Simple Onion Sliders

Hi, I'm Josh Ozersky, and you are watching eHow.com. You caught me while I'm getting my pan ready to make the perfect onion slider. It's a little bit redundant a term. You know all sliders basically means onion sliders, and in fact all the original hamburgers as they were invented were in fact what we call sliders. Little tiny sandwiches. Perfect, small, elegant, simple. Meat, soft squishy bun, onion, a little bit of cheese, some salt for sure and that's it. No ketchup, no mustard, no tomato, no lettuce, no Gorgonzola, no bacon. None of that crazy crap that you see on hamburgers today. No this is a purist's burger. But before I can get it ready I had to take a little bit of this delicious 80/20 ground chuck. I had to cook it in this pan. Now did I do that because I wanted a snack? Yes. However, what I really wanted to do here was to get myself some nice grease ready. I wanted this pan to be ready to receive a little piece of meat, very small, that has to brown very quickly. And then absorb and be suffused with all the sweetness of onions and the magic elixir that is onion water. So how do we do it. We take a little bit of this freshly ground 80/20 ground chuck from the supermarket. Roll it into a ball and we have one perfectly formed meatball. It's going to be squished a little bit. It's going to be then salted like so. And it's going to be salted with kosher course salt because that is going to turn into a nice crust. If I put the regular table salt on it what will happen? The table salt would dry it out, would pull all the juice out of it. It would become a hamburger mummy. And we can't have that. So I've got a pretty hot pan now. I've got my bun ready. The regular soft squishy bun unseeded.Whatever the cheapest worst low grade squishy bun is, that's the one you get because the squishier the better. The more insubstantial. The bun should be totally an invisible vehicle like wonder woman's plane. You shouldn't be able to detect it at all when you eat it. So I take this meat and I'm going to drop it into this pan which is wicked hot. And I think that I might put a little bit of butter in the pan ahead of time. I've already got it greased up from other hamburgers but I don't know I like those, saw those milk solids in the butter. You know that's something that I feel helps it crust up a little bit better. Now the burger patty is going to drop, flop, and get pressed. How does this work? I drop it, I flop it, and once it's flopped it gets pressed. Now the reason for this is that the original contact with the pan gets me some cauterization or whatever on the meat and that keeps it from sticking. If you push raw meat it sticks to the spatula. Now I've got some burger, it's cooking in a pan. It's nice and salty, the pan is hot. The meat is sizzling. What I need to do now is to put a little bit of onions and onion water in it. So I have some onions here. They are sitting in onion water. You know how I made onion water? I added water to the cut up onions and a little salt to that. Lots of salt everywhere here. I am going to take some of these onions and the onion water and I'm going to pour it like this. Oh oh look at all that onion fumes. Get your eyes away. A lot of sulfuric acid there. What's happening though is as that onion water is going all over the place it's suffusing the burger itself. Every bit of burger is being filled with onion steam and onion taste. What's more it's simultaneously deglazing all the black bits up. Alright it's got the onions, it's got the onion water. It's time to flip it, cheese it, and bun it. First I'm going to reach in I flip it. Nice and brown you see despite the onion water. Now the cheese goes on top. Now the bun, bottom bun first goes on top of that. Now I've got about a five second count to have an exquisite moment of extended expectation and anticipation for the joys that are about to come my way with this perfect historically unchanged atavistic masterpiece of a sandwich. What you say? It's time to eat it. I agree. Up it comes with it's onions. It slides onto the top bun. It gets flipped over. And this burger is now completely unique. If you eat this the cheese on the bottom, the onion taste all throughout, the soft squishy bun. You will really experience the taste of hamburger history. I'm Josh Ozersky, thanks for watching. And check back again on eHow.com.