Binging with Babish: White Castle Order from Harold & Kumar

Feb 27, 2020

HAROLD: I want thirty sandwiches, five fries, and four large cherry Cokes. KUMAR: I want the same thing, except make mine Diet Cokes... Chuck. CHUCK: Wow! HAROLD: Damn, that hit the nail on the head. BABISH: Hey, what's up guys? Welcome back to Binging with Babish, where this week we take a look at one of the most culinaryly cathartic scenes in all of cinema... ...I'm talking, of course, about the stony climax at the end. Harold and Kumar go to the

white

castle

. I have a frozen White Castle burger here as a control group; It's mysteriously missing its signature pickle chip, but has the signature five holes punched into the burger.

Legend has it that this is to save meat and money; White Castle says it's so the burgers cook faster and absorb more onion vapors. We will see. First things first, we have to make some burgers. Here I have a bunch of ground beef that I'm going to blend until I get a more pasty consistency, so that the burgers end up having a very firm texture. The patties I pulled out of the frozen burgers weighed about 0.7 ounces, and since burgers typically lose about 25% of their weight during cooking, I prefer 1-ounce patties. To form them, I'm going to place about eight ounces of ground beef in a rough rectangle between two sheets of parchment paper.

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binging with babish white castle order from harold kumar...

Next, I'll place four-millimeter guides on a rolling pin and roll out the meat into a relatively uniform rectangle. Then it's time to divide it into individual burgers. Using the bottom half of one of my slider buns as a sort of template, I'm going to cut out six square patties of the same size, slightly larger than the bun to account for shrinkage. Then, once all six patties have been scored, it's time to make the five telltale holes, using a metal straw and pressing down and twisting until a small piece of meat comes out. There we go, one hole made, 149 more to make.

Once you've made all the holes, it's time to put this guy in the freezer to harden while we continue making more burgers, because Harold and Kumar

order

ed 30 burgers each, so to be exact, we had to do the same , so prepare yourself. for a lot of fast-paced shots in this episode. It's times like these when you can reflect on how you could have traveled to Brooklyn for a few minutes, grabbed a Crave Case™ and called it a day, but our dynamic duo went through a lot to get their burgers, so in that spirit, I'll continue . While we give our meat a couple of hours to freeze, we need to chop all the onions.

All of them. Keep chopping until your largest bowl can't handle any more onions. From there, we have a little more mise we need to implement. I'm using Martin's Dinner Rolls as my dinner rolls. They are a potato-based muffin, which is inaccurate, but it is the only muffin I could find that was exactly the right size. Speaking of exact size, we need to cut thirty slices of American cheese, take the meat out of the freezer, remove the parchment paper, and start cutting them into individual patties. Now there will be a lot of meat scraps here, which you can reuse, but don't refreeze them if you let them thaw at room temperature.

Now that the burgers are separated, it's finally time to head to the stove, where I need something a little more dramatic than the usual burners and cast iron. Let's adjust the camera here... to give you a little better view of what's happening, and first, we need to lubricate the top of our hot griddle with a little bit of vegetable oil, and then we need to lay out a big bed of onions, because Unbeknownst to me, White Castle burgers never touch the grill. Instead, frozen burgers are placed on top of a large bed of onions and cooked solely with onion vapors, which we will help by giving our onions a healthy splash of water: both to prevent them from browning too quickly and to cause them to produce the best. as much steam as possible.

I'm going to sweat these onions for two or three minutes until they turn translucent, maybe get a little color, and then it's burger time. I'm just going to make sure I've placed enough onions to hold a ten by three hamburger pattern. Looks like we're ready, so put down the burgers. We want them to be stacked next to each other so that the only place the steam escapes is through the holes. Then once all the burgers are placed, we'll top them with just a little bit of kosher salt, not too much because American cheese is salty. Next, I think something will scare everyone a little, but this is what they do at White Castle: the bottom bun goes directly on top of the burgers, with the top bun on top.

This is to warm the buns and trap steam so the burgers cook faster. Once the onions have turned a nice color and the burgers are sufficiently...gray, we'll invert them onto a rack set over a rimmed baking sheet. I'm going to do this in batches of ten so the burgers don't cool down too quickly. I'm going to top each burger with a slice of American cheese and a pickle, then finish with the top bun, whose steaming heat should hopefully melt the cheese, all on its own. As you can see, the burgers have been perfectly shrunk to fit the size of the bun, each burger is beautifully loaded with golden onions and the buns are nice, warm and soft.

So now, I'll just rinse and repeat with the remaining twenty burgers, keeping the fully constructed burgers in a low oven to keep them warm, and now it's time for the cash injection: a cheesy, meaty palace erected in honor of one. one of my favorite comedies from when I was in high school. And there you have it folks, this is what thirty sliders look like. I'm just going to remove some of the top here, so it has a little more structural soundness. Enter two pounds of crinkle-cut potato chips into the situation. I think that's all... N- Wait a minute.

No, one more thing... We need Diet Coke and Cherry Coke to be really accurate. And there we go. A complete

order

of the penultimate chapter of Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle. But how does it know? Does it taste real? Tastes better? And I have to say; The burger and onion flavors are perfect, the only difference, nay, the only improvement comes from using a potato roll. Now, I have to admit, this is a lot to eat alone. So I have a group of, let's say, "drunk" friends in the other room who will help me make sure none of this goes to waste.

But let's say you don't use substances that increase appetite and you want to prepare these burgers in a slightly more reasonable format. For this, the procedure is very similar: we will prepare the meat in the same way, as well as the onion, but we will cook everything in a cast iron skillet. My friend Jamie Wax helped me and we made enough burgers for both of us. And last but not least: how about a "Babish" version? As you can imagine, this will start with us grinding our own meat. The fat content of White Castle burgers is very high, so we will use chuck and ribs, boneless, silver skin removed and cut into 1-inch cubes that we will place on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.

Then we will place all this in the freezer for about fifteen minutes, until the edges and corners of the meat are very firm. We'll then place it in our new work bowl of the food processor, along with a blade that we've also chilled in the freezer for about fifteen minutes, and pulse until we get a nice pebbly ground beef. It shouldn't take more than thirty seconds of pulsing, as long as your blade is sharp. Then we're going to form the ground beef into one-inch meatballs, because I have every intention of making flattened burgers. On the stovetop, I sauté the onions until they're soft and tender and have a little color, and then, most importantly, I toast the buns, which is a way to instantly upgrade virtually any burger.

Next, I'll take a page from my man Alvin Cailan's book and make some cheddar fries, placing small mounds of grated cheddar cheese on the stove next to the meat, which I'll season with kosher salt and black pepper before smashing. freshly ground And then, as Hulk says, it's overwhelming... time. That's what it says, right? We use a dowel to firmly press the burgers and spread them with the spatula to ensure the integrity of the burgers, then we place spoonfuls of sautéed onions on each of the cheese fries, followed by the well-browned burgers, which we are not going to eat. to turn because they are so thin that they are completely cooked.

We'll simply stack them in stacks of two and slide them onto our slider rolls. So are these little smashed burgers better than White Castle? No, they are not better, they are just different. There is much more texture and crunch and they are filled with sautéed onions. Also, I didn't have to do thirty, which is always nice, but they are both members of the Clean Plate Club. Hello friends, I'm so excited to announce that, whoops!, to announce that I received my first advance copy of my book, and even more than before, I'm super excited and proud to share it with you.

This is the Binging With Babish companion cookbook and features the first hundred recipes from the show. It has lots of fun facts, beautiful burger models, gorgeous photography, behind-the-scenes looks, and an extremely moving foreword by Jon Favreau. You can pre-order your copy at the link in the description of this video, or visit