog, said that the fast food chain still used onions to steam its burgers, the company didn’t have huge piles of fresh onions just lying about when they made their pre-packaged frozen burgers.
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He revealed: “They are pre-sliced and diced and arrive at the plant dehydrated. They're rehydrated for placement onto the production line's grill.”
In another eye-opening revelation, White Castle uses robots rather than humans to make its fries.
Although the company has stuck to its traditional menu since Edgar Waldo "Billy" Ingram and J. Walter Anderson opened the first outlet in 1921, it isn’t adverse to looking to the future in its cooking methods.
Jason wrote: "After testing fry-making machines for over a year, the chain will be adding 100 of them to restaurants.
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“The bots fill fry baskets, cook the food, and then dump it off to be packaged and handed to the customer by human coworkers.”
White Castle fans may also be interested to know that Anderson made the burger joint possible by inventing the grill used to cook the burgers, Jason says.
The blogger also revealed the reason why the restaurants are white.
In the wake of Upton Sinclair's book The Jungle, which exposed the horrific conditions of meat-industry facilities and the meat they produced, Americans lost some of their love for the hamburger, seeing it as dirty.
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That change in attitude, Jason says, led “White Castle's founders to push a squeaky-clean image featuring restaurants of white porcelain and stainless steel. Food was cooked in full view of customers and fresh meat was delivered twice daily.”
Another titbit Jason revealed is that White City’s food trucks are hugely popular.
Trucks were first sent out in 2013, to cook up sliders for folks at sporting events and state fairs.
That year, it prompted four-hour waits in then-White-Castle-free Las Vegas.
In 2015, one such truck sold a massive 10,000 sliders in six hours outside of Orlando, Florida theme park Fun Spot.
Previously, a White Castle worker revealed why their burger patties are filled with holes.
Those holes are there by design, to help the burgers to cook faster.
In 1954, one White Castle employee, Earl Howell, put a note in the chain's suggestion box.
He wrote that if you put holes in the patties, they would cook faster, leading workers to be able to cook more burgers in less time.
After trying Howell's suggestion, White Castle chefs discovered that not only did the burgers cook faster, but the holes helped them to cook more evenly as steam rose up to heat the meat.
The holes also took away the need to flip the patties halfway through cooking, as the steam cooked the top of the burgers.
The fast-food joint makes their sliders small so customers can eat several fun-sized burgers, according to Mashed.
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Its patties are flattened, the beef is seared on both sides and it’s kept tender and moist.
Time Magazine branded the White Castle slider the “most influential burger” of all time in 2014.
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